Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm WBEZ Chicago. It's This American Life. Okay, here we go. Blackjack, $10 table, $10. High limit room, which no one is in. Monday, late morning. This American Life producer Robin Semien and I are in a casino that will remain unnamed here on the radio because we did not have permission to record. I did not ask for permission due to the nature of our visit. Come on, let's see over here.
We stand by one of the blackjack tables and Robin does a quick scan of the cards.
Chapter 2: What are the basics of card counting in blackjack?
What's the count on this table?
Negative six.
We were there to count cards, to play blackjack and count cards while we did it, which gives a player such a big advantage against the house that most casinos ask you to leave the table if they catch you doing it. And how did we end up here? Well, we've gotten a lesson the day before in how to count cards. We used to say that you could teach a piece of wood to play blackjack.
You just have to be able to keep your wits about you when you're at the table, and not make too many mistakes.
Chapter 3: How does a Christian card-counting team reconcile faith and gambling?
We got our lesson from Andy Block, who played blackjack for what is possibly the most famous group of blackjack card counters, the so-called MIT blackjack team. The winnings inspired a best-selling book and a terrible Hollywood film called 21. These were real MIT students. Andy studied electrical engineering.
Chapter 4: What happens when beginners try card counting at a casino?
There is no reliable way to know how much they won. They claim over $8 million between 1994 and 2000. After he quit the team, Andy put out an instructional DVD about how to count cards. He doesn't play much blackjack himself anymore.
Once I got known as a part of the MIT blackjack team, it became hard to play, and I would get kicked out of just about anywhere I tried to play. And sometimes I would take friends there. They just wanted to see me get kicked out of someplace. Play for a little bit. After, you know, 15 minutes, an hour, they'd come over and ask me to leave.
Now, I don't know if I should assume that you've played Blackjack or you know the rules, but if you haven't played or you don't know, here are the rules. Everybody at the table gets cards. You can ask for more cards if you want. The way that you do that is that you tell the dealer, hit me. You want your cards to add up as close to 21 as possible without going over. It's very simple.
It's so simple that when you play, it feels winnable. And it seems like everybody you meet who plays Blackjack has a system. Everyone thinks they can beat it.
Yeah, I've heard a lot of crazy systems about blackjack. You know, the best myths are the ones that are based in fact. And it is a fact that you can beat blackjack. You can actually beat the casinos. And the idea that it's possible to beat the casino is what made blackjack so popular.
I think this is what makes Blackjack so special, is that you think you can beat it. But of course, as soon as you start to think you can beat it, it gets you into trouble.
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Chapter 5: What legal issues arise when a gambler blames a casino for their losses?
Here's how diabolical Blackjack is. Unlike most casino games, if you play Blackjack correctly, the casino barely has an edge. The odds are very close to 50-50. You win almost half the time. So the dream of winning is right there in front of you, just out of reach. And if you did have a system that could beat Blackjack, imagine what that would mean.
It's like the money is just sitting there in casinos everywhere all over the world, huge stacks of chips and $100 bills waiting for you to take them home. No job, bad economy. If Blackjack is beatable, your problems are solved. Today on our program, we watch people run after that dream, including some fine, upright, God-fearing people, including Robin and me.
Stay with us and good luck with that ace. Okay, so when Andy Block says that you can beat the casinos, he is talking specifically about counting cards to change the odds. The mathematics of counting cards was nailed down in the 1950s and 60s. There is a way to count cards that definitively gives you an edge over the house.
And you don't need to be a rain man or have a photographic memory to pull this off. A normal person can do it. So Robin and I decided that we wanted to learn. And I could pretend right now that there is a high-minded journalistic reason for this. You know, we wouldn't really understand what Blackjack is all about if we didn't dive in ourselves. That would be a lie.
We'd both heard of card counting. We wanted to try. For the same reasons that anybody does, we thought it would be so awesome to beat Blackjack. And the thought that we would be doing it during our jobs, that we would be in a casino when the rest of the staff was back at the office editing and writing. Amazing. So I can tell you what we learned in like two minutes.
Here's how card counting works. Please remember this public radio station if it makes you rich. The basic idea is for lots of reasons that we don't need to get into here, tens and aces are to your advantage as a blackjack player. So as the cards are dealt, what you want to know is, are there lots of tens and aces left in the deck for you to get?
And by tens, I should say, I just don't mean like the ten of hearts and the ten of spades and all that, but I mean like the face cards that add ten to your hand when you play blackjack. Okay, so, stay with me. You want tens and aces, and you count. And this is important. You're not going to keep track of the position of every single card. You're not memorizing the deck. That would be insane.
They invented something that is way, way easier than that. You just keep a running tally, very rough one, of tens and aces. You start your tally at zero. When a ten or an ace is dealt, you subtract one from the tally. When a low card comes out, you add one. That's it. That's the whole thing. The running tally, that one number, that's all you need to know. Again, here's Andy Block.
It's not a complicated thing. You don't need a great memory. You don't need to know how many queens are left in the deck. You just need to know that one number.
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Chapter 6: How does the casino industry target compulsive gamblers?
And Andy demonstrated here. He dealt cards into a pile to demonstrate how that works.
So minus one, zero, plus one, plus two, plus one, plus two, plus three, plus two.
Then it was time for Robin and I to try this. Note that the pace changes just a little.
Plus two.
Plus two, it was a three.
Plus one.
Plus one. Zero. Minus one.
Plus one.
Plus one.
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Chapter 7: What psychological effects do near-misses have on gamblers?
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.
The first day, I remember making maybe it was $500 or $1,000 in one night, and I've never seen money move like that before. You know, I was used to waiting tables. And every once in a while, I would get a $10 tip and maybe make $100 a night. But I just remember being fascinated by how fast this cash could move back and forth. It was just I started to see money differently.
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.
Basically, all these people had been watching us play blackjack for the last... Three years. And they didn't know a lot about it, but they knew that I bought a house with the winnings. So there was all these kind of family members that had heard of the story, and I think, frankly, were just excited about the story. And me and my business partner, Colin, we went to different churches.
So he had people from his church coming to him, and word was kind of spreading, and people were like, oh, I heard about this blackjack thing. Are you guys hiring people? And if it was the right person, we would never say no.
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. Wait, where's the Christ in cheating at blackjack? And isn't gambling a sin or just wrong? Turns out all the players ask those questions too.
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Chapter 8: How did Angie Bachman end up in legal trouble with a casino?
No question about that. But they weren't gambling at all because they counted cards. Here's one of the players, Mike. He'll explain.
As a card counter, you go in there thinking there's no such thing as luck. There's only math. We're going to sit down and work for eight hours and make money. And that's the exact opposite of what 99.9% of all people do in a casino do.
But even if you square in your heart that card counting is not a sin morally, isn't it illegal in some states? Or at least considered cheating by the casinos? I ran this by Ben, the founder, who could not wait to correct me.
No, it's not.
No, one of the biggest misconceptions ever, and this drives me nuts, is it's so fundamental, but people don't get it. And I guess that's to the casino's credit, is people actually think that this is violating the rules of a casino. But we follow every rule the casino has. In fact, if you call up a casino and you ask them, is it against the law to count cards?
Is it against your rules to count cards? They'll be like, oh, well, no, not really. But it is kind of frowned upon.
How could that be? We all know that casinos spend tons of money on overhead cameras and security guys to detect card counters. So I called the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, and Ben was right. Card counting isn't illegal. In fact, the spokeswoman said it wasn't even against the rules, though they do discourage it.
She told me that if they catch you, they'll ask you to go play other games, a process known as backing off. Or if they really don't like what you're doing, they will tell you to leave and that you're not allowed back. But for the most part, casinos just don't like to dissuade anyone from gambling, even card counters. Maybe because most of them are so bad at it, they lose money anyway.
And so they pulled it off. Ben and Colin kept training more and more churchgoers, flying the members of their congregation to casinos all over the country. Soon enough, the casinos began to treat them as whales. That's what they called big-time gamblers, rewarding them with comps, free rooms, cases of liquor.
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