A fiery sun crested the night-purple mountains ringing Las Vegas, silhouetting the Galaxy’s massive electronic billboard at the edge of the Strip and creating long shadows inside the front doors of the gigantic casino. Jurgen Voss blinked and squinted as a horizontal flash of sunlight swept across his field of vision. Maybe it was a sign that he was pushing his luck. He’d been counting down blackjack shoes at the Galaxy for over two hours, well beyond his usual self-imposed time limit. It was a dangerous game. But this was the last hour and a half of the graveyard shift, when the pit crew was tired and typically least watchful. Plus the cards were running well, the dealer was cold as penguin scheisse, and he was already up over two thousand. It was his most profitable session in ten years of card counting.
For Voss, in addition to possessing a photographic memory, was a mathematical genius.
Of course, there was more to professional card counting than mere brains. You had to be intelligent, but more important you had to be smart. Early on in Jurgen’s casino career he had learned the hard way that even a two-hundred-plus IQ was not enough. You could play totally perfect precision blackjack, but if they discovered that you were counting, it was game over. He’d been caught only once, just after he’d embarked on his card-counting career. It had happened at Harry’s in Reno and it was an ordeal he never wanted to reexperience. He’d remained too long at the same table, allowing the pit personnel time to evaluate his playing technique and betting strategies and to mark him as a card counter—an enemy of the house. Two large men had seized him and unceremoniously dragged him to a back room—casino storm troopers with pea-size brains who had shown absolutely no respect for his intelligence. He’d been photographed, ID’d,
punched in the belly, and rudely ejected with dire warnings never to return.
After the event Voss had consoled himself with the notion that a major casino was actually scared of him or, more specifically, of his mental abilities. He had always harbored a deep-seated pride in those abilities, and the roughing up had vindicated that pride with at least some recognition, however painfully delivered. It was at once the highlight and the low point of his career. Difficult as it was to hide his light under a barrel, to assume a mantle of stupidity like some gold-digging bimbo in a May-December marriage, he had vowed from that moment on to keep his bets more conservative, to limit his table time to no more than an hour at a stretch, and to act dumber.
In fact, card counters were the bane of any casino’s existence. Short of out-and-out cheating, Jurgen knew, there was no way a player could consistently prevail over the casino edge at craps, roulette, baccarat, or any other table game with a fixed house percentage. Only at blackjack did a skilled player have a mathematical chance of beating the house. By mentally keeping track of the cards that had been dealt, a card counter could calculate the general composition of the cards that remained. If these remaining cards favored the counter—if there were more tens, jacks, queens, kings, and aces than average left—then the shoe was “positive” and the counter would increase his bets and take more chances on doubling down and splitting pairs. Conversely, if the remaining cards favored the house—if the small cards outweighed the big ones and the shoe was “negative”—then the counter would reduce his bets and take fewer chances on splits and doubles. Expressed as a percentage, a good card counter’s advantage over the casino might average only one or two points, but Jurgen Voss knew that this seemingly insignificant edge was all you really needed to realize a decent return for your efforts at the tables. Huge casino empires had been founded on tiny advantages.
Like any business, casinos hated to lose money. For that reason, most Nevada casinos had an unwritten policy of barring successful card counters from the blackjack tables. Technically, the counters weren’t cheating. They didn’t touch the cards or practice any physical flimflammery—they simply used their eyes and their brains to take advantage of information available to anybody who knew how to use it. Voss resented the fact that people like him, people with superior intelligence, were constrained from freely demonstrating that intelligence to beat the house at its own game. But as a realist, he recognized the industry sine qua non that if too many players won,
there’d be no industry. So he suppressed his ego and resigned himself to obeying the professional card counter’s Ten Commandments of Casino Camouflage:
1. Emulate typical tourist behavior by acting “dumb.”
2. Hesitate on “difficult” hands.
3. Don’t act guilty or nervous.
4. Interact pleasantly with the dealers and the pit personnel.
5. Don’t move your lips or your head while you’re counting.
6. Don’t jump your bets suddenly when the cards turn positive.
7. Don’t drop your bets suddenly when the cards turn negative.
8. Don’t make expert plays, like doubling down on soft eighteen.
9. Don’t handle your chips expertly—be a klutz.
10. Don’t play too long at one table or in one casino.
In Nevada (unlike Atlantic City, where the courts had ruled in favor of card counters, albeit with some restrictions) the law stated that any player could be expelled from any game solely at the casino’s discretion. Even so, most Nevada casinos tolerated limited card counting because they had learned that incompetent card counters often dropped more money at the tables than good basic-strategy players. In cases of semicompetent counting, they would sometimes adopt countermeasures such as shuffling up early to wipe out the counter’s advantage. Only in very unusual circumstances—if the counter was exceptionally adept, betting and winning big—did they take more drastic action.
For Jurgen, that meant the high-rolling lifestyle was too risky. Augmenting his own bitter experience, he had observed other unfrocked counters barred or, like himself, physically abused by casino knuckle draggers. So he kept a low profile and bet small enough to remain unnoticed among the hordes of dummkopfs swarming the blackjack tables.
The card counter’s unusual outward appearance had oddly enough turned out to be an asset to his business: it helped distract the casino watchers from his forbidden activities. He was a short, scrawny man with a large head perched precariously on a skinny neck, forming the cranial silhouette of a Ping-Pong paddle. His white-blond hair was combed back severely from a sharp widow’s peak, which, combined with wire-rimmed Coke-bottle glasses, lent his pale, pinched features an owlish aspect. Voss’s nervous habit of chewing his fingernails had eroded them to a bleeding
rawness; defensively, he tried to conceal his mutilated fingertips from the view of others, even going so far as to signal for hitting and standing at the blackjack table with a partially closed fist, fingers bent and thumbs tucked in. Aside from this one quirk, he attempted to act as “average” as possible.
The deception irritated him. With an ego that was inversely proportional to his physical size, he desperately longed to flaunt his talents, to display his remarkable abilities for the world to admire, to show the casino big shots that their precious game could be beaten.
But subterfuge was necessary to reduce the risk of exposure. By swallowing his pride and meekly following the Ten Commandments, he could usually clear a few hundred dollars a week after expenses.
Thanks to the dozens of new casinos and riverboats springing out of nowhere like mushrooms on a wet lawn, Voss could have eked out an existence in any of the American states or Canadian provinces where gambling was now legal. But he had always preferred Vegas. The blackjack house rules were generally more favorable for card counters, and the hot weather suited him fine.
It was not a great life, but it was a living. Most important, the revenue from card counting provided Jurgen with the means to buy the special equipment he needed to keep the shameful secret hidden and to satisfy his private needs.
As usual, the computer in Voss’s mind was on autopilot. Windows projected upon this mental screen effortlessly and precisely calculated the variable factors affecting his playing and betting strategies. His phenomenal multitasking capabilities allowed another part of his brain simultaneously to carry on easy conversations with dealers, cocktail waitresses, and other players—without ever missing a card.
Plus twenty-two, read the Running Count window in his head.
Five point five, said the True Count Adjustment window, modifying the Running Count to compensate for the number of decks remaining in the shoe.
Hard nine against the dealer’s seven, his eyes told him. Most blackjack players would merely hit this hand, but the Hard Doubling Point Count Numbers Matrix required him to double his bet.
Ace Adjustment Factor: Plus three—
“Can I get you anything, sir?” asked a cocktail waitress who had suddenly materialized beside him.
“Maybe a coffee,” Jurgen replied with an apologetic smile, sliding another forty dollars next to his original bet. He never drank alcohol at the blackjack table although sometimes he pretended to in order to reinforce the typical-tourist image he was careful to project. “Black, please.”
The dealer gave him an ace and flipped herself a queen, making hard seventeen and losing to Voss’s soft twenty.
Up two thousand and eighty-seven fifty, said the Win Tally window in Jurgen Voss’s head.
As far as Voss could determine, there was no heat whatsoever from the pit: the young floorwoman was talking on the phone, tapping on her computer keyboard; nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. She seemed to be totally uninterested in his relatively modest twenty-to-eighty-dollar spread. After all, bettors of his caliber were small fry in a verschwenderisch carpet joint like this. Maybe he’d count down one more shoe and then clear out.
During the shuffle, the attractive brunette floorwoman walked casually over to his table. To avoid “fitting the profile,” Jurgen had selected the middle seat of the table—instead of the card counter’s traditional third base position—because he’d mostly been going head-to-head against the dealer and there were no other players’ cards to count.
She introduced herself with a smile. “Good morning, sir, I’m Lucy Baker. You’re doing very well. I don’t believe I’ve seen you at the Galaxy before, Mr … . ?”
“Jackson,” he lied smoothly. “Harry Jackson. It is my first time in your casino. I am here on a convention.”
“Is there anything we can do for you, Mr. Jackson? Breakfast, perhaps?”
For some reason, instinct maybe, certainly not because of anything the lady had actually said, a small alarm bell sounded in the back of Voss’s head. “Thank you, but I shall be soon leaving,” he replied.