Jack Hitt

The way Ben tells the story, it all began where so many great ideas originate, reading in the bathroom.

It was a book about gambling, and there was a three-page chapter on blackjack explaining how to count cards, and Ben thought, I could do this.

He waited tables back then, minimum wage work, and he had just had his first kid.

He and his wife were broke, and so one day he came up with a plan to take their last $800 to a dinky casino outside of Seattle.

And he won.

Ben formed a small crew of card counters to hit the casinos together.

And they did okay for a while.

But after three years, that team fell apart.

Ben said they just had different values.

And so Ben and another player, his good friend Colin, decided that if they were going to create a great team, then they had to find new members they could trust completely.

And that's when it hit them.

The perfect source of blackjack players.

It was right in front of them, at least on Sundays.

Church.

Now that Ben and Colin had their players, they needed more money, a lot more money, if they hoped to win big.

So they went to the same source.

Using PowerPoint presentations, they showed their fellow Christians how much they'd been winning, not using luck or prayer, just math.

And at the end of this presentation, here's what they pulled off.

They convinced churchgoers to cash out their savings and retirement funds and hand them over to a pack of young people to carry straight into the devil's playground and risk at blackjack tables.

Now I know what you're thinking.