BARRED FROM THE VEGAS HILTON

Sommers about 1983, close as I kin figger, my brother and I were playing blackjack at the Las Vegas Hilton. I was betting anywhere from $25 to $100 a hand, and losing my ass, I might add. I had just thrown down a $100 bill for a few more green chips, when the pit boss walked up and snatched my C note off the table. He took a few steps away from my table, and motioned me over. He was NOT a nice guy. He said, “ Get your friend over here.” He meant my brother, Greg, standing at another table. Greg saw the shit going down, and came over. The pit boss axed me if I wanted my hundred back. I said, “Yes sir.” God, what a pussy I was. I should have kicked his ass. Anyway, he said that we’d been identified on three shifts, and that they didn’t want any more of our action. He handed me my hundred-dollar bill, and suggested that we find a casino with “softer” surveillance. So, off we went with our tails between our legs. We didn’t feel much like blackjack for the rest of the day.

Oh, God, I just hate being pushed around by those greezy casino types, don’t you? I know I do. That guy was SUCH a meanie pants. What he did was so hurtful and insensitive to our feelings. We should have made a big stink in front of all the customers, about how the pit boss stole our money, and how we weren’t being allowed to lose our asses at their casino. Well, I got him good on the way out. I told him that the Hilton was an ugly-ass hotel, and no wonder it was off the Strip.

This whole mess began developing back in 1977. I had a part-time job as personal assistant to a music professor. I had been a student in one of his piano classes. The old perv wasn’t much interested in my help. I did very little for him. He just paid me to come to his apartment so that he could leer at me while we drank beer together. He wasn’t dangerous, just a frail old man.

Well, one thing that I actually DID do to earn my money, was drive a relative of his, an elderly lady, and her vehicle up to L.A., to the home of some other relatives. They would put me on a plane home the next day. So, off we went on an uneventful, two-hour drive.

While I was killing time at the L.A. house, I saw a book lying on the couch. It was entitled “Playing Blackjack as a Bidness.” It’s a classic book, now, and one of the very first on card counting. It was full of colorful charts and tales. I didn’t study the book carefully at the time, but it appeared that blackjack could be played not only with skill, but also basically by following a recipe. Just memorize some tables, and practice adding numbers in your head as you see cards come out of the deck. I just filed the book away in my mind, for another time.

I graduated in 1978 with a B.S. in Chemistry. I started work on a Master’s in Chemistry at SDSU, but came down with mononucleosis in my very first semester. I was really sick. I couldn’t even look back and forth from chalkboard to my notebook, without getting dizzy. I had to drop out for that semester. When I was feeling better, I got a job driving a bread truck for a very small local bakery. The bread had been baked the night before, and the truck smelled heavenly. I ate quite a bit of bread as I drove.

After chauffeuring bread around for a few months, a headhunter called me up. A local company had hired him to find them a process engineer. Somebody at SDSU must have put in a good word for me, because I was a mediocre student. Anyway, I interviewed with the company and got the job. I was making more money than I had ever seen in my life, but the job was nowheresville. Boring. I thought it would be way more fun to just go to Vegas all the time. So I quit.

At some point during my three years at that company, I did some casual looking around in the games section of the bookstore, and easily found that same blackjack book I had looked at a few years before. The absolute classic book on the subject of card counting is called “Beat the Dealer.” I think I picked up both books.

In the early sixties, sufficient computer power was available to analyze the game of blackjack. People were programming computers to play simulations of blackjack hands, to figure out the best way to play each hand, versus a particular dealer up card. Tens of millions of simulated hands had to be played in order to build up tables of rules for how to play the cards. These tables have to be memorized if you want to play well at the tables. All the books, and today there are many, refer to the basic rules for playing the hands as “the basic strategy.” It doesn’t take much work to memorize the basic strategy, and it all but neutralizes the house advantage.

Lots of tens in the deck is an advantage for the player because the dealer is forced to hit until he reaches 17, so lots of tens means that the dealer tends to bust. Lots of little cards in the deck is an advantage for the house. The deck composition fluctuates randomly as cards are dealt. Sometimes the deck becomes rich in tens, and that situation can be exploited if you have been keeping track of the deck composition. If you bet big when the deck is rich in tens, and bet small otherwise, you will gain a small edge over the house, about 1%. In the early days of card counting, bigger edges were possible, but casinos make it very hard to get away with card counting these days. Card counting is legal, but casinos are in bidness to make money.

Ok, back at the ranch, er, the company, I was studying blackjack. I did a lot of dealing to myself, and kept records of the performance of the card counting strategy. Results were impressive, but I was not playing under casino conditions. You can really only eek out a slight advantage in a real casino. I’m not going to go on and on about the technical reasons for that. You can read blackjack books for yourself, gentle reader.

While still employed, I began going to Vegas on weekends. I got braver and braver, betting more and more money. I was learning fast just how well you could do in a real casino. Bets that fluctuate wildly in size, is the signature playing style of a card counter. It attracts heat from the pit bosses. They know that a card counter bets small when the house has the advantage, then suddenly bets large when the player has the advantage. If you are betting a lot of money, and wildly varying your bets, and also demonstrating that you know how to play the cards, then you might get told to leave. Less drastic measures are often taken, such as simply shuffling the deck on you. Once all the discards have been put back in the deck on the shuffle, your advantage is gone. If the casino starts doing that, you have no edge. You move on.

I had a pretty big bankroll saved, and had become a confident casino player, but I had only been betting peanuts. Before I quit my job, and started playing big money, I had some computer simulations of my own to run. I wanted to program a computer to play a million hands of blackjack under simulated casino conditions, so that I could see just how bad the losing streaks would be. That’s the scary part, the losing streaks. With only about one or two percent advantage, you have to absorb brutal losing streaks, and just keep the faith that your puny edge will finally turn it around for you. So, I wrote a blackjack-playing program. I still had a computer account from a class I had taken at SDSU about three years before. To use this old account that had not been deleted, I couldn’t just log on to the machine from home. This was around 1981, or so; things were not so easy. I had to go to the campus to use the machine. So, I’d rush over to the campus on lunch breaks to program. Eventually the program was finished, and churning out results, when they deleted my old account. Damn. Maybe somebody noticed that that old account was being used a lot. It was a class account, and I noticed some other freeloaders were making use of it, too. So, they shut us all down.

I plunked down eleven hundred, 1981 dollars for a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. Now, that was primitive computing. I transformed the FORTRAN program I had written before, into basic, and let that sucker go, and go, and go. I learned a ton from doing that, and saw how tough I was going to have to be if I wanted to play big money. I was going to have to learn to be a loser.

Playing blackjack with only a one or two percent advantage, means wild winning and losing streaks. But the winning streaks are bigger than the losing streaks. So, if you want to count cards, you have to have faith in your statistical advantage, and just keep playing, even when you are losing your ass. It’s tough. When you are throwing money down the toilet, you just want to stop, but that does you no good. Your luck is just as likely to change on the very next hand, as it is if you wait a few hours. If you wimp out and stop playing, you are just losing money in the long run. You have to bring enough money with you to the casinos to see you through the bad times. If you are playing $25 chips, then a two hundred chip losing streak means a lot more money lost than if you lose two-hundred, $5 chips. Losses of two hundred chips are not common, but they do happen, and you have to have enough to cover it.

My overall bankroll for blackjack was adequate to cover bets ranging from$10 to $300. The deck had to heavily favor the player for me to lay down three hundred bucks. By the time I quit my job, I had taken some minor licks in Vegas, taken some BIG licks on the computer, and was ready do some serious battle in the casinos.

Sometimes I flew to Vegas, but mostly I drove my filthy, dented AMC Pacer. What a piece of shit that car was. I deserved it, though, because I should have recognized that it was a piece of shit when I bought it. Anyway, I’d typically stay for three nights or so, and play maybe six or eight hours a day. Eight hours of blackjack over a sixteen-hour waking period is brutal, especially if you’re losing your butt. I’d do that once a week.

I was lucky. Things went really well for a long time before I had to take any big hits. I was winning big. I was ahead of Vegas by a few thousand dollars after just a few trips. My bets were probably only averaging about $40, so my gain was pretty good for being such a low roller.

Things went on and on like this, with ups and downs, over a period of months. Some interesting things happened along the way, some having to do with blackjack, some not. I guess I’ll just recount a few random things that I can remember.

It’s best not to have a lot of chips in front of you if you are winning, because it attracts attention. You don’t want dealers and pit bosses watching you too closely, because if they think that you know what you are doing, they will stop dealing to you. So, this one time at the Sahara, I was really winning big. I was winning even when the deck was bad. I was winning even when I made mistakes. I had mountains of chips in front of me, and I couldn’t conceal them. God, it was awful. I was surreptitiously stuffing them in my pants pockets, my shirt pocket, my jacket pockets, even my socks. My clothes were just bursting, so I got up to take a break and cash them in. I didn’t waddle directly to the cashier. I went to hide somewhere to unload. It was nice to make a big killing, but I knew I’d be pouring most of it back again during some future losing streak.

I remember, very late one night after a very long day of blackjack, I was pooped and ready to head back to my room. I am a chocoholic, and needed my fix before bed. I just wanted a candy bar. You can seemingly get anything, anytime, in Vegas, but on this night I was having trouble locating a damn Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. That’s what I had to have. I pulled into a dark strip mall, on the fringe of the hotel casino action. It was a long shot. Nothing looked open. I got out of the car, and started walking around hoping for a light in a liquor store, or something. Nope. Nada. Zippo. A very attractive woman suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and accosted me. She was black; thirty-ish, well dressed. She started talking to me, axing me what I was up to. I figured she was just some streetwalker -- the last thing I was interested in. I insisted I was just looking around for a candy bar, but she wouldn’t have any of it. She wanted me to buy a bottle and take her back to my room. I dunno, maybe she wasn’t a hooker. Maybe she just really needed the booze badly and was willing to do anything for it. She couldn’t have been trying to get at Art Bell through me, because Art Bell wasn’t even Art Bell yet, he didn’t live in Pahrump yet, and I didn’t know him yet. She really was persistent, but she finally had heard enough about the candy bar problem. Very abruptly she said, “bye,” and disappeared into the night. I can’t remember if I ever got my damn Reese’s or not.

I was doing ok, money wise. I was beating Vegas, but not by a lot, because I wasn’t betting a lot. I was only winning about 1K a month. I didn’t have the bankroll to survive the swings in fortune I would have to endure if I was making bigger bets.

I began using a technique called back counting. Instead of sitting at the table betting peanuts, then raising the bets when the deck got hot, I just started standing behind the players at the table, counting the cards, but not betting. Why bet anything while the deck is cold? Well, that’s great in theory, but it’s very unusual behavior. Ordinary players don’t play that way, and it calls unwanted attention to the card counter. But, I got away with some pretty outrageous back counting for a good, long while.

I remember one night at Circus Circus, the place was just packed and really rockin.’ That’s good. The more confusion and distraction, the better it is for me. I want the heat to have to look at a lot of people at a lot of tables. So, I was standing behind this one packed table, playing an open betting circle between a couple of seated players. It was really awkward to have to reach in between heads to play that circle, but oh my God the deck was hot. I couldn’t just stand there. So, after doing nothing but standing and staring for a long time, I suddenly started reaching in with stacks of $25 chips, and winning. It was outrageous, and I felt very self-conscious. I really couldn’t tell if I was attracting the attention of any pit bosses, or not. I just kept doin’ it, and won a bundle. Finally the deck just ran out. I got away with it, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t noticed, and photographed, by the eye in the sky.

Blackjack teams have taken fortunes out of casinos worldwide. The advantage of a team is that many players count cards at many tables, simultaneously, which locates hot decks much faster. When someone finds a hot deck, they signal the “Big Player,” who comes over to the table and starts making huge bets. I thought I’d try a little teamwork with my brother, Greg, so I taught him card counting. I bankrolled the whole effort, and gave him a cut of any winnings.

So, we were a mini team. We would both play for peanuts, or just back count, until one of our decks got hot (rich in high cards). I was the Big Player for both of us. If my deck went hot, I just stayed at my table and started playing big. But if Greg’s deck went hot, he would have to send me a signal somehow. We decided to have him wear a baseball cap, and spin it around backwards or sideways if the count at his table was high enough. A guy standing at the blackjack tables, with an obsessive/compulsive hat-spinning habit is odd behavior. Any unusual behavior is bad for the card counter because it attracts attention. But we needed an obvious signal because I was busy counting cards myself, and couldn’t spend too much time looking around to see if my partner was doing anything weird. On a big team, the Big Player does no counting; he spends all his time watching the counters for signals.

One problem with our scheme was that when I arrived at Greg’s table, Greg needed to somehow communicate to me the “running count.” The running count is the surplus of high cards over low cards, which I would then divide by the number of decks left in the shoe. The resulting number is called the “true count” in most of the books. It’s the true count that you use to determine bet size, and even to make some playing decisions. Our solution was to have the direction of the bill of the baseball cap indicate the approximate count. If the bill of the cap was over Greg’s left ear, the count was above five; if it was over the back of his neck, the count was above ten; if it was over his right ear, the count was above fifteen. That was about the best we could think of to do at the time.

We used the hat spinning method for a number of trips to Vegas, and the one trip to the Reno/Tahoe area. If our tables were close together, we could use hat spinning because I could see Greg’s signal. On other occasions, there was just no way to see him, so we would just play separately. Sometimes when I got my ass kicked, it was a relief to meet up with Greg and find out that he had won, adding up to no net loss for the team.

One time we had just arrived in town, and were checking into Circus Circus. Greg got started playing, and by the time I had checked us in, he had LOST about $800! That was a huge sum considering the fairly small betting he was doing. God. Well, I started “helping out,” and between the two of us, we lost our entire $2000 bankroll before the trip even got started. That was the worst losing streak that we suffered, and it happened in, like, a couple of hours or something. We were just numb, but I had learned from watching the performance of the computer program that I had written, that these moral-busting downward swings happen, and you just have to have the nads to take it. If you can’t take the occasional ass-kicking, you can’t play.

The Reno/Tahoe trip we took was unproductive. I think we broke even, but didn’t even do much playing. The blackjack rules up there are very unfavorable to the player, compared to Vegas. There was one spooky occurrence at one of the big Tahoe hotels. We hadn’t been playing more than about ten minutes before I saw a lady pitboss pointing me out to some other greezy casino type. That was just too weird. How could they possibly know us up there? Was the information sharing between casinos THAT GOOD? Anyway, that place was just too hairy for me, so we got outta there.

It was on the Reno/Tahoe trip that we started thinking about a better way to signal. Radio signals seemed like the perfect way, but we would never get away with standing around the casino talking on walkie-talkies. Today, you could get away with limited shenanigans using cell phones. Casinos are full of people with cell phones on their ears. But what about RC model airplane transmitters, and the servos that move in response to the transmitter signals? That seemed like the way to go.

We were actually in Vegas when we decided to buy some RC equipment, so during a break from blackjack, we found a hobby store and looked over some stuff. We didn’t want anything fancy, just a transmitter that could send a signal to a receiver that could move something in response to reception. We found a couple of units pretty cheap, so we bought the stuff right there in Vegas, even though we couldn’t use it on the same trip. I really hadn’t figured out yet just how to make use of it.

Back in San Diego I took the boxes apart, and removed the transmitter circuit boards. There were little controls that when moved; caused the transmitter to send a signal to a receiver that in turn caused a servo to move. Underneath our clothes, we taped to our bodies the circuit boards, battery packs, wires, transmitter controls and servos. It was really a precarious mess. We were always afraid we’d be walking in the casino, and batteries or wires would fall out the bottoms of our pant legs. We had long wire antennas down the legs of our pants so we could receive signals even when far apart in the casino. Every morning in Vegas, we’d get up and one of us would mumble, “We have to get wired.” It was a long procedure, and tearing the tape off at the end of the day was painful.

The radio signaling worked really well. The transmitter control was in our pockets, and the servo that moved upon reception of a signal was taped to our legs. We would both back count, then if Greg’s deck got hot, he would put his hand in his pocket and signal me the count. He would just move his control a number of times equal to the running count. I would feel the servo moving against my leg. I just counted the number of times it moved. Visa versa if my deck went hot. We were each other’s Big Player. The Big Player would receive the count, then show up at the hot table, apparently out of nowhere. That looks natural. A player just walks up and sits down, and starts playing. When one of us did sit down to play, the bets were big because the count was high.

The best story involving the radio signaling concerns a Vegas trip we took with our parents. Greg and I were wired up, and playing downtown at the Mint (no longer in existence). Greg was actually playing for peanuts (instead of back counting) at a crowded table, while my parents watched. I had been back counting some other tables, but not much was happening. The decks were staying cold. I decided it was time for a restroom break, so I hit the men’s room. I entered a stall, dropped my pants, and prepared to have a seat for a while. Well, suddenly the servo on my leg started going NUTS! Wherever the hell Greg was playing, the count was HUGE. So, I put a cork in it, pulled up my pants, and raced out into the casino. It was easy to find Greg because my parents were standing at the table, watching.

The table was full. There was no place for me to get a bet down. Damn. The count was so high that we had a huge advantage over the house, for the moment. It was outrageous as hell, but I walked up to Greg, whispered in his ear that I would take over, and took his seat. That was such weird behavior, that I might as well have climbed up on the table and shouted, “WE ARE UP TO SOMETHING!” To boot, I plopped down and started making huge bets, attracting even more attention. I was putting out $300 per hand, and winning more hands than I lost. The pit boss had had enough of that shit after about ten minutes, and so whispered to the dealer to shuffle up. So the dealer pulled the decks out of the shoe, even though there were plenty of cards lefts, and shuffled away our advantage. Well, we made $350 in just a few minutes, and in so doing, put on a great show for my parents.

We had been driving my brown AMC Pacer to Vegas, but we wanted to start flying in, in order to save the car and get some extra playing time. The plane would cost money of course, and we sure didn’t want to spend any more on a rental car. So we bought a couple of bicycles. You can really get around the strip easily on a bike. The strip is grid locked much of the time, and parking takes forever, so a bike can really out perform a car around the crowded strip. We tied the bikes to the top of the Pacer, and drove them to Vegas. There were lots of poles of various kinds in the covered parking area near the main terminal at McCarran, so when we were ready to drive the Pacer home, we locked the bikes to a pole with some high quality bike locks. On future trips, we flew in, carried our duffle bags out to the parking area, unlocked the bikes, and pedaled to our hotel. On the last day of a trip, we’d play blackjack up until the last second, then jump on our bikes with our duffle bags, and haul ass for the airport. Each time we’d lock the bikes to the pole.

Well, on one trip we arrived at McCarran and walked out to our parking pole, but found no bicycles. Hmm, must have been the wrong pole. We looked for our bikes at other poles, but found nothing. I was really sick that our bikes had apparently been stolen. We reported the missing bikes to security, whereupon they informed us that our bike locks had been cut through with a blowtorch and the bikes removed. They gave the bikes back, but we were not allowed to lock them up to those poles anymore. One of the bikes was damaged, and we had no place to store them in Vegas anyway, so I guess we just stopped using them.

On one of the Pacer trips, we took some guns with us to shoot out in the desert. There’s a weird road just outside of Baker Ca. called Zyzzyx Road that runs right out into the open desert for a long, long way. I think it ends at a U.S. Geological Survey station. Anyway, we pulled off the asphalt just a couple of feet, and stopped. After shooting the desert to pieces for a while, we hopped back in the car. It was hot in there. The outside air temperature was 118 F. I started up the engine, put the car in first gear, and slowly let out the clutch. The wheels just spun. The desert sand was like moon dust. I put the car through all kinds of gyrations, and just wound up farther off the road. What a mess. Happily, we had a few gallons of water in the car, for radiator emergencies. The water was pretty damn hot, though.

We worked hard, digging under the tires and stuffing in rocks for better traction. No dice. Da car no move. Well, we were about ready to walk back to the freeway to thumb a ride into Baker. Luckily, a truck from the deep desert happened by and saved our asses. The driver was concerned that we were overheated and dehydrated. We were fine. So he dropped us off at a towing service in Baker. We road back out to the car in a four-wheel drive tow truck. It was a real beast. We stood on Zyzzyx and watched that monster tow truck haul the Pacer through the moon dust. God, I swear that powdery stuff was half way up the Pacer’s tires. The Pacer really got a rough drag through the desert. The car came through it ok, though. The bill was only $34, back in the early 80’s. We were back on our way to Vegas, but just totally worn out for that day.

We had reservations at the Sahara, and were ready to get our room and just crash. Bidness must have been off at the Saharha because we got an unbelievable suite for just TWELVE BUCKS! Incredible. Little chocolates on the pillows and everything. We broke out the booze and just got wasted. No blackjack that day.

After about seven months of that, I was up about $5000. Not that great for seven months work, eh? Well, if you want to make big money you have to bet big, and I just didn’t have the bankroll to cover it. More importantly, if you bet big you attract a lot of attention. It’s very hard to get away with card counting for big money, but a number of sophisticated teams have won fortunes at blackjack. I quit going to Vegas, and became a professional grad student.

So that’s about it, my darlings. The story kind of ended with a whimper, didn’t it? It was all true, though, no bullshit in this one. But I’m just out of story.