- 6 months ago
Mike Aponte is a former leader of the MIT blackjack team and a pioneer in card-counting strategies.
In the 1990s, he was part of a card-counting team that won millions of dollars at major U.S. casinos, including the MGM Grand, The Venetian, The Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
Aponte explains to Business Insider how card counting works, breaking down the mathematics and strategies behind it. He also discusses casino security, how he avoided detection, how team members were recruited, and how much they were paid.
Today, Aponte offers bespoke blackjack training and advantage-play consulting. He is also a keynote speaker at universities and corporate events.
For more:
https://mikeaponte.com
In the 1990s, he was part of a card-counting team that won millions of dollars at major U.S. casinos, including the MGM Grand, The Venetian, The Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
Aponte explains to Business Insider how card counting works, breaking down the mathematics and strategies behind it. He also discusses casino security, how he avoided detection, how team members were recruited, and how much they were paid.
Today, Aponte offers bespoke blackjack training and advantage-play consulting. He is also a keynote speaker at universities and corporate events.
For more:
https://mikeaponte.com
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TechTranscript
00:00My name is Mike Aponte, and I led a card counting team that won tens of millions of dollars from
00:04casinos at blackjack tables, and this is everything I'm authorized to tell you.
00:12Discretion and secrecy is, yeah, it's of the utmost importance, particularly since we're a cash
00:18business. That presents like a obvious potential, like safety risk. We would carry around tens or
00:25hundreds of thousand dollars of cash, like to and from trips. We were very structured. We had rules
00:32and policies and protocols for everything that was laid out. During my senior year, one of my best
00:45friends at MIT named Josh, we lived in the same dorm. Like one day, he just told me about this
00:53blackjack card counting team he had joined. I mean, I didn't know what to make of what he was saying
00:59because I had no exposure to gambling at all. And that's when I learned very quickly that, you know,
01:05card counting, it's a mathematically proven system. It's 100% legal. So with the MIT team, as far as
01:14the successful group, we had a really good run from 1994 through 2000, 2001. MIT is Massachusetts Institute
01:26of Technology. So it's one of the top science, math, engineering schools in the world. And we would
01:32actually just practice in a classroom at MIT in the early evening, about 6 p.m. There were three,
01:40four of us that would administer all the training to everyone. The number one thing I looked at when
01:49it came to potential crew was just kind of their general demeanor. We knew that the ability, their
01:57aptitude to actually learn how to count cards wasn't going to be an issue. So we really based things on
02:03that trust and kind of those other characteristics, the whole art of the game. We kind of had like
02:09step-by-step training. Like the first step is they have to master that basic strategy. Like what do you do
02:16for every single hand in blackjack? There's one and only one correct play. And we call them checkouts. And
02:21then once you pass that, you could actually start participating with the team as a spotter. A spotter is
02:27someone that would just watch the tables and keep track of the count and then signal in the big player
02:33when things move into our advantage. And then as they were progressing, the final and hardest
02:40checkout was the big player checkout. That's where you're doing everything. Perfect basic strategy,
02:48perfect running count, and then betting optimally, having like the perfect bet relative to your
02:54advantage. And then we also factored in you had to have the extra bandwidth to be able to talk,
03:00deal with distractions. And so that's something we incorporated into our training as well as far
03:06as like the very end of the big player checkout. Passing the big player checkout, like the
03:13the top level, I would say it took people typically anywhere from, you know, four to six months.
03:23So the way we tried to train our new recruits to deal with all the pressure and the distractions and
03:29the casinos were to try to simulate that as best we could, like during our training during the big
03:35player checkout, you had to talk, we would also incorporate where we'd have teammates that would be
03:41harassing you, they'd be playing the parts of the drunk player at the table or the pit manager that's
03:47watching you closely. And there were a few people that didn't make the cut as far as being able to
03:55handle all that multitasking and and that perceived pressure. But overall we had like extremely high
04:03success rate. We did have a few recruits where it just didn't work out. So we had one recruit where
04:09I mean really great guy. I think the stress level was there, but then during training, he would get
04:17so flustered when he made mistakes. But on one such occasion, like after failing, he kind of just totally
04:24lost it and like picked up his chips from the table and just flung them at the at the wall. And he didn't
04:31direct his anger at anyone on the team. But after that, we kind of knew he wasn't cut out for it. Because
04:38if you're if you're going to break in this environment, you know, what are you going to do in the casinos?
04:48I went on the first trip and won it's like 40, 45,000 at MGM. I went and played with three spotters.
04:56So I went in. I was very I was excited, optimistic. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. But then
05:03right from the beginning, everything was just went so smoothly. So before each session, we would have
05:09a general game plan as far as where what pits are we going to play at? What was the general time frame
05:15that we're planning to play? And then also where would we would meet or exit if for when if things both
05:23kind of ended well or not so well in terms of like getting attention from the casino. So
05:29a spotter can blend in very easily. Of course, they want to look natural and relax. So there's
05:35an art of it, right? Because some people naturally are more anxious and kind of stand out. Now once the
05:41count of the table like rose into the player's advantage, then the spotter would then put out
05:47what we call the hot signal. And we had a very simple signal, they would just cross their arms
05:52like this. So I would be kind of lurking, you could say, like maybe by the slot machines.
06:00And as soon as I saw that hot signal, I would make a beeline for the table.
06:04And as I approached the table, I would identify where the open spots were. And then at that point,
06:11the spotter would pass off the running count to me using a verbal code word. So for example, for the
06:17number 11, we used the code word football, 11 players on offense and defense. Now the really
06:24important thing when the count was being passed off was not to make any type of eye contact. So say,
06:31for example, I was coming in on the left side, the spotter ideally would look to the right and just say
06:39football. And you could actually say it pretty loud because casinos are, it's a noisy environment.
06:45And we knew that the surveillance cameras, they didn't record audio, but they could record somebody
06:51unconsciously like leaning towards the big player because sometimes with new recruits on their first
06:57spotting trip, they would get nervous and they would, they would unknowingly kind of give a little
07:02tail and then we would quickly correct them like after the session, kind of give them feedback.
07:07Well, once I knew, got that count football, I knew the count was 11. So then I would just sit down and
07:14just capitalize on the advantage and I would take over from that point. And then the spotter
07:18would then walk away to count another table. And so with this strategy, with the team play,
07:26your sampling rate goes way up. Like with three to four spotters, you could sample up to 20,
07:3324 tables per hour. So this, the strategy of maximize our mathematical expected win.
07:40And it did provide that camouflage. Now, the ideal scenario is that I capitalize on the advantage and
07:47then you expect the count to go down, like all the high cards to come out. And that's when you get
07:52blackjacks and get the tens when you double down. And then hopefully by that point, when once the count
07:59dropped, one of the other spotters would have a hot shoe. So the big player is just jumping from table
08:05to table. So one potential telltale sign of a card counter is someone that's varying their bets
08:12up and down, particularly near the end of a shoe. But that alone doesn't mean you're necessarily card
08:21counting because there's a lot of gamblers that like to fluctuate their bets up and down.
08:25I think one of the aspects in which they proved a lot is they eventually picked up on the whole team
08:32play. And so that's where an individual card counter, it's hard for an individual card counter,
08:40they can make a decent amount of money for themselves, but it's hard for an individual
08:44to really hurt a casino's bottom line. But then a team is capable of doing a lot more damage,
08:50right? With a combined bigger bank row, kind of maximizing their betting volume.
08:55So the casinos over time did recognize, let's look for these spotters.
09:00And let's look for the big player jumping from table to table.
09:04For me, I never got nervous. I would get a little, I would get a bit of an adrenaline rush,
09:08but that's kind of, that's why you do all the work. That's why your spotters have been counting.
09:13And that's why you put in all the practice. That's kind of what you're, you're trained for
09:18and what you live for as an advantage player. So for me, I just, I love that, those moments.
09:24I didn't go in with the intention of being like a manager or a leader. I was just really focused
09:31on being the best player I could. And so I think a lot of that transition to management just came
09:37from being a really successful player. I won on that first big trip. I became the first member of the
09:43team to win a hundred thousand dollars in the trip, like a few months later. And so it was just kind
09:50of a natural like progression. We were having success at the blackjack tables. We did have to start
10:01looking into the disguises because one of the unavoidable aspects of advantage play, like no matter
10:07how great your persona is or your act is, like at some point, what's going to give you away is the
10:15fact that you keep winning. And then that kind of puts you on the, on their radar. So in response to
10:21that, we would start to use, first, we started with low tech disguises, baseball caps, some sunglasses,
10:31try growing a beard or facial hair. And then later on we did, I actually did make a trip to LA with one
10:39of my teammates. And we actually consulted with a Hollywood makeup artist where we tried more
10:44elaborate stuff like wigs and actually a fat man suit. Overall, the disguises didn't work as well as we
10:52had hoped because you have to consider when, if you get barred from a casino and well known, if you come
11:00back and you're playing and you change your lookups lately, like when they, if they start scrutinizing
11:05you, like they're going to recognize who you are. Well, as far as the casino employees and supervisors,
11:13that would depend on just a number of tables. Like a small casino, a blackjack pit might only be
11:19four or five tables. At a place like MGM Grand, a blackjack pit could be huge. And then each pit
11:27is going to have floor people. And the floor people, they're responsible for kind of supervising like
11:33several tables. Their main job is actually just to rate players and make sure that the dealer is
11:40following proper procedure. Each pit's going to have a pit manager. And the pit manager in general
11:46is the one where you really want to keep an eye on them. Because the more senior,
11:51naturally the more experienced and knowledgeable they tended to be. Obviously each shift would have
11:55its own set of surveillance people. The day shift tended to be the sharpest that would have the
12:02most senior people. And then we, so we started focusing on the night shift and even the graveyard shift
12:10as well. The phone ringing, that was a big one. When the phone starts ringing in the pit,
12:16then that's when you have to pay even more attention. And then you also have to learn to discern
12:21between when there's actually heat. They communicate regularly in terms of like chip inventory
12:28and so forth. But for me, the telltale sign was definitely just the casino employees, their demeanor.
12:35There were times when they would try to, try to be inconspicuous, but you could just tell from their
12:42energy and kind of their like quick glances that they were suspicious. And then as soon as you
12:48recognize there's any type of heat, our rule was to, to leave the casino. But there were a few times
12:54where it gets, it is more difficult to manage, particularly on the really big weekend. So as far as
13:01Vegas, we didn't play there like every week or even every month, as a lot of people would think. We
13:07focused on the high roller weekends, like New Year's, Super Bowl. During the time we played, like boxing
13:17was like at its peak. There were so many great fighters, you know, Tyson, Roy Jones, De La Hoya.
13:23Those fights were at MGM Grand and those weekends you would have all the high rollers come in,
13:29celebrities, pro athletes, all of the wannabes. And it made for so much cover for us where we could just,
13:37you could bet $5,000, $10,000 and you wouldn't even get a second look. So during those fight weekends,
13:45we would literally have the entire team at the MGM Grand, for example. There were a number of
13:54instances where there was a very poor decision made by a member of a team. You can get too comfortable
14:02where the casino people like you and you're not getting any type of attention. And then you start
14:08to get a little complacent. So we actually did have that on one trip and we had probably, we had about
14:1510 players there at the time. And then that's when I noticed, I noticed the heat. This pit manager was
14:22looking at me. So I just got up and took off. But unfortunately, one of our other players,
14:29she didn't recognize the heat at all. So not only did she not notice the heat, she started a conversation
14:35right on the casino floor, which that's like a cardinal sin with a number of other players. And they
14:41ended up all getting nabbed by the casino. And they got taken to the back room. They didn't get beat up
14:48or anything. You know, they got their IDs and ended up burning about five of our players, just from that
14:56one simple mistake from getting like too relaxed. So you have to always assume that you're being watched.
15:03Yeah, Richard Chen, he was a member of our team, actually an excellent player. And he got involved
15:10in a legal situation at Monte Carlo Casino in Las Vegas because he naturally used an alias. It's called
15:16a camouflage passport. So camouflage passport, I believe the one he used was for Burma. It was stated
15:26as official country. Burma technically doesn't exist anymore. It's known as Myanmar. And so he used that
15:34passport for his ID. It's not illegal to use an alias or even present an ID as long as it's not a legal
15:45government issued ID. But if you're presenting a passport for a country that doesn't even exist,
15:50technically that's not illegal. And so that's why Richard was awarded that 40,000 that he had won.
15:58So that was the correct decision.
16:05Well, what makes blackjack special compared to other casino games is that it's a way of quantifying
16:11what's happened before in a user friendly way to determine when you have the advantage and then
16:18capitalize on that advantage. The system of choice by the MIT team is called the high low card counting
16:24system, which groups the cards into three groups based on how they impact house edge. Now with the
16:31game of blackjack, when you start at the beginning of a new shuffle, it doesn't matter whether it's
16:37single deck, double deck, six deck, or even eight deck, there are an equal amount of high cards.
16:45The first group is the high cards, 10, jack, queen, king, and ace. And overall, these cards favor the
16:52player over the long run. That gives you blackjack, which pays three to two. That's 150% on your wager.
16:59So for example, when you're doubling down to 10 or 11, these are the cards that you want to draw. And the
17:06third benefit to the player is that when the dealer is hitting on those tough totals of 12 through 16,
17:12stiff totals, the dealer is more likely to bust if there's more of those 10 value cards remaining.
17:19So high cards favor the player. There are two low cards, two, three, four, five, and six. So at the
17:25start of a new shuffle, these cards are balanced and they essentially cancel each other out. But as soon
17:31as the dealer starts dealing the game, you can imagine that the net difference between these cards is
17:38going to constantly fluctuate. And what this does, it provides the opportunity for a skilled card
17:44counter to identify when there's a lot of high cards remaining in the game because a lot of a surplus
17:52of low cards have already been dealt. The more low cards that are remaining, that means fewer blackjacks
17:59for the player. Also, when the dealer is hitting on totals of 12 through 16, these are the cards that
18:06can turn the dealer's bad hand into the winning hand of 17 through 21. And the third group of cards in
18:14the high-low is the neutral cards, seven, eight, and nine. And living up to its name, relatively speaking,
18:22the neutral cards don't favor the house or the player. So that leaves us with high and low. And as
18:30you can see, it's a balanced count system, right? All of the high cards cancel out all the low cards
18:38in any complete number of decks, whether it's single, double, six, or eight. Now, as far as the actual
18:44count values, the high cards, they each have a count value of minus one. Now, the reason these are
18:51negative, even though these are favorable for the player, is that a card counter is sticking in terms
18:57of future probability. So for example, the moment you get dealt a blackjack, that's great, but that
19:04also means that there's two fewer high cards remaining that can benefit you in subsequent play.
19:11The low cards, two through six, are each going to be plus one. And that's in line with the fact that
19:18as low cards are depleted from the game, player advantage increases. Because if there's been a
19:24surplus of low cards that have come out, that means that there has to be a surplus of high cards
19:30remaining. So at the start of any shuffle, the count's always going to be zero because there's an
19:36equal amount of high and low. But then as the shoe is dealt, that count's going to be constantly
19:42fluctuating up and down. So a card counter takes advantage of those positive deviations. And the
19:49key to it is just putting the time to get skilled at it visually so that it becomes second nature as
19:57far as keeping track of the count.
20:04During the week, you're just like a regular student. You know, you're eating like cafeteria food,
20:09you're going to classes, you know, go play pickup basketball with your buddies. But then on
20:17weekends, you kind of you take on this whole role and persona. So like as soon as you land in Vegas,
20:22for example, we would often get picked up by limo, you know, under your alias, get VIP check in. And then we
20:31would typically always stay like in the best suites, get everything fully comped, and then even get like
20:38ringside seats at the fight. So all these perks made the weekend easier. But we were, we put in a
20:46lot of hours and worked very hard while we were there. Well, I always really enjoyed the transition.
20:53Even though it's 100% legal, you always have to be like looking over your shoulder. You always had
20:58like a simple backstory for why you had so much money, you could just give them a simple like
21:06one sentence like, Oh, my family's in import export. And then in their minds, it is kind of, you know,
21:12that's going to check that, that box. It did have some of that, like, Clark Kent, the Superman feel like
21:19even just flying to Vegas, we're still normal, right? We want to be inconspicuous, naturally kind of
21:25viewed the casinos a bit as the bad guy. And so I think that's part of what people love about the
21:33whole story, right? Just like beating the system, taking down the house. Once we started making
21:40what was a lot more money as compared to being a poor college student, our spending did increase,
21:45but we were good. We didn't increase it in an extravagant way. Like, it was nice just to be able
21:51to have like a nice, you know, sushi dinner, for example. But we were very tempered about it. There
21:59was no one on the team that went out and bought a Porsche or anything like that.
22:08I would say like that, you know, the MIT teams, we did win, like, in the tens of millions. I mean,
22:15the most I ever won for the team in a trip was a quarter million. But as a team, our best weekend,
22:21we won half a million dollars in Vegas over Super Bowl weekend, what we would do is we would set a
22:29arbitrary profit goal. Typically, it was about 350,000. So once we hit like 350,000 in profit,
22:39we would have a distribution. And so that profit, it would be divided into like three pools. One big pool
22:47was the investor pool. The second big pool that was equal to an investment pool was the player pool.
22:54As a player, your share of that would be the percentage of expected win that you contributed
23:00to the bank. We would meet up discreetly, and then we would confirm like all the details of our actual
23:07play. And then we did have like a third, the smallest pool was for management. So for people such
23:14as myself that spent a lot of time recruiting, training, coordinating trips. So it was like very
23:19business run, very black and white. I mean, one of the unique aspects of being a professional card
23:27counter advantage player at that time was that we just operated it in cash. At first, it was it was
23:33quite a jolt as a young person. When you're carrying around when you see like even $10,000 in cash,
23:40much less $100,000. But then it becomes like anything, you get immune to it pretty quickly.
23:47So it was commonplace for us to carry tens, if not hundreds of thousand dollars of cash. We'd always
23:52have it in our carry on. Or actually even better, you would just have it on your person, right? Because
23:59a large amount of cash through the x-ray machine, they could they could potentially identify it.
24:04Like for example, when we won that half a million in in Vegas, I was responsible for bringing back
24:11like over $300,000 in cash. I totally packed myself and I put the last like $30,000 on top of my head
24:19underneath my baseball cap. Because at the time, you know, it was different as far as security.
24:25We didn't utilize banks at all. For example, it was pretty common just simply in my apartment,
24:31just locked in the in a file cabinet. I could have anywhere from three to five hundred thousand.
24:37So I mean, this is a huge part of why discretion was so important. Like literally,
24:42even good friends of ours didn't know that weren't on the team. They might hear rumors,
24:48but they had no idea of the extent. So as far as like the ethics of card counting, it's not just
25:00100% legal, but it's 100% ethical. From a business standpoint, casinos, it's not in their favor to allow
25:08advantage players to to keep playing over time. Now, the vast majority of them, they're very civil.
25:16The most common way they would deal with, for example, when I would get barred from playing is
25:21you would just get a polite tap on the shoulder and they would say something like, you're welcome
25:27to play any other game than blackjack. And that's it. And at that point, our policy was to never,
25:34never confirm or deny. Don't argue. Just simply say, okay, and then you leave the premises. They could be
25:42more aggressive or hostile about it. And there also could be a difference between the corporate
25:49like Vegas casinos and Indian casinos because a lot of the Indian casinos, it was so brand new that
25:54they're just trying to figure it out because there was still a lot of perception, some perception when
26:01we started playing that card counting is illegal or at a minimum should be illegal.
26:07So as far as the countermeasures that casinos can take against card counters, I mean, one simple one
26:13is they can just shuffle on you, shuffle up once you put out a big bet. I mean, the downside of that
26:20from the casinos is that it actually stops the game. So that was one kind of a bit of an old school
26:25method. Another one is they call it half shooing you. They might move the cut card up on you. So the cut
26:32card determines the shuffle point, like how far you get to play into the game. So for example,
26:38for a six deck game, typically, we would get to play four and a half decks into it. So they put the
26:43cut card at one and a half decks. Now, if you're a gambler, it doesn't matter where the cut card is.
26:49But as a card counter, you ideally would like to play as deep as possible into the shoe because you can
26:55get more information and you tend to get a higher frequency of advantage. So cutting the shoe in half is
27:02one countermeasure they especially like to do in Atlantic City. Because in Atlantic City,
27:06according to state law, they're not allowed to ban advantage players. They can't kick them out.
27:12But they can take other measures such as half shooing you. As far as casinos I've been banned from,
27:18it's a really long list. MGM Grand, Mirage, Treasure Island, Bellagio, Tahoe, like the
27:28all pretty much all the casinos in Tahoe, like in Tahoe and Biloxi, they're much smaller communities.
27:34So they even at that time, they had an agreement, they would share information quickly. So on one
27:39trip to Biloxi Gulfport, after I had, I'd won like 40, 50,000. And then I, they escorted me out politely.
27:47Then they just that information got shared quickly, where I went to try to go to another casino, and they
27:54instantly barred me for playing. And that's where it really accelerated kind of the burnout of players
28:03on the team such as myself, where you could go to a casino that you'd never played at before, but then
28:08you were already on kind of in that, that black book, so to speak. The first casino I ever got
28:15banned from in Las Vegas was Caesar's Palace. They had a list of people from MIT that was going around
28:24cheating casinos. And then at that point, they told us we had to leave the property. And then they tried
28:30to direct us to the back room. And at that point, I just refused. I said, we're not going. So eventually,
28:37they relented and, and took us to the cab line. And they read us the official trespass act. Well,
28:45when it comes to who the casinos allow to play, it, you can just distill it to one simple principle, like
28:52everyone's welcome to play as long as you're going to lose. It's as simple as that. I mean, that's,
28:59they can't, they don't discriminate based on any, like on gender, race, religion, but they can,
29:06and they do discriminate based on your skill level. And I know a lot of people get
29:11up in arms about it. I guess for me, I just, it's just one of those facts of life that you just have
29:17to accept. And it's something that's never going to change. I obviously naturally viewed it from
29:24an extreme position that the casinos were unethical. They were the bad guys. But then over time,
29:31I kind of see things a bit more objectively and that, you know, they're running a business.
29:36They should have the right to protect that business interest. I think the important thing to me is
29:40that when they do do that, just do it in a very legal and civil way.
29:51MIT was actually the birthplace of Card County. It was a professor named Ed Thorpe who formulated
29:57it way back in the 1960s. The MIT Card County team, it was a startup company called Strategic
30:05Investments. So there were three managers, a Harvard MBA grad and two MIT alums. So it was about a
30:12million dollars they raised and they formed a limited partnership. And their whole business model
30:17was to recruit MIT students, train them how to count cards and then, you know, send in the casinos.
30:24And so I was recruited on the tail end of that team, Strategic Investments in 1993. So it had like a
30:33number of issues was that we just had this like really large kind of bloated group. And it was a bit
30:40disjointed, like every practice on Strategic Investments, I would see people I'd never seen before. And that also
30:47created a security issue, which ended up biting the team pretty hard. Because one of the practices,
30:56in hindsight, that wasn't very wise is that the managers, they would have everyone on the team,
31:00their name, email addresses and phone numbers. It was for good reasons. They wanted everyone to have
31:08each other's information so that they could practice with each other in between team practices. But later on,
31:15there was a member of the team that sold that, took one of those photocopies and sold it to the casinos
31:21for like 30 to 40,000. Then I was introduced to JP. He was one of the managers of the team.
31:29For some reason, JP, he wouldn't put your full name on the roster, he would just put your initials.
31:38So for me, it was just MA. So I was really lucky because my full name would have been on that list.
31:45Unfortunately, the team wasn't very well run or operated. So it ended up failing and dissolving.
31:52Well, after that failure, like a new team formed. So I was fortunate to be recruited onto that team
31:59in 1994. You could make it akin to the mafia. Like in the mafia, you bring someone in, you have to vouch for
32:08that person. Like that person's on you. So people were vetted very properly before coming in.
32:16After we had that great run of success, things just kind of slowly and gradually moved to the point
32:29where we weren't making the same type of profits. And it wasn't because we were losing, we just couldn't
32:35get down the money. So key players such as myself, we were so well known that we couldn't play anymore.
32:42And so about 2001, it got to the point where we just decided to call it quits and disband the team.
32:51Currently, I'm in touch with only a few members of the team. So it's good. It's interesting.
32:57Everyone's kind of gone on, not surprisingly, to do some pretty impressive things in different fields.
33:04We kind of are nostalgic about the good old days, about that special period that we got to
33:11experience. I actually got into nonprofit work. And then the book Bringing Down the House came
33:16out. That's when our story became public and there was a tremendous amount of buzz about it.
33:21And then I got pulled back in to blackjack, but just in different aspects as like professional speaker.
33:30People started contacting me because they wanted to learn how to play. And then now I'm currently
33:36working on a number of entertainment projects that are like blackjack, card counting, gambling based.
33:43When I was young, I never even knew that such a profession even existed. And then it was like after
33:50my card counting career ended, I realized, well, one, it was my first exposure to entrepreneurship.
33:56We did actually learn from our mistakes, run the team as a business. And for me, I've always been a math guy.
34:03That was my first real life application of like probability and statistics, right? It's one thing
34:09to learn something in a class from a textbook, but it's quite another to experience that in real life.
34:17Like after my card counting career, one of the things, kind of the, one of the common threads,
34:21I've been like a data science consultant. I've had a data science boutique firm for a time. And card
34:27counting was my first real life experience about the power of like making data driven decisions. And so
34:34it's something that has a lot of carry over into other fields.
34:44As far as the future of card counting, there's always going to be that opportunity, at least in
34:49the US, right? As long as the casinos offer blackjack and they're, you know, dealing in a
34:55non-continuous shuffle machine, you know, that, that dependent event opportunity is always going to
35:03exist. You can't count cards online if it's just essentially like just a continuous shuffle in which
35:09it's kind of negating those past events.
35:12But there are some select online casinos in which the dealer actually does deal the game from a
35:19finite set of cards. Unfortunately, they have algorithms and tracking software that can easily
35:26identify like advantage players. I mean, what's ironic about card counting and like surveillance
35:33in terms of their technology and procedures, they kind of have a, a symbiotic relationship in a sense.
35:39Advantage card counters and, and advantage players have kind of forced the casinos to adapt and get
35:44better. So one tremendous improvement is going from like VHS tapes to like modern day digital cameras,
35:53the ability to pull up, you know, footage from, it could be from a year ago at a specific time
36:00in place. So that provides the surveillance with a lot more capability to evaluate
36:07players. And then the hand in hand with that is just the, the improvement, vast improvement in terms of
36:13the databases for undesirable players. And that information is now passed, can be passed instantly
36:20and electronically. I mean, in the last 20 years, there's been so many advancements in technology
36:26and also in terms of like AI and algorithm development. There are applications of AI for
36:35facial recognition, but for the most part, they aren't very effective because as technology gets
36:41better and just as important, less expensive, more cost effective at some point in the future,
36:47that's going to be implemented, um, at every table. I mean, today there are, there certainly
36:54are card counters still playing and, uh, and teams as well, a number of which I'm, I know personally.
37:02So as long as casinos offer games that are beatable, there's always going to be
37:06people looking to, to beat the system. Hi, I'm a producer on Authorized Account.
37:11If you liked this episode, then you should check out our new podcast
37:14and comment below with the names of people you'd love to hear us interview.
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