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“Some small teams manage to operate successfully without written handbooks, but I would advise against this.”
Arnold Snyder, The Big Book of Blackjack
The weekend got off to a bad start when we had consecutive losing sessions at the Trop, Borgata, and Trump Marina. We were down more than $4,000 and everyone was getting frustrated with the glut of bad beats that we’d each experienced. But it wasn’t the dip of the bankroll that seemed to be bothering Kyung. We’d continued to see shifting emotions in Kyung. He could be extremely high or extremely low. By now, he was making only about half of our team trips and he’d clearly violated our rules when he backed out of the bankroll for the MGM at Foxwoods trip. As his attitude changed, so did our feelings toward him. He was passive aggressive and uncomfortable to be around. But it was his play that worried us most.
We’d created and fine-tuned a comprehensive team manual, complete with playing and bankroll rules, as well as a series of required checkouts. Because Kyung had pushed back on the idea of us testing his skills, we took opportunities to observe his play at the tables and ensure that his abilities were up to par. His frequency for errors in both playing decisions and betting had begun to increase over recent months. We hinted at adhering more closely to the team manual, including the checkouts section, in an effort to keep everyone sharp. Kyung had become more outspoken about his aversion to the idea. He thought we weren’t being fair. He’d managed to eke out a consistent profit, but we wanted to make everyone better. We wanted to get back to the well-oiled machine that our team had once been. Kyung had different ideas about what constituted a professional blackjack team. He believed we were skilled enough to play with an advantage. Taking notes, evaluating stats, requiring checkouts, and working to improve as a unit were all just nuisances to him.
Fatigued from the start of the trip, we took a break to hold a much-needed team meeting about where we were heading. Kyung admitted dissatisfaction with his role on the team, but confessed that he didn’t have a desire to embrace our system. He thought of our trips as gambling getaways, not efficiently run business-first sessions. The challenge, we argued, was that playing blackjack professionally required precision, practice, and organization. His game had gotten sloppy. From time to time, D.A. and I had played at the same table with Kyung and it wasn’t uncommon to see him making mistakes. It was easy to pick up on him using his peripheral vision to identify our betting and then mirror it. It wasn’t a good sign.
We began questioning him more, particularly when his statistics started to show that he was on the very low end of the range of possible returns. By running the organization as a business and keeping track of every session we played, we’d identified Kyung as a bit of a liability, but we still felt a sense of loyalty. He was a person with integrity, and when his mood was positive, we enjoyed his company. The problem was that the less he worked on his game, the more his game remained stuck in mediocrity. Our bankroll continued to grow and the need for his share was less critical, so if push came to shove, we had no problem dropping our unit a little bit if ever he decided to leave the team. Going from $200 to $150 didn’t matter to us if it meant a more cohesive effort.
After that trip, the three of us never played together again. We made half-hearted attempts to organize a group reunion, but they never materialized. Every few months we’d get an email from him saying that he’d been working on his game and that he wanted to get back onto the team, but eventually the communication came to an end. All in all, it was probably for the best. Kyung was a good person, but he approached his game, and his life, differently than us. We preferred optimizing our play and having fun at the same time. We preferred to win.
We sometimes wondered if we would run into Kyung on future trips, seeing him bellied up to the felt, wearing his signature nondescript baseball hat and a puffy winter jacket with a half-lit cigarette and tired eyes, grinding it out with the rest of the green chippers.
“What are the odds of that?” we often asked each other.