Author: Arnold Snyder

The Sticky Bonus vs. the Traditional Bonus and How to Play Them

By Arnold Snyder
© 2005 Arnold Snyder

The Traditional Online Casino Bonus

Online casino owners offer cash bonuses to players to entice them to try out their casinos.

Traditional bonuses, also called cashable bonuses, may be withdrawn in full after fulfilling the terms and conditions of the bonus, which usually means after meeting a wagering requirement on permitted games.

But never get hung up on labels when evaluating any gambling situation, even a traditional bonus. Try to understand the underlying concepts, so you can apply the ones that best fit any particular situation.

The Sticky Bonus and Other Non-Traditional Bonuses

You can tell that a bonus is a sticky bonus when the online casino’s terms and conditions specify that the bonus is “for wagering only.” But, again, don’t get hung up on labels. If you understand the underlying concepts, you may apply them to a variety of gambling situations.

Technically, a sticky bonus is worth roughly the same to a knowledgeable and well-bankrolled gambler as a traditional bonus, even though you can’t withdraw the actual sticky bonus itself. But you have to play a sticky bonus differently from a traditional bonus to extract its full value.

Here’s a very simple example to illustrate why.

Imagine that an online casino has offered you a $100 sticky bonus for a $100 deposit to entice you to check them out. You deposit $100 and receive the $100 bonus to play with. If you then make a bet at blackjack of $200 (the entire balance in your account) you will either win $200 or lose $200 (or, you may push, in which case you’ll bet the $200 again). (For this simple explanation of the logic, let’s ignore splits, double downs, the 3:2 payout on a blackjack, the house edge, etc.)

If you win and then decide to quit play (let’s leave aside for a moment the wagering requirement, if any, on your deposit), you can withdraw the entire balance in your account minus the $100 bonus. This means you can withdraw $300, for a win of $200 on your $100 deposit.

But if you lose and quit play, all you have really lost is the $100 you deposited.

Since you will win roughly 50% of the time and lose roughly 50% of the time, you will win $200 half the time and lose $100 half the time.

$200 win – $100 loss = $100 profit for two plays

So, if your betting strategy was to place one bet then quit the game, win or lose, your $100 bonus played this way would be worth $50 to you in the long run.

But what if you don’t withdraw your money right after you win that first hand? What if you continue to play on your bonus?

You now have $400 in your account (your $100 deposit, your $200 win, and the $100 sticky bonus). Of this total, $300 belongs to you—only the $100 sticky bonus may not be withdrawn. If you bet all $400 on your next blackjack hand and win, you win $400. If you bet it all and lose, you lose $300 (your $100 deposit plus $200 prior win minus the $100 sticky bonus).

$400 – $300 = $100 profit

Now, stay with me here. Assuming you win half the time and lose half the time when you play a hand of blackjack, you will win two hands in a row only 1 out of 4 times. One time you’ll win twice, one time you’ll win the first time and lose the second time, and twice you’ll lose the first time and never get to the second bet. Therefore, if you choose to bet it all 2x in a row, 3 out of 4 times you will lose your $100 deposit, and 1 out of 4 times you will turn it into $600. $600 – $300 = $300, so you have a $300 expectation on 4 plays, for $75 per play.

That means the bonus was worth roughly $75 to you if you used the two-bet strategy. The bonus was worth roughly $25 more using this strategy.

So, how do you get this sticky bonus to be worth $100? You just keep doubling your bet and gradually the value approaches, but never quite gets to, $100. The only problem is, with each bet you have to keep betting more to win less.

So the real value of a sticky bonus depends on your tolerance for risk. That is, it depends on your tolerance for risking money you’ve already won in order to get smaller and smaller further increments of bonus.

Please note that the exact value of a bonus and the best strategy for using it is complicated by such things as the house edge and variance on the game you play, the wagering requirement for the bonus, casino betting limits, and other factors. Consider this just a general guideline.

So, how should you bet a sticky bonus? Simply set a win goal and go for it. Here are some guidelines:

Sticky Bonus Play: All-Purpose Advice for Beginners

1) If your total bankroll is less than $2,000, ignore most sticky bonuses until you have built up your bankroll some more by playing the non-sticky and pseudo-sticky bonuses. You do not need big fluctuations right now.

2) If your total bankroll is more than $2,000 but less than $4,000, never play any sticky bonus of less than 100% of your deposit. Set your win goal at twice the value of the bonus. That is, if you are getting a $100 bonus for a $100 deposit, then set your win goal at doubling your total playing bank for that play, that is, turning the $200 total in your account into $400.

Bet aggressively off the top, at least 1/8 of your starting account total, until you hit your goal. That is, with a deposit-plus-bonus total of $200 in your account, come right out with at least a $25 bet.

The actual best amount to bet for any particular bonus is based on a number of factors, including the wagering requirement, the house edge on the game, camouflage, your bankroll and other factors. Consider this a general guide for beginners playing sticky bonuses with wagering requirements. Pros with large bankrolls should bet the maximum amount possible for the greatest variance. Pros who can take the fluctuations want to go for as much of the bonus as possible while giving as little action to the house as possible.

Do not lower your bets if you start losing. In fact, most pros would raise their bets as they got down into the house’s money, as your advantage actually goes up at this time.

If you lose everything, so be it. If you win your goal (making your total bank $400), then use a conservative betting strategy to get through the remainder of your play. Any time you go below your $400 target, raise your bet to at least $25 again, until you either lose it all, or come back up to your $400 goal.

In deciding whether or not to play the bonus, estimate the dollar value as one-half of the bonus total–in this case, one-half of $100, or $50. Over the long run, you’ll lose your $100 deposit about half the time, and win $200 the other half of the time. In the short run, you could lose your $100 quite a few times in succession (which is why you don’t want to play sticky bonuses with a bankroll of less than $2,000). By the same token, you could also win quite a few sticky bonuses in succession. And that’s never a problem.

3) If your total bankroll is more than $4,000 but less than $6,000, again, never play any sticky bonus of less than 100% of your deposit. But set your win goal at doubling up twice. That is, if you are getting a $100 bonus for a $100 deposit, then set your goal at turning your $200 (D + B) into $800.

Bet aggressively off the top, at least 1/8 of your DB, until you hit your first double up. That is, with a starting DB total of $200 in your account (as in this example), come right out with at least $25 bets. (Again, the actual best amount to bet for any particular bonus is based on a number of factors, including the wagering requirement, the house edge on the game, camouflage, your bankroll and other factors. Consider this a general guide for beginners playing sticky bonuses with wagering requirements.)

Again, do not lower your bets if you start losing. If you lose everything, so be it. When you have doubled your starting bank once (so that your account totals $400 in this case), then raise your bets again to at least 1/8 of your new account total (or $50 in this case—again, the optimal bet depends on many factors), and shoot for that ultimate $800 total in your account. If you hit this total, then grind out the remainder of your play at small bets.

Any time you go below that $800 mark, raise your bets to $50 again, and keep betting this amount until you either come over the $800 mark or lose all of your money. In deciding whether or not to play the bonus with this strategy, estimate the dollar value as 75% of the bonus total, which would be $75 in this case. With this strategy, you can expect to lose your $100 deposit about three-quarters of the time, but you’ll profit $600 about one out of four times.

4) If your total bankroll is more than $6,000, then either follow the sticky bonus advice directly above for players with bankrolls between $4,000 and $6,000, or study the intricacies of Kelly betting principles and risk management that professional gamblers use. (See my book Blackbelt in Blackjack for an in-depth discussion of Kelly betting and bankroll risk management.) With a big enough bank, you can often afford to go after a sticky bonus that adds less than 100% to your deposit, provided you do the math and figure out the optimal bet size, dollar value and percentage advantage for the play.

In fact, the way to extract the most money from any online casino bonus, whether traditional or sticky, is to bet on the bonus with absolute maximum aggression. The goal is to either tap out fast (giving the house as little action as possible) or make a bundle. Believe it or not, you’ll collect all that bonus money you lose on the tap-outs on your few big wins.

The advice above is for new players on very small bankrolls who can’t ride out the swings inherent in such aggressive betting. ♠

Can a Hole-carder Utilize an Off-table Accomplice??

by Arnold Snyder (with comments by Stephen R. Minagil, Attorney at Law)

(From Blackjack Forum VII #2, June 1987)
© Blackjack Forum 1987

As reported previously in Blackjack Forum (Vol. V #3), on December 18, 1984, the Supreme Court of the State of Nevada ruled conclusively that certain types of hole-card play are legal at Nevada’s casino blackjack tables. The specific hole-card case they ruled on was the State of Nevada vs. Einbinder and Dalben.

Steven Einbinder and Tony Dalben are professional gamblers who had been arrested at the Golden Nugget Casino in downtown Las Vegas on November 22, 1983, and charged with violating the State’s cheating statutes. Specifically, they were observed and videotaped to be playing in a manner whereby Dalben sat in the first base position at a blackjack table, placing table-minimum bets, from where he was apparently able to view the dealer’s hole card whenever the dealer checked under an ace or ten for a possible blackjack.

The videotaped evidence supported the State’s claim that Dalben was then signaling this hole card information to Einbinder, who sat on the third base side of the table placing bets of up to $700 per hand. The State claimed that Einbinder was playing his hand according to the hole-card information signaled to him by Dalben.

A few definitions of some of the various types of hole card play that might be affected by this case:

“First Basing”

This is precisely the type of blackjack hole-card play described above, as engaged in by Einbinder and Dalben.

“Front-loading”

This is a type of play in which a player views the dealer’s hole card, not when the dealer checks for a blackjack, but when the dealer “loads” the hole-card beneath his up-card. This type of blackjack play is made possible by a dealer who tips the card up towards the players to slide it beneath his up-card, and a player who is either short, or slouching at the table, such that his eye-level is low enough to read the value of the card.

“Spooking”

This is a play where the player has an agent — a “spook” — positioned behind the dealer, most often seated at another blackjack table on the other side of the pit, which enables the agent to view the dealer’s hole-card when the dealer checks for a blackjack. [Note from Arnold Snyder: If you watch the movie Casino, the players who got backroomed by Ace Rothstein were spooking.]

The “spook” then signals the player at the table with the hole card information, so that the player may play his hand accordingly. Another type of spooking employs an agent in front of the dealer, but far enough away from the table so that his angle of viewing allows him to see the dealer’s hole card as per typical front-loading, except that this type of play requires yet another agent to signal the player or players at the table of the hole-card value.

The Las Vegas District Court where Einbinder and Dalben were tried found them not guilty, based on the fact that it was the dealer’s sloppy dealing style that enabled them to obtain an advantage over the house. The players were merely using their powers of observation to obtain information that would have been available to any player in Dalben’s seat.

The State appealed this decision to the Supreme Court, and the not guilty verdict was ultimately upheld on the appeal.

Tony Dalben was kind enough to send me complete transcripts of the court proceedings. I’ve been studying these transcripts for some months now — 133 pages in total — to determine exactly what the Nevada Supreme Court found to be legal.

The actual order from the Supreme Court dismissing the State’s appeal is brief and to the point:

Respondents were charged with cheating at gambling and other related felonies. The facts of the alleged offenses were essentially undisputed In particular, the evidence showed that respondent Dalben was lawfully seated at his position at the blackjack table, that he did not use any artificial device to aid his vision, and that he was able to see the dealer’s “hole” card solely because of the admittedly “sloppy” play of the dealer. Respondent Dalben then communicated his information to respondent Einbinder. The district court ruled that respondents’ conduct did not constitute a violation of the cheating statutes. We agree.

Cheating is defined as the alteration of the selection of criteria which determine the result of a game or the amount or frequency of payment. NRS 465.083, see Sheriff v. Martin, 99 Nev.. 336, 662, P.2d 634 (1983). We have considered the briefs and the record, and we have heard the oral arguments of counsel. We conclude that in this case the district court correctly found that respondents’ conduct did not constitute cheating at gambling. Accordingly, this appeal is without merit and is hereby dismissed.

This decision indicates that the Supreme Court considered it significant that Dalben “did not use any artificial device to aid his vision, and that he was able to see the dealer’s ‘hole’ card solely because of the admittedly ‘sloppy’ play of the dealer.” (emphasis added).

This wording of the decision explains in part why the Nevada Supreme Court may have been prejudiced against Taft and Weatherford (Blackjack Forum VI # 1), who were convicted of using a video device to view the dealer’s hole card — though I still believe that Taft and Weatherford should have been found not guilty. At the time of their “crime,” April 1, 1984, Nevada had no anti-device law, they were not touching or in any way altering the cards and their potential advantage was also derived from sloppy dealers.

At the time the Nevada Supreme Court upheld the district court conviction of Taft and Weatherford, January 28, 1986, I had not seen the transcripts for the Einbinder/Dalben trial. I was unaware of the fact that the Supreme Court had specifically mentioned that no “artificial device” had been used by Einbinder and Dalben. I can see now the difficulty this must have posed to Taft’s and Weatherford’s attorneys in defending their clients. The Einbinder/Dalben decision may have provided only weak support, if any, for hole card play as practiced by Taft and Weatherford.

Prior to receiving materials from Tony Dalben, I was also unaware of the fact that Taft’s attorney — John Curtas — and Weatherford’s attorney — Stephen Minagil — were the same attorneys who had initially represented Einbinder and Dalben, respectively. And although Curtas and Minagil were dismissed from the case prior to the final decision, it is apparent from the preliminary hearing transcript that their arguments in the Einbinder/Dalben case were what ultimately won this case for the defendants.

My criticism of Curtas and Minagil (Blackjack Forum Vl #1) for not defending Taft and Weatherford on the basis of the Einbinder/Dalben decision was short-sighted. It’s apparent to me now why Curtas’ and Minigal’s defense of Taft and Weatherford was a brand new ball game.

So, does the Supreme Court’s decision in the Einbinder/Dalben case protect hole card players other than “firstbasers”?

Does it protect “front-loaders?”

Does it protect “spooks?”

The Supreme Court decision does not directly refer to spooking, but direct reference to this playing style was made during the District Court preliminary hearing, the transcript of which the Supreme Court used to form their decision. The date of this hearing was February 17, 1984, and at that time Tony Dalben was being represented by Las Vegas Attorney Stephen R. Minagil.

On page 48-49 of the court transcript, Minagil is arguing for his client’s defense:

Minagil: ” . . . I would use the analogy that two people, a husband and wife, maybe unsophisticated in gambling, and the husband is standing next to the wife and turns to her and says, ‘Gee, I saw she had a ten. Maybe we shouldn’t hit this one.’ Is that cheating?”

Court: “We don’t have a husband and wife here that we know about. Let’s say someone is sitting on the other side of the pit, slouched down in the chair and when the dealer looked at the dealer’s card, the person sitting there could see the card and the person flashed the signal to the person. Is that cheating?”

Minagil: “I think so in that you have a person behind the table. That would be cheating. But these gentlemen, they sat where they are supposed to sit. They didn’t use devices. And this dealer made a mistake.”

Does this reference in the hearing transcript make it ill-advised for a player arrested for spooking to cite this Supreme Court decision as a legal defense of his action? Nowhere does the Nevada Supreme Court state that having an agent behind the dealer is illegal. And it could certainly be argued that such an agent, like Tony Dalben, might be “lawfully seated at his position” — albeit at a different table from the dealer, and that such an agent may be using no devices other than his powers of observation.

It seems to me that a “front-loader,” who obtains his information to play his own hand, or to signal information to another player or players at his table, would likely be protected by the Einbinder/Dalben decision, assuming no “devices” — mirrors, “shiners,” video, etc. — were being used to obtain hole-card information.

A front-loader who was not seated at the table, however, acting as a “spook,” could be a different story. What about a front-loader who is seated at the table, but who is obviously slouching, or laying his head on the table to peek at the dealer’s hole card? Part of the testimony considered by the Nevada Supreme Court, from the same hearing transcript, contained this line of questioning of Golden Nugget Director of Surveillance, William McDonnell (p. 34-35):

Minagil: “Mr. Dalben, who I believe you testified was sitting at the first base position, to observe the hole card of the dealer, he just sat there, didn’t he?”

McDonnell: “That’s correct.”

Minagil: “He didn’t get up and make any physical movement to peak at the card, did he?”

McDonnell: “Not on this occasion, no.”

Minagil: “All he was using was the power of observation; is that right?”

McDonnell: “That’s correct.”

Minagil: “You’re not aware of any rule that requires players to look away from the dealer when she’s looking at the hole card, are you?”

McDonnell: “No.”

Minagil: “So it’s the dealer’s responsibility to shield that hole card, is it not?”

McDonnell: “That’s correct.”

Minagil: “And if the dealer allows a player to see a hole card, she’s making a mistake; is she not?”

McDonnell: Yes.”

I called Dalben’s former attorney, Stephen Minagil, and asked him, as a Nevada attorney, exactly how he would expect the courts to interpret the Supreme Court’s Einbinder/Dalben decision, and just what obstacles this decision might present to an attorney who had to defend a player who was arrested for either spooking or front-loading.

I taped Minagil’s response, and have transcribed it here with his permission:

Steven Minagil: I’m concerned that there is not much protection provided by the Einbinder/Dalben decision with regards to “spooking,” i.e., employing agents not at the table. Each decision rendered by the Supreme Court is limited to its facts. In the Einbinder/Dalben decision the facts were that they were lawfully seated at the table and used no artificial devices to aid their vision. I believe those are the key facts upon which the decision is based.

I see the Court making a distinction between those facts and a situation where a person is assisting a player, and the assisting person is not at the table. I’m concerned that the Court would use the rationale of Taft and Weatherford, wherein they said that using the equipment put the player in a position of superior knowledge, and therefore altered crucial characteristics of the game.

As to “front-loading,” that is a person you have defined as obviously slouching or laying his head on the table to feign drunkeness, etc., in order to see the dealer’s hole-card. That is a tougher question. Even though one is obviously slouching, I believe that those facts are within the parameters of Einbinder and Dalben, because that person would be lawfully sitting at the table and not using artificial devices.

I’m concerned about a court still using the rationale of Taft and Weatherford, that is, by doing something in addition to merely sitting and playing, that the player is placed in a position of superior knowledge, thereby altering the crucial characteristics of the game. But I think the front-loading question is a lot tougher, that is, that the possibility of the Einbinder/Dalben decision applying to front-loading is greater.

I have a real problem with the spooking example, but not so much with the front-loading example. I think the defense counsel would have a much easier time in getting the Court to sit down and think about applying the Einbinder decision in a front-loading situation than in a spooking situation.

So, if you’re under the impression that the Einbinder/Dalben decision protects you as a hole-card player, be aware of the limitations of that protection. Cheating is a felony in Nevada. Don’t take unnecessary chances. ♠

[Note from Arnold Snyder: There have been significant court cases regarding blackjack hole card play since this article was written, and each has increased the case for the legality of hole card play when the player is merely taking advantage of a sloppy dealer.]

by Richard W. Munchkin

(From Blackjack Forum Volume XXIII #4, Winter 2003/04)
© 2004 RWM

[Note from A.S.: Richard W. Munchkin is the author of Gambling Wizards: Conversations with the World’s Greatest Gamblers, and a member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame.]

Keith Taft is a pioneer, and not just in professional gambling. He built what may be the world’s first microcomputer. He was one of the first to network computers, and with the aid of his son Marty, he was one of the first to use computers to capture digital video.

Is he a Microsoft millionaire, or a dotcom billionaire? Hardly. Keith and Marty Taft focused their technological genius on beating casinos.

Keith Taft started building his first blackjack computer in 1970. It took two years, 2,000 solder joints, and weighed 15 pounds. This blackjack computer, named George, eventually led him to a partnership with Ken Uston.

Uston wrote about these exploits in Million Dollar Blackjack, but here you will get the rest of the story. Building a computer that counted cards at blackjack was the tip of the iceberg. With each new development came a larger edge. For the first time in print you will read about Thor, God of shuffle tracking; Narnia the sequencing computer; and the “belly telly,” a camera in the belt buckle that sees the dealer’s hole card.

Staying at Keith’s was a bit like visiting my grandmother’s house. He has a simple home on ten acres in Elk Grove, California. It’s warm, and folksy, with flower prints all over the guest bedroom. We had casserole for dinner, and Jell-O for dessert.

He and his wife Dorothy have been married over 50 years. He stays fit jogging, and playing tennis, while Dorothy occupies her time doing volunteer work and Bible study. Off the garage is Keith’s workroom. It is stuffed with racks of electronic gear, computers, software manuals, and doodads. In January of 2004, Keith Taft was inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.

In the Beginning

RWM: How did you first get interested in being a professional gambler?

Keith Taft: We were on a family trip in our pickup camper. We went over to Reno, and we went to the Harrah’s Auto Museum. They gave us some lucky bucks, so we went into the casino on the way back. I asked someone what the fundamentals of blackjack were, so I could spend the lucky bucks. I got a blackjack and wound up with $3.50 profit. On the way home I remembered that Ed Thorp had written that this game was beatable.

RWM: You had heard of Thorp’s book?

Keith Taft: Yes, but it had been way back, and I just had a dim recollection. It immediately occurred to me, since I was working in newer semiconductor integrated circuits at my job, that perhaps one could put together a blackjack computing device that would do what Thorp had done in his head, and be more successful.

RWM: Where were you working at the time?

Keith Taft: I was working at Raytheon here in Mountain View.

RWM: Did you then go pick up Thorp’s book?

Keith Taft: I picked up every book I could find in the library. I got Wilson’s book, Revere’s book, Thorp’s book, and on and on. I read them all voraciously. I learned to count. I practiced and got up to speed, and went out to make a few bucks counting cards.

RWM: Were you successful?

Keith Taft: No. It seemed like every time I pressed, I got beat. I overextended my bankroll, and my wife got very discouraged with my luck. That’s what really drove me to revisit the idea of building a computing device.

RWM: What year was that?

Keith Taft: It was 1969 when I played those lucky bucks, and early 1970 when I began to work in earnest on it.

RWM: At that time there weren’t computers anywhere, were there?

Keith Taft: That’s right. There was no such thing as a microcomputer.

RWM: Not all universities had a computer at that time, am I right?

Keith Taft: That’s probably true. They were very large, and I think it was a 1600 IBM that I worked on initially. They used punch cards for the programming.

RWM: What made you think you could build this device small enough to take into a casino?

Keith Taft: I was aware that Texas Instruments had come out with a 4-bit ALU (arithmetic logic unit) that would be the heart of a computer. I designed a 16-bit machine that would power down when it wasn’t making any calculations to conserve battery power, since it would have to run on batteries.

I was building some memory chips that were solid-state memory. They were small enough, and dense enough that they would serve as the random access memory. Also, there were programmable memory devices out there which it turned out would allow a thousand bytes of instructions to be hard wired into the machine.

RWM: Were you doing some of this development at Raytheon?

Keith Taft: Not really. I was involved in manufacturing-in the process area. I wasn’t involved in testing these devices. I took a couple of courses in logic design when I was still on the East Coast. Just by reading and planning I was able to design a computer that would be fast enough, and powerful enough, to get the job done.

Then I changed jobs. I became a section head in R&D, at Fairchild. They had computers available for me to use. That was a big help in developing the software algorithms.

RWM: What was your background?

Keith Taft: My undergraduate was a double major in music and physics. Then after I taught music for five years, and physics for three, I got my masters completed in physics.

The First Blackjack Computer

RWM: How long did it take to build the first blackjack computer?

Keith Taft: It took two years before I went into a casino for the first time. I named the computer George. It was pretty bulky. It was about as big as you could stand to put on your body without it being ridiculous. It was made in sections about the size of a book. If you imagine three books around your midsection, and the batteries were above it. They were a bit slimmer so it tapered my body shape, but I looked a bit portly.

RWM: How much did it weigh?

Keith Taft: It was quite heavy. My concern was that I would have radio frequency interference, or give off radio waves that the casino would pick up. I made it out of brass plate, and it weighed about fifteen pounds. It was operated by my big toes. There were four switches, one above and one below each big toe.

RWM: It’s interesting to me that you chose to do it that way, rather than a hand keypad.

Keith Taft: My first thought was that the hand would be difficult to conceal without them thinking you were doing something suspicious, whereas if you put it in the shoes, no one would be suspicious, and your hands would be free to play the cards.

RWM: What happened the first time you wore the computer into a casino?

Keith Taft: This was 1972, and Marty went with me. He was just out of high school. We went to Reno, and I got all wired up in a parking lot that was about a block and a half from the casino. I hadn’t gone but a short distance when I had to return because the switches were not quite adjusted right. It was painful.

They were little button switches, and I had taped them onto my toes. I got them adjusted, and went into the casino. I was quite nervous of course. I played a short session for small stakes. I don’t recall the result right now. I remember a casino person coming over, and placing his hand on the small of my back. At one time I had thought of wearing the computer on my back, so I was very thankful I didn’t have it back there. Of course I was also thankful he didn’t pat me on the tummy.

RWM: You don’t remember the result, but obviously it was promising enough that you moved forward. Did you start playing regularly with the machine?

Keith Taft: Yes, I played for a short time, and then was interrupted because we had a home built in Ben Lomond, and moved up there.

Then I started back in earnest in the fall of 1972. I played twelve weekends in a row, and won every time. I was playing for small stakes, and decided to increase my bet levels. I had a bank of $4,000, and I told my wife I would either win $10,000 or lose $4,000. That weekend I raised my bets, and I lost all my prior winnings plus another couple thousand. That was a devastating loss, so I stopped.

RWM: In retrospect, do you think you hit a bad fluctuation, or do you think that when you started betting more money you were cheated?

Keith Taft: A mixture. It’s very difficult to know for certain if you’ve been cheated. I’ve read books on the things you are supposed to watch for, but I think it was mostly a bad fluctuation.

RWM: What happened after the loss?

Keith Taft: I quit, and I thought about writing a book about the experience. I didn’t do anything about it for a couple of years. In the summer of 1975 I decided to go public with the story. I called a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News. He came out to the house, and wrote a story that was on the front page, and was picked up around the country. The reactions were rather interesting. Most of them were quite humorous. Their take was, this guy has this computer, wiggles his toes, does all this weird stuff, and still loses.

Marty Taft: One of the papers called him “The Fastest Toes in the West.” I had the readout as little LED lights in the upper rim of his glasses. That captivated them.

RWM: The later computers didn’t use that technology. Why not?

Keith Taft: One reason was, if you looked at me you could see the reflection of the LEDs in my eyes.

Marty Taft: They were also very fragile, and were hard to build. There were lots of wires coming from the lens. They were hair fine wires, so they broke easily.

RWM: When you first started all this, what did your wife think?

Keith Taft: She was supportive. She wanted me to go ahead and realize the dream. I had a snake-oil sales pitch that this was going to be the thing that would bring happiness and money. I would be able to concentrate on inventing, which is what I had always wanted to do in life.

She begrudgingly went along with it. But one of the serious aspects of this was that I was working full-time at an engineering job, I was working evenings and all weekend long running my routines on the computers at work, and I was gone from the house virtually all the time. Then I went into the construction phase on the computer. I did 2000 solder joints on the back of this computer, and it took an immense amount of time. I wasn’t spending time that a father should spend with his family. She was winding up with the load. We had four children who were teenagers at the time.

RWM: Was Marty helping you at that point?

Keith Taft: Not in the beginning. It was hard on my wife Dorothy, and one of my daughters I think had the worst time of it. She went through a rough time as a teenager in high school, and Dorothy was catching the brunt of that, dealing with her rebellion.

RWM: Once it was completed, was she worried about it being dangerous?

Keith Taft: She was very concerned about that.

The Second Blackjack Computer and Playing with Ken Uston

RWM: Didn’t I read that you said God didn’t want you to be a millionaire?

Keith Taft: Yes. The losing streak I had was very unusual. I ran a simulation very early on, before I built the computer, to prove that it would have a good edge. The streak I went through wasn’t statistically likely at all.

Anyway, I worked at a consulting job for a year. Then I went back out counting cards for lower stakes, and was fairly successful. I again thought it was ridiculous to not be using a machine. Now there was a microcomputer available which would make the job of building the machine much easier. It would also be much smaller, and easier to conceal. It seemed silly not to build a more modern version of the machine. I set about doing that in the fall of 1976.

I went down, and got the very first board using the Z80 chip. This was a close copy by Zylog of the 8080, which was really the first 8-bit microcomputer that Intel made. The Z80 was a little bit superior, and used the same instruction set. The first prototype was built in a calculator, so if I were discovered and searched they would just think it was a calculator.

I completed it in December, and about that time I got a call from a man named Art. He was thinking about building a computer for Ken Uston. Ken was a fairly well-known team leader and blackjack “guru.” He wasn’t well known to the general public yet, but he was to the insiders.

Art talked to me after the article came out in the Mercury News. He came to my house, and we spent some time together. I thought it was ridiculous for Art to go through all that development time when I had everything right there. He put me in touch with Ken, who was quite interested. I went up to Lake Tahoe, and played with the finished product to see how usable it was. That went quite well. [This is the same “Art” mentioned in the Darryl Purpose interview last issue.]

RWM: Was this machine called David?

Keith Taft: We still called this one George, but the refinement of the new machine we called David. [Named after David, who slew Goliath.] I took the machine to Las Vegas, and demonstrated it to Ken. He liked the possibilities.

RWM: Did you give any thought to whether this was legal or illegal?

Keith Taft: I thought a lot about that. It seemed the computers were clearly legal in the sense that I was strictly making use of the same information that was available to any other player. I wasn’t marking the cards, or manipulating the outcome of the game in any way. It seemed 100% defensible legally. In fact, my biggest worry was, if there were Mafia interests behind the casinos they might seek retribution by harming me.

RWM: At that time that was a very legitimate concern. Where did you meet Ken Uston?

Keith Taft: The Jockey Club, room 628. He was very excited about it, so we decided to work together. He was just breaking a bank with his team. I believe it was the 21st trip the team had completed. He had been trained, and really everything he knew had been taught to him by Big Al. [Big Al Francesco was interviewed in the Summer, 2002 issue of Blackjack Forum, and was the first player inducted into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.] Big Al was a pseudonym given him by Ken in a book called, The Big Player that had not been published yet.

In fact, Big Al was rather unhappy that Ken was going to disclose his methods. Ken had parted with Big Al, and Ken really was the reason the team had to fold. Then Ken formed his own team, and had been playing for seven or eight months. While I was there they broke their bank. There were about ten people on the team. They would train to use the computers.

RWM: You were just going to provide the equipment?

Keith Taft: Exactly. We had a deadline, and we scrambled. We had to seal the computer boards in epoxy in order to insure that nobody could get into them and steal the design. It took a few weeks for Marty, my other son Dana, and me to build five machines.

Ken didn’t like the toe input. He thought that would be too difficult, and cause too many errors. We decided to go with a hand keyboard. We designed a keyboard that you could strap to your thigh and operate through a hole in your pocket.

Instead of operating the computer, and playing, we wanted to signal a big player. We had to design a receiver for the big player to use. Some people call them Gorilla BPs, because they don’t have to have any skills. They just have to know how to put on a good act, and bet the money.

We developed a transmitter about the size of a pack of cigarettes. That would send the information from the computer to a receiver concealed in the heel of a shoe that the BP would wear. The output device was a tapper, and the signals were a series of short buzzes, or long buzzes.

We accomplished all that in a few weeks. I brought all the equipment back to Ken, and stayed around to maintain and improve it while he got the team going. They trained, and then they played. They didn’t do well, and they hadn’t gone far before they were quite disgruntled.

Ken felt that suddenly he had this hammer under his control. He wanted to fashion a very favorable deal for himself. Those people on his team were now getting less of a share, and the only way they were going to be happy was if they had done fabulously well. Since they were struggling they didn’t see the profit in it, and basically mutinied.

RWM: What was your share supposed to be?

Keith Taft: Ten percent. It’s hard to believe.

RWM: With no reimbursement for the cost of the equipment?

Keith Taft: No.

RWM: When Ken Uston ’s team mutinied, what happened?

Keith Taft: He called me, and was very depressed. They pulled out, and at the same time three of my four children had come to me saying they wanted to be involved. By this time Marty was married. He convinced his wife that she should think about it, too. They had already talked to me, and I wasn’t excited about it at all. Then when Ken called I suggested a solution. Within a few weeks they polished their skills and we all went down to Las Vegas. Ken got some BPs, and we started training together.

RWM: Did you input, too?

Keith Taft: Yes. It was my three children, Marty’s wife, and me. He had the big players to bet the money.

RWM: Had you played for big stakes before?

Keith Taft: No, in fact one of the things I did on a previous trip with Ken was to go out as a big player. Frankly, I didn’t work out very well. I played a couple of sessions, and I got a lot of heat. I was too professorial, and studious. I didn’t look right.

RWM: You mentioned that your second major was music. Music has been a big part of your life, and was a big part of Ken’s life. Did you play together?

Keith Taft: We had one big jam session. One of the BPs had a friend visiting. He played a mean banjo. We went to a room upstairs, but it didn’t have a piano, so Ken played the string base. I played guitar. We had a good old time, but we didn’t have any other opportunities to play together. Our music tastes and backgrounds were totally different. Ken liked to go downstairs, and sit in when a visiting band would come through at the Jockey Club. He played a good jazz piano. He didn’t have formal training, just a natural aptitude. He loved the song “Misty.” Errol Garner was his favorite.

Blackjack, Faith and Family

RWM: There have been three important things in your life; blackjack, music, and the church. Did you feel a conflict between your active role in the church, and your work with Ken? Did the people at your church know what you were doing?

Keith Taft: No, we kept it a secret. We wouldn’t have been countenanced well by the church. There are a lot of hard-liners that only see black and white, even though the Bible doesn’t actually condemn gambling. There is a thought somehow that gambling is evil. There was deceit involved there, and that really bothered my wife in particular. It has always been an issue.

I personally haven’t had much wrestle with it because I came to realize that man is basically evil, and except for the grace of Jesus Christ we haven’t got a chance. We’re doomed. Whether the sin is one thing or another, it is still a sin. Gambling per se isn’t a sin. The love of money is a sin. It’s like trying to rate sin. Can you put one sin over another?

Jesus made it clear that when the Pharisees talked about having sex with a woman out of wedlock, the fact that you had lust condemned you equally. To gossip about someone, or to lie to someone, these are all human failings we have.

Gambling is just another in a long list of things that are ripe for abuse. To get more to the question, Ken’s lifestyle-that is the real world. As Christians we are to be out in the world, and be witness to the world. For some, we will be the only bible they ever read. It was an opportunity to witness to Ken, and we had some very good conversations about faith and such subjects.

RWM: How did you feel about bringing your children into that environment?

Keith Taft: I had no concern. We’ve been very pleased with our children, and the choices they have made. It never worried me that they would decide that was a neat lifestyle.

RWM: Marty, was this the coolest thing in the world-to have your Dad get you on this professional blackjack team?

Marty Taft: It was. We were quite excited about it. It looked like an opportunity to make some money and do some interesting things. When you’re a kid you are in this grind with school, and this looked like a way to break free from all that. It started for me with helping to build the equipment, but then it became a big financial opportunity.

RWM: You were what, 24? I would think it would be so exciting, almost, “I’ll pay you to do this.”

Marty Taft: It was very exciting.

RWM: What happened when you went out to play?

Keith Taft: Things went very well. One of the interesting sidelights of all this was the difference between the inputters, which were my family, and the BPs. It was like two different universes. This phony act was second nature to these BPs. It was difficult to communicate with us technical people who were used to black and white, and ones and zeros. There was some conflict.

People would come back from a session, and the BP would have one view of what happened, and the inputter had an entirely different view. The good news was they were generally bringing back money. There were not a lot of problems putting down the play. It really was pretty slick. The BPs didn’t have to look at the cards. They either drank, or pretended to, and put on a good swashbuckling act. They attracted large galleries of people, and it was a happy time for everybody.

RWM: How long did it last?

Keith Taft: We started in April, and broke the first bank in fifteen days. It was $35,000. We started another bank immediately of $50,000, and doubled that in about ten days. We got some heat. My son Dana was quite sure he was followed out of a casino. There were quite a few casino bosses staring at him on his last session. I went in to relieve him, and I sensed there was some tension, too. We decided to let Vegas cool off. We took a break, and then reconvened in South Lake Tahoe.

Marty Taft: We were there a couple of days, and we were winning some.

Keith Taft: My son Dana had a religious issue, and talked to his sister and another counselor. He decided gambling wasn’t something he should be doing. He left, and we got this young lawyer. He was inputting at Harrah’s, and there had been a win at Harrah’s the day before.

The Heat

RWM: Do you think Tahoe had been called from Vegas with some suspicions?

Marty Taft: Don’t know. But I know my sister had been playing in Harvey’s the night before I went out, and when she heard I was going to Harvey’s she said, “No. It was so hot in there, I didn’t think I would get out.” There was one rogue BP named Roxi. They had won $4,000 in quarters at Barney’s [now Bill’s], and then they went over to Harvey’s. They really got attention. Roxi said, “There was no heat.” So Ken said, “There was no heat.” I told my sister, “I believe you. I will really watch.”

We went in, and there was no heat. The casino had pulled back, so everything was really calm. We played for a while, and we were down a couple thousand bucks. I went to the bathroom to change batteries, so an hour or hour and a half had gone by.

I came back, and I hadn’t been there too long when someone came over and tapped me on the shoulder. He said, “Will you come with us?” I said, “Okay,” and as we walked along I realized they were going to go up some stairway in the back. I wasn’t going to go up there. I turned around, and there were three guys who just pushed me up the stairway.

They took me up to the security office. They threatened me, and tried to intimidate me. They knew what I had because they had gotten the player across the street at Harrah’s about an hour before me. They had taken their time with us. They wanted to get the whole thing because they only got the inputter at Harrah’s.

They dragged Roxi in, and she was screaming her head off. Finally when they got her in the back she was crying, “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me.” It wasn’t very pleasant. It was quite a shock. They wanted to kill us for playing cards successfully.

RWM: Except you lost money.

Marty Taft: That’s right. We were still stuck. In fact, we had lost so much money that we couldn’t bail ourselves out of jail.

RWM: Did they threaten you while you were in the security office?

Marty Taft: Oh yeah. They stripped me, and took photos. They looked at the antenna wire and said, “Let’s plug him into 220, and see how he likes it then.” They tried to rattle my cage with, “Let’s take him for a ride.”

RWM: How did you react to all this?

Marty Taft: I was upset. This thing that we had worked so hard on was over. I figured it would be big news, but it wasn’t. It was all kind of hush, hush. They repeatedly stressed how much trouble I was in, and that I would get at least five years in jail. One of the biggest things I was thinking about was, my wife Rosie was doing this at the same time. I was thinking, “If they have her, I’m really in trouble.” When I got to jail, and she wasn’t there, I was really happy.

RWM: Was Oscar Goodman [currently mayor of Las Vegas] your lawyer?

Marty Taft: No, he was Ken Uston ’s lawyer. Ken had some lawsuits at the time. We didn’t get a lawyer. We talked to a couple of lawyers. One of them talked to Steve, the other guy arrested, and wanted him to take some kind of plea bargain. We talked to someone else, and he said, “Ah, let them try to prosecute. There is nothing here.” Sure enough, it dragged out for several months, and was dropped.

RWM: Didn’t they send the computer to the FBI, and the FBI said it was not a cheating device?

Marty Taft: That was the claim, but who knows? That was the story they put out. We were never arraigned, and the charges were dropped.

The Magic Shoes

RWM: Did this cause the team to disband?

Keith Taft: Yes. We were all spooked by it. It wasn’t very long though before we went back. Not Marty though, because he was still in this legal situation. I made sure he wasn’t even aware of what we were doing.

What happened was, Al Francesco came back in the picture. He and Ken were willing to work together again. Al was really excited. He had over twenty people he had solicited, and got them busy training to input with their toes. Ken’s book is in error when it implies these were Ken’s people. Al is the one who brought them in.

We were very impressed with the people he brought. We got one of Ken’s old teammates to do what Marty had been doing. He did assembly and repair work full-time. Because I was concerned about the heat, I decided the way to do it was to build the computer into the shoes. I didn’t even want the wire to go from one shoe over the crotch to the other shoe.

Instead, I worked out a method of communication with an IR similar to your VCR remote. One shoe had a little LED that would shine an invisible red light to a photoreceptor in the other shoe. Now the computer in the right foot would pick up the inputs from the switches in the left foot. The batteries were in the heel, and all you had were these magic shoes. They were laughable. I should show them to you.

Marty Taft: We used to call them Frankenstein boots.

RWM: How did you fit the batteries in the heel? I would think they would be bigger than that.

Keith Taft: We used AAs. Because they were difficult to get to, and we didn’t want them carrying extras in their pockets, we put twelve AAs in the heel of those shoes.

RWM: That has got to be a big heel.

Keith Taft: It is. Then the computer, which was a full size David, fit under the sole. So it was a good-sized platform as well. The switches were built in for the toes. I put them in RTV, which is a hard rubber when it sets. That sounded like a good idea because it had sponginess, but it turned out to be a fatal mistake because it allowed flexing. That meant that over time the wires would flex until they broke. We had a lot of repair problems.

With all these projects there are constant repair problems, and it is a constant struggle to find better materials, better switches, etc. Gradually we were able to get things to be fairly reliable. Not with these shoes though, because we didn’t really get the opportunity. They started playing in Reno, and weren’t doing very well. This was probably from inputting errors.

It was a fairly short time, and then Ken decided they should go to Las Vegas. Ken’s ulterior motive was that he had started a team where they would recruit known losers from the casinos. He would approach them to provide a counter who would signal them how to play so they could win. He fashioned a deal where Ken was only going to win money, and couldn’t lose if the player lost. He needed more play callers, so he was quickly moving our inputters over to this team. They ended up moving over to do that, and were working on a roulette computer project. They abandoned Big Al and me totally.

RWM: I don’t remember reading about a roulette project.

Keith Taft: I don’t know that Ken wrote anything about it. There was a guy we’ll call Doc, who was a well-known orthopedic surgeon. He was a big loser at Caesars. The thought was to have him train with our shoes, and have him go in and really kill Caesars. We knew he could get a big bet spread, and wouldn’t get any heat.

He trained, and when he went to Las Vegas he talked to this guy with the roulette concept. The guy didn’t have a working machine, but he convinced Doc that the future was rosy enough. I believe Ian Andersen was involved in that project as well. [Ian Andersen is a well-known name in the blackjack world. He is the author of Turning the Tables on Las Vegas and Burning the Tables in Las Vegas.]

They decided to pursue the roulette project instead of our magic shoes. Doc got real strange, and they aborted that operation as well.

RWM: Were you building the roulette computer for them?

Keith Taft: No, that was another guy. I didn’t know anything about it until later. This caused them to drop the magic shoe operation altogether. I had money invested as well as all my time. That was a write-off. Poor Big Al. He put in a lot of time and money into that project.

RWM: When I interviewed Al Francesco he said that the loss on the project was about $75,000. In Ken’s books I think he claims to have won over a hundred thousand with the computers. What is your recollection of the amount of money won or lost?

Keith Taft: We won $120,000 with the first team, and the second team was definitely a losing operation. Ken was also talking about when he had a computer team just before the law was passed in 1985. He wrote about playing right up until midnight on the last night. I think he claims he did all right, but his team members say otherwise.

RWM: Was he using your machines in 1985?

Keith Taft: I think so, but I think he obtained them from someone else.

RWM: Wait, he used your machines, but didn’t come to you to get them?

Keith Taft: Probably. I definitely didn’t sell them to him.

Marty Taft: I thought he had renounced all use of electronics, and was all into the cerebral thing.

Keith Taft: He did, but then he came back and renounced the renouncement.

Marty Taft: I remember talking to one of the guys on his team at that time. I said, “I hear you guys have been really successful.” The guy said, “No, we never made a dime. All the profits went up Kenny’s nose.” Ken was always a big self-promoter, but the actual numbers generally weren’t good at all.

Keith Taft: Again the computer lay dormant until I was approached by a PBS show called Secrets. We had this secret that fit right in with their format. We went to demonstrate it in South Lake Tahoe. I actually resuscitated the original George, the big brass job, and wore that into the casino. They filmed this, and interviewed a pit boss on scene. While I played they asked the pit boss if someone could play with a secret computer. The boss said, “Impossible. Our security is too good.”

The interviewer asked me what I would do if someone asked me to build him one of these machines. He talked about it being a cottage industry. I stressed that I wouldn’t sell them to some guy with a gas station who thinks he can buy it and get rich. I knew the difficulties, and it wouldn’t be fair to someone.

I thought I would sell it to professionals that were playing already, and wanted an additional edge. It would be a way to get additional income. I decided to do that, and I thought I needed to make the computer a little more user friendly. I enlisted one of Big Al’s teammates, named Tom, to work with me full-time. Marty was working a full-time job, but he helped during his off-hours.

We put an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle, and called the computer, “David.” We weren’t getting much response, but at that time a guy from Sports Illustrated came out to do a story about Ken and me. He went with us to gamble with a David. He talked with Ken separately in Las Vegas, and then he wrote a big article. [Sports Illustrated, April 16, 1979] We started a team at the same time to play low stakes.

RWM: When the article came out it showed your ad. I would think that would have spurred your sales.

Keith Taft: It made two significant contacts. The more notable was, I got a call from Rats Cohen. He came by and bought two computers. At that time he was working for the Stanley Roberts School of Blackjack. He said he had an address book full of card counters he had trained at the school that would be potential computer buyers. He became a sublicensee to sell David.

Now things started to happen in a number of different directions. Rats started selling computers for us. We were playing on that small bank, and decided we should go to Atlantic City. We didn’t have the money to bank it, but we called a friend who was willing to bankroll us. Six of us went to Atlantic City, five men and one woman. The five men lost $15,000, and the one woman won $42,000. She told us we should have played on the beach instead of gambling. She was a neat gal.

Marty Taft: She would come back from sessions with the most amazing stories. They just stretched your imagination, but she always came back a winner. She had strange body chemistry. Her toe switches would corrode in a matter of hours. Yet my sister would have the same switch last a whole trip with no problems.

RWM: Was she eating a lot of kimchi or something?

Marty Taft: I don’t recall her eating anything different from the rest of us. I would do failure analysis on the switches. Switches are a key part of your operation. They have to work perfectly. I’d tear them apart trying to find out what the problem was, and they were just corroded like you wouldn’t believe.

The Shuffle Tracking Computer

RWM: You were playing in Atlantic City with Davids, which were really designed for single-deck.

Marty Taft: They could play up to 8 decks.

RWM: They could, but your edge using it wouldn’t be much better than counting in your head.

Marty Taft: But that was back in the days of early surrender so we did have help there.

RWM: How much do you think you gained over just counting in your head?

Marty Taft: Good question. I don’t think it would have made much difference. It was such a boring game to play. Looking back we probably should have just counted in our heads.

RWM: You had mentioned that you were keeping all this a secret. When these articles came out in the paper and Sports Illustrated, were there any repercussions in your personal lives?

Keith Taft: The pastor in our church said he picked up the paper, and his eyeballs fell right out on the floor. The church secretary said her first thought was “This guy has the same name as Keith Taft. That is Keith Taft.” There wasn’t any ostracism.

RWM: What happened after this bank in Atlantic City?

Keith Taft: That was the trip where I saw that when they shuffled the cards they were preserving different segments. You could know the content, or richness of various segments. This opened up the possibility of a larger edge, and more importantly would allow you to play in a manner that would not look like card counting.

There was a lot of paranoia on the part of the casinos in Atlantic City. They were barring card counters at that time. We went right to work in earnest on building a computer to shuffle track. We called it Thor. We met with our team members on July 16, 1979, and tested the new computer. We met again in late August, and started them learning the new skills. They had to estimate the size of the dealer’s grabs when they shuffled.

Marty Taft: I think we started in Las Vegas, just to practice. You had to estimate how many cards the dealer grabbed in each hand. You had to input which way the hands went. Did the top go to the left or right?

RWM: I would think that would be very easy to confuse.

Marty Taft: We had a code for everything. Every move the dealer made we had to input. Sometimes they would break the shoe into six piles. Then they would grab from different piles to shuffle a segment. Each pile was numbered, so we had to enter-pile three went with pile six, and they grabbed X number of cards from pile three, and Y cards from pile six. You were busy trying to follow all this. Thor would take all your estimates, add them up, and see if that matched the total number of cards that were supposed to be in the shoe. If it didn’t match then it would scale them so it would.

RWM: Did you, Marty, get into the software end of things?

Marty Taft: That was Keith. I handled more of the hardware.

Keith Taft: That fall we were working out the bugs, and went back to Las Vegas. We caught fire. We had a very successful trip, and then went to Atlantic City in December, and had a great trip. We didn’t take that many trips. We spaced them out, and then they took out early surrender in May of 1981.

RWM: You really got this new program up and running quickly.

Keith Taft: We did, yes.

Marty Taft: We had to make hardware modifications, too, because the program got bigger. We were always stretching the limits of the machines. We needed more EPROM, and more RAM. We tried to make the processors faster now that it calculated a lot more stuff. About that time I taught a friend to program, and he had input into Thor as well. We had a very successful experience with Thor.

RWM: Finally you were making money.

Keith Taft: Yes, and enjoying it. We called ourselves the Big Six. We had a rough time when they took out early surrender in Atlantic City.

Marty Taft: It seemed like we never won much after that. It was a lot of fun to play with Thor. It was like playing four or five single-deck games. As you crossed the boundary from one segment into another anything could happen. You would get end-play in each section. Your bets were all over the place, and we made wild plays. We were doing things way outside the norm. As a result, we didn’t get barred much.

RWM: Did you have any problems with barrings?

Marty Taft: I don’t think we were ever barred with Thor. Thor would tell you where to put the cut card. It was too aggressive, and as time went on we toned it down more and more. Our woman player had some big bets out, and she had hard 17. Her boyfriend was watching her play, and he could tell she was reinputting her hand, because she didn’t believe what it was telling her. It said hit, but she decided not to.

Sure enough, she hit her next hand and caught a four. It would tell you to hit hard 17 a lot. The strategy plays were always a chancy kind of thing. You had to know when to give up. You thought you were in a rich segment, and you thought certain cards were remaining, but you might be wrong. You probably were wrong about some of them.

If you were playing down to the last eight cards, a lot of times it thought those cards were significantly different than they really were. It was always a wrestling match, how much to go for. That’s where a big part of the edge is too. It’s edge, and errors, and greed, and fear.

Keith Taft: We decided that this was working pretty well for the six of us-let’s expand. That was a turning point in our team experience. Up to that point we had people we knew quite a bit about. It was a very harmonious team. We had time and performance as criteria for your share. Everyone shared alike, except we had a technology share off the top.

Marty Taft: We started this expansion, and it was a long, losing grind. We hung on for months, changing everything we could think of. We did more testing, making sure everyone was operating correctly. It was very discouraging. One problem was a built in protection we had. I remember being at the Dunes, and being up $5,000. I split eights, and after that the money evaporated in a very short time. I was thinking, “All these calls seem wrong.” I went home broke, and a little later we found that when you split eights, Thor went into a protection mode and gave you all wrong decisions.

RWM: What was this protection mode?

Marty Taft: We built in a little hair fine wire in the board, so if someone tore off the epoxy they would break this wire. It wasn’t on the Davids, just Thor. The program would go look for this connection, and then it would know it was in the right hardware, and act properly.

Somehow in the program the flag didn’t get set properly under certain conditions. If you split eights it would look for this connection, find it, but not set the flag right. It went into opposite mode where rather than having an edge, it gave you the worst possible decision.

RWM: I assume you built this in because of Rats Cohen ripping you off on the Davids?

Keith Taft: No, we didn’t know that yet. We were just thinking ahead.

Marty Taft: We knew that some of this stuff would be vulnerable sooner or later. I remember throwing away that $5,000, and we could have really used it at that time. I’m sure that happened to some of the others. I don’t know how long that bug was in there, but it was a while.

RWM: Here you had a project that was finally making good money, and yet you sold it off and moved on to something else.

Marty Taft: Well, it didn’t make money after that.

RWM: After you discovered the bug?

Marty Taft: Right. At the end there were ten of us left out of the original twenty. The others had dropped out after a time. We had $5,000 left, and we decided that each of us would go play with $500, and play nickels. We all came back, and every last one of us tapped out. We lost every penny we had.

We were not chunking it out. We were cutting back, and trying to be careful with the money. Every single person lost every penny. You could have given the money to ten drunks, and at least two or three would have come back with something.

RWM: Why do you think that happened?

Marty Taft: We had no good explanation. We thought God was telling us to get out of this. And we did stop. That was the end of it for a while.

Keith Taft: We sold off the rights to Thor, and the buyer promptly had some programming changes made. He called it Dil Thor for Diluted Thor. He thought we were looking too much at the end of segments, and if we diluted it Thor wouldn’t make these radical plays, and it would play better. The edge would be derived more from the betting than the playing. I still remember one of the players saying, “Dil Thor, it plays just like it sounds.”

This same player opted not to go with the new Dil Thor team. He wanted to play on his own. We provided him with a Thor, and he played for years with it.

Marty Taft: At low stakes he made a thousand units over a few months. That is a significant win. He was always making several units per hour. Clearly the machine had its moments.

Keith Taft: We skipped over the fact that we worked on roulette a little bit. Another guy had given us some money to work on that project. We ended up building some Thors for his repayment.

Marty Taft: We gave him almost all the money from our buyout as well.

Network Computing at Single Deck

RWM: Why did you give him the money from the buyout?

Marty Taft: We were nuts. We wanted him out of our lives. He said if we would give him back some of the money he gave us, he’d go away. So we did, and didn’t hear much from him after that. He was a strange guy with a lot of problems.

This is when we came up with the 7 Up idea. We wired everyone together at the table, and played single deck hoping to get two rounds.

RWM: Wait a minute, explain this.

Keith Taft: We had five players take over a single-deck table. We played all seven spots.

Marty Taft: They were all connected together by hair-fine wires. They each had a computer, and it was a network. The computers all shared the information.

RWM: You invented network computing?

Keith Taft: That’s right.

RWM: Were there network computers at this time?

Keith Taft: Not that I know of.

RWM: Do you know how much money you could have made if you became Microsoft instead of pursuing blackjack? What year was this?

Keith Taft: 1982.

RWM: So you built a microcomputer network, housed on five bodies, connected by hair-fine wires?

Keith Taft: What we called the master is called a server today.

RWM: You guys were like a chain gang, all connected together?

Keith Taft: Yes.

RWM: Didn’t that look kind of funny walking into the casino?

Marty Taft: We wired up in pairs, and one guy wasn’t wired at all. We would walk in and sit down. The guy not connected to anyone would sit in the middle. He then connected to the two pairs. The way we did that was, one of each pair had two quarters glued together with a wire, and an insulator between them. That way you had a plus and minus.

The guy in the middle had to stick the quarters into holders in his pockets. They had to go in the right way, so when you handed him the quarter it had to be heads up, and the head side had to go away from the body when he stuck it in the connector in his pocket. In his pockets he had a sentronic plug. The quarter fit into it just right, and made contact on both sides. There it was, a serial link. We were so paranoid about the wires that we made them really thin. They were literally the size of a hair, and almost invisible.

RWM: Did the wires come out the pant legs?

Marty Taft: They came right out of the pocket.

RWM: How much slack was there between the pairs when they were walking?

Marty Taft: About three feet. One time two guys were wired together, and one of them saw a pretty girl and said, “Oh, let me get the door for you.” She walked between them, and snap, there goes the wire.

Sometimes they would get too far apart. If it didn’t break the wire, it might pop the quarter out of his pocket. There was the quarter dangling behind the guy. You would see the quarter bouncing along on the carpet. It was fun though. It was easy to input because you were only inputting your hand.

Keith Taft: And we were acting like we all knew each other.

Marty Taft: Rather than you alone against the casino, you had a group. Psychologically that helps. You didn’t have to watch the cards, and you were flat betting, so there was no heat.

RWM: Was everybody betting the same amount?

Keith Taft: No, everyone had his own amount to bet, but it was heavier betting toward third base.

Marty Taft: One time one of the guys caught a hole card from one of the dealers. We had programmed a hole card feature into the machine. We had told everyone that if this happened you might get some very strange plays, so use some judgment.

Well, one guy gets the hole-card, and the dealer was stiff. The first guy has a pair of fives, and rather than double down he gets a call for a split. He backed his cards out and reentered them into the computer, and got the same result.

He split the fives. My dad is over there going, “Oh my Golly, what are you doing?” He was trying to get him to stop, but no. He split the fives. He gets another five, and splits it again. He winds up stiff on all three hands. The next guy splits tens. He winds up stiff on his hands. I’m thinking, “How obvious can this be?” The guy who saw the hole card is thinking, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”

Sure enough the dealer turns over the stiff and breaks. The pit boss came over and said, “You know, we’re not running a candy store here.” We decided we had better take a hike, and have a little strategy discussion.

Keith Taft: The 7 Ups was another idea that was basically workable that we abandoned. It involved quite a few people, and we didn’t have a lot of bank money. We were winning, but it wasn’t that profitable. It was something that we left that could have been made to work.

Marty Taft: But then they started preferential shuffling on us. If the count was negative they would deal a second round. If it was positive they would shuffle up. We tried calling them on it, and they said they could do whatever they wanted to.

Video Hole Carding

Keith Taft: I had always been really concerned with doing things that were patently legal. I realized when they started preferentially shuffling that they were not going to play the game by the rules. That is when I said, “The gloves are coming off.” That’s when we started thinking about using video.

RWM: What gave you the idea to use video?

Marty Taft: We had kicked the idea around before. I had thought of cutting a hole in the side of a motor home and using a satellite dish. This was before we really knew much about any of this stuff. I thought of using that to get transmissions out of a casino. But that isn’t how we started.

RWM: How did you start?

Marty Taft: We had a Hitachi camera first, but that was bulky. I took a standard camera, and started digging into it. I took the head off, and was able to tilt it 90 degrees. The belt buckle seemed like the logical place to be looking out. It was the right height when you were standing. We put some material in front of the lens. It actually looked very good. You couldn’t tell.

Keith Taft: We had to find special filter materials for the belt buckle. It was IR [infrared] so it looked red to the human eye but was transparent to the camera.

Marty Taft: They didn’t have electronic shutters then. We cut a little pie piece out of a metal disk, and put it on a motor that was synchronized with the frame rate. This disk would spin, and freeze the motion.

RWM: This is all built into the belt buckle?

Keith Taft: The camera was up on your stomach. The batteries were on either side of the camera, so it was fairly bulky.

Marty Taft: The head of the camera was taken off and turned 90 degrees. That is the lens and the sensor, which is a CCD chip. That chip usually has a few electronics on a small board.

That is then usually connected to the rest of the electronics board in the body of the camera. The cameras were about six inches long, by two and a half, by two and a half. That Hitachi wasn’t very light sensitive, so Sony came out with a CCD camera that was quite a bit more light sensitive. I did the same thing with that camera, and I think a 25mm lens was the right focal length. The lens and chip were about one inch long, so that is how far it stuck out behind the belt buckle.

RWM: Were these big rodeo type belt buckles?

Marty Taft: No, they were about an inch tall with a gold frame, and a little red symbol in the center. It just looked like a gold buckle with a red jewel-like center. It was very trim. The final version looked very good.

Keith Taft: My brother and I took a trip, and played several casinos. I made a few trips with a couple of different models. By expanding a Thor we were able to have enough memory to capture 11 frames. I would hold a toe switch down, and the belt buckle camera took pictures continuously until I let up on the switch. When we saw the hole card tucked, I would lift my toe. It would then pop back about 5 frames. I had a little one-inch monitor in my shirt pocket, and it would play back those frames, and I could see the hole card there.

RWM: Doesn’t this make you a pioneer of digital photography? You were capturing digital images back in 1983. This had to be technology way ahead of its time.

Keith Taft: That’s true.

RWM: Did you have to make this one-inch monitor, or could you buy one at that time?

Keith Taft: It was actually the viewfinder for one of the early video cameras. We took apart the camera and I carried that little black-and-white monitor in my shirt pocket. I wore dark glasses that had a right angle prism in the left lens. When I looked straight ahead my left eye would actually see down into my pocket.

RWM: Why did you abandon this method?

Marty Taft: I was up on a balcony looking down on him playing. I could see the monitor glowing in his pocket.

Keith Taft: Also you had to wear dark glasses to put the prism in. That looked a little suspicious. There were probably ways around these problems, but we decided it would be better if the person doing the viewing was away from the table. We talked for years about putting that stuff into something you could carry into the men’s room. We never wound up doing that. We always put it in a vehicle outside.

We started experimenting to see what could be seen. We came up with an idea to put a right angle lens into a belt buckle. We looked at many different belt buckles. We experimented with how to operate it. We looked at various frequencies for sending the signal back and forth.

We looked very early on at satellite frequencies. It sounded much more appealing to use standard channel frequencies from 60 MHz on up to 800+ MHz where you get into UHF bands. We looked at all of those, and built some equipment to take into the casinos to test it. We would practice something at home, and it would work perfectly. Then we would get to the casino, and as soon as we got inside, the signal would die. It really puzzled us. We knew that people operated TVs in casinos with just rabbit ears. I don’t fully understand why that is a fact.

Marty Taft: We did an experiment where we parked right across from the casino. I could see him. He was only 20 or 30 feet from me. He would step into the doorway, and the signal just disappeared. He’d step back outside, and I’d get it right back.

Keith Taft: Marty and I had a big argument on the way home from one of these disastrous experiments. Marty insisted that satellite frequencies-which are 4 GHz-were the way to go. He finally convinced me that was right. This involved putting a six-foot dish in the back of a double-cab pickup truck. It had a rather unusual looking frame around it, which was transparent to radio waves. We converted the back seat, and put in the capture device, which was a video recorder that had special controls. It had a shuttle so you could quickly review frame by frame.

RWM: What happened when you started playing with this?

Keith Taft: We were down to our last dollars. We went out on the first trip with $700, maybe less, but this thing was a money machine. It started cranking right away.

Marty Taft: I remember one of the first plays. I was out in the truck, and my dad went inside. He started winning, and they changed dealers on him. The new dealer was very fast, and snapping the cards around. Because she was angry she actually gave me a better flash than the first one.

We continued to win, and she was getting more and more angry. We had time limits. We would only play 30 or 40 minutes. He finally packed up his chips to leave, and a tear came down her eye, because she wanted to beat him so bad. It was freezing one time in Sparks, and I remember my dad wanted to grind on.

RWM: I thought he was only supposed to play 30 or 40 minutes.

Marty Taft: Yeah, I don’t remember why we were grinding on. I guess we wanted to get one more play in. Anyway, it was cold in this truck, and I could hardly keep my eyes open. The screen would come to life and flick, flick, flick, as the propeller would wind up. When you turned on the camera it was up to speed, but that little motorized device with the disk would take a few seconds to rev up and synchronize with the frame rate of the camera.

It was never perfect. You would lose a frame every ten, or you would sometimes lose a critical field. He was playing, and all of a sudden everything went black. I thought, “Oh no. What kind of equipment failure did I have?” Not too far away I hear this big diesel motor start up. Then I hear Dad over our two-way radio, “Oh, looks like we had a power failure in here.” All the lights went out. That’s why my screen had gone black.

RWM: When Keith was inside with the camera, you were in constant radio communication?

Marty Taft: He had a separate switch that allowed him to turn on a radio to talk to me. That same radio I used to transmit to him.

Keith Taft: We used taps and buzzes though, because we were worried about them intercepting voice transmission.

Marty Taft: That’s right. His radio was tied to a buzzer with a phase-lock loop.

Keith Taft: He could override it with a mic if he needed to talk to me.

The Arrest

RWM: So life was good. You had a money machine.

Marty Taft: We were pushing hard. We were out there grinding away, trying to make money. Things were finally starting to click. I think we stayed out on one trip a little too long. These guys were tired, and they did some dumb things.

RWM: There were two others on your team, right?

Keith Taft: Yes, my brother, and my brother-in-law. They went to play at the Marina, and there was a culinary strike going on. [The Marina was located where the MGM in Las Vegas is today.]

RWM: Hadn’t there been a bomb threat?

Keith Taft: That’s what we heard.

RWM: Did they play?

Marty Taft: They tried, but there were some problems. He came back out to the truck to change his boots.

Keith Taft: The boots were uncomfortable, so he was changing into his other shoes.

Marty Taft: The security guards came over. They thought it looked a little strange because the engine was running. They started asking questions. They wanted the registration on the truck, and our guys couldn’t find it. They were suspicious, and they didn’t like the looks of the truck. It was pretty heavily modified. They found the camera, and then the police got there.

RWM: This wasn’t the police? This was just security guards?

Marty Taft: Right. Our guys were inexperienced. If they had just said they were leaving.

RWM: What did the police find?

Marty Taft: Satellite dish. Practice tapes that showed the hole card going under.

Keith Taft: There was a loaded 9mm handgun under the front seat.

Marty Taft: That was the only thing we got back at the end. They took everything else, including all the money, which was a substantial amount.

Keith Taft: The police took them back to the hotel. I was sleeping in the next room, and I heard this ruckus. I went outside and knocked on their door. The door was yanked open, and they threw me on the bed, and handcuffed me.

Marty Taft: Put a gun to his head.

Keith Taft: Yeah. They took me aside to talk separately. Ted and Rod were sitting there in handcuffs looking pretty glum. They didn’t have anything on me, so they let me go. They took Ted and Rod down to the hoosgow. We bailed them out before too long.

RWM: Wasn’t one of them a school principal?

Keith Taft: My brother had been a principal, but wasn’t at that time. The other was my brother-in-law. He was a space engineer, and had resigned originally to play with Thor.

RWM: Who was your lawyer?

Keith Taft: I don’t remember his name.

RWM: I don’t understand how they prosecuted. There were no laws against devices at that time, and they hadn’t played.

Marty Taft: A dealer said he had played, and she recognized him.

RWM: Weren’t there surveillance tapes?

Marty Taft: They didn’t need them.

RWM: If you had a good lawyer they would.

Marty Taft: Yes, then things would have been different.

RWM: What charge were they convicted of?

Keith Taft: Possession of a cheating device.

Marty Taft: They laid all the cash and equipment out in front of the jury, and said, “They cheated, they cheated, they cheated. They went too far. Look at all this effort they went to in order to cheat. This is clearly not something that is legal.” The jury agreed.

RWM: Did anyone testify for your side?

Marty Taft: No. The dumb lawyer said they hadn’t made their case.

Keith Taft: Arnold Snyder was there ready to testify, but the lawyer didn’t use him.

Marty Taft: Arnold had all the things in the books, why it was legal, but the jury never heard any of it. The jury just heard one side, and our lawyer didn’t think they had made their case.

RWM: Did they appeal?

Keith Taft: Yes. By this time the lawyer’s partner took the case. He seemed to be fairly decent, but they upheld the first decision. The first lawyer left the state for some reason. They described it as an evaluation for 90 days. They were in prison for 60 days. It was very traumatic for them.

RWM: I would think for you as well.

Keith Taft: It caused a lot of hard feelings within the family. We got them involved in this thing. My brother’s church was not understanding. He had some bad experiences with the elders, and the pastor of that church.

Marty Taft: Didn’t they make him confess in front of the church?

Keith Taft: It could be. I’ve forgotten. It was a bad experience.

Rats Cohen

RWM: It was because of this bust that Nevada wrote their device laws, wasn’t it?

Keith Taft: It was a big factor, but Rats Cohen was running ads at that time in the Las Vegas Sun, and the Los Angeles Times for Caseys. They could see that computers were going to be a big problem. [Casey was the name Rats Cohen gave his computers, after stealing the design from Keith.]

RWM: Ah, we haven’t talked about that yet. At some point you found out that Rats had ripped off your machines.

Keith Taft: Yes.

RWM: How did you find out? Was it these newspaper ads?

Marty Taft: Cohen called us. He had a Thor at that time. He said, “All these decisions seem to be wrong. Explain why the computer is doing this.” I remember Dad saying, “Aha! You’re copying the frames from our old David, and trying to put the Thor in it.” Cohen said, “No, I haven’t done that.” Dad gave him an out saying maybe he had taken a chip out of one and put it in an old machine.

Keith Taft: He also had called up asking how to get the epoxy off the machines. We told him, which was kind of crazy.

RWM: What was his excuse for wanting to get the epoxy off?

Keith Taft: He wanted to do a repair.

Marty Taft: He had been trying to pick that stuff off before. I’d get machines back where the epoxy had been picked off in sections. He was attempting to open it up from very early on.

RWM: It turned out he eventually got into it, copied your design, and started selling them as Casey?

Keith Taft: Yeah.

Marty Taft: He changed a pin slightly on the output. Everything was the same. I guess we’re really lousy salesmen. One guy called me up who wanted to buy a machine. Somehow he had heard about Casey, and he said that Cohen said he was first. I said, “No, we built all this stuff, and he ripped us off.” I gave him the whole story, and he wound up buying from Cohen anyway.

RWM: Was his cheaper?

Marty Taft: No, same price. But Cohen was much more convincing than we were. Then, a month later the guy called, asking if I could repair his machine. He said he had a falling out with Cohen. I said, “No, I’m not going to fix it. You didn’t buy it from us.” It was nuts.

RWM: Did you know there is still someone out there selling Caseys?

Keith Taft: I did know that. I talked to the guy, because he and Cohen also didn’t get along. This could be someone beyond that, but last I heard he had the exclusive franchise, and had paid Cohen quite a bit of money for it. Cohen was ripping him off too.

The Super Drop

Marty Taft: Then we came up with the idea for the super drop. I’m not sure who had the initial idea.

Keith Taft: I think it was one of those simultaneous things. We were talking about various ideas, and there it was. They started to work on that down in L.A. One guy wore the camera in the belt buckle. He would ask some directions as one of the players was cutting the cards. The player cutting would riffle through the deck before making the cut. [At this time players cut by hand, not by inserting a cut card.] That would be transmitted, and the person in the truck would get the order of the cards.

The BP would stall for time pulling out a lot of money, and getting it changed up. It took about forty seconds, and by that time the person in the truck had inputted the cards, and he would relay the information back in as to how many hands to play, and which strategy to play. They only had to learn an A or B strategy. The BP was just told how many hands to play, and whether to use strategy A or B.

They would get in 2 rounds. By then the camera was out the door, and long gone. The truck was also gone before the action took place. They didn’t need to park long. That worked from roughly October to May. We had an actual 57% edge. That’s not theoretical. They actually won 57%. Now that is a hammer.

Marty Taft: The BP would start pulling money out of his pockets to delay. There was no problem stalling. One time, after he won a bunch of hands, the dealer said, “I see you didn’t come here to gamble.” The BP said, “What do you mean?” The dealer said, “You just came here to change your money.” The BP said, “Go ahead, and fish them out of the box. I’ll take the same bills I brought in.”

The one problem I had with that project was that the players had no technical ability at all. If anything went wrong they said, “Call Marty.” I’d drive five hours to Reno. One time I drove there, and all I had to do was cinch a connector together a little tighter, and that was it. They said, “Golly, we feel bad.” I said, “Well, I understand.”

I drove all the way home, and I just got home and they had another problem. I turned around, and drove all the way back. This time it was a tough problem. It wasn’t something they could fix, so it needed my attention. I fixed that, and drove all the way home again. I was really tired. I had to stop and take a quick nap about half way home.

RWM: But that project was a good moneymaker.

Marty Taft: It was, and I was happy to go out and work at things that were succeeding.

RWM: What happened? Why did you stop?

Keith Taft: Ted and Rod’s appeal was in the mill. There hadn’t been a decision. If they got pulled up it would be hard on them.

Marty Taft: Plus, don’t forget they were seemingly getting some heat. When they cashed in their money they were getting a lot of attention. The casinos were asking for IDs. It was about that time they passed the law about reporting over $10,000. It was either that or they really were just trying to find out more about our guys.

The Sequencing Computer

Keith Taft: The other big thing that happened was that I made a trip to Atlantic City, and observed the shuffles. I realized the sequencing possibilities, and went to work hard on building a sequencing machine in the spring of 1985. I figured we should switch over rather than risk using video. This machine I named Narnia.

RWM: Computers were not illegal in Atlantic City at this time?

Keith Taft: Right. The concept was to take a short hiatus while I built Narnia, and put the video aside. We had been very fortunate, and there were no incidents. We thought we would just keep it a secret, and nobody would ever know. That has been true. It was as if it never happened.

Marty Taft: It really pissed our partners off. It was a source of good income for them. They wanted to keep the equipment and keep going. But my dad said, and I think rightly so, there was just too much on the line right now with the court cases. It really pissed them off, and that was the beginning of the end. They held on through development for a while, and then they dumped us.

Keith Taft: I met them out in A.C. in August, and demonstrated what I had at the time. It needed some refinement, but in September we went out there and started to train and work. They weren’t really winning, and it was pretty frustrating for them. They had expenses, and all. I continued to work on it, and solve the problems. We decided to take a break around November.

Marty Taft: You had encouraged them to take a break. We needed two or three months to work on it, and then we would have it.

Keith Taft: We didn’t get back together until February. We flew out there with our latest Narnia. We really had wonderful results, and it was ready for action.

Marty Taft: Our bags got mixed with the bags coming in from Canada, so they were X-rayed. In my bag were some Christmas presents, which were survival knives that were gift-wrapped. I also had a roll of toilet paper because I didn’t like that cheap hotel toilet paper. They get my bag open and see these weird computers, and this other stuff. They thought I was some kind of terrorist. They gave me a big hassle, and I had to just sit there waiting. This Customs guy said, “You’re not going anywhere until I say you can go.” After about fifteen minutes he said, “Okay, get out of here.”

RWM: Boy, in this day and age you would still be in the lockup trying to call your lawyer.

Keith Taft: I arrived there, and our teammates were grim-faced. They said they didn’t even want to see the new Narnia. I thought that was strange. They didn’t want it demonstrated. They just wanted to split up and go their own way.

They had some other ideas. We also disagreed because they wanted to play poker rooms in California. I’ve always had an aversion to playing against my fellow man with a computer. Maybe this is warped, but I felt it was okay to go after a big casino with computer technology, but not to sit down at a table with another guy who thinks I’m just Joe Blow. We disagreed in that area, and they said they wanted to pursue that.

RWM: What were they going to play with a computer?

Keith Taft: Poker. They wanted to develop a poker computer.

Marty Taft: Plus, they had an excellent trip playing the “drop” without a camera. While we were on the hiatus they made a lot of money. [The “drop” was first discussed in my interview with Al Francesco. At that time players were allowed to cut by hand. The move involved starting to cut, flashing a card to a confederate, and then dropping it and four more cards back down onto the deck. When the dealer completed the cut the team now had exact knowledge of the fifth card from the top of the deck. It is this move that caused casinos to begin using a cut card.]

RWM: Why didn’t they tell you that they wanted to split before you got on a plane to fly out there?

Keith Taft: Good question. They said they had been wrestling with it, and had just come to the decision. They had all gone to Hawaii during the hiatus, and I think they had worked this out.

They left us there, just Marty and I. We were low on funds, but we decided we better go out and play with Narnia, and get it going. We played that trip, and we worked out some techniques. We had some discussions about what the best way to use Narnia was. One of the former teammates thought you couldn’t jump your bet around or they would bar you as a counter. I felt that you could because you were betting at odd times, not with the count.

It turned out I was right. They looked at our crazy plays, and ignored the bet spread. There was also a question of whether the inputter would stand behind the table or play. We went ahead and worked it out. We were playing low stakes, but did well.

We went home, and called two other players we knew. They had approached Ted, who had been our representative after he was arrested. They stopped by, and we met them. They had nothing better to do, and they were eager to get involved. We gave them a deal, to this day when I think about it I sweat. We promised them $200 per day just to be there. Then they also got a percentage of the win.

RWM: That sounds like a fair deal to me.

Keith Taft: This was an unproved program.

Marty Taft: And we had to borrow $10,000 from one of our former teammates. We borrowed money from him to pay the two new guys.

Keith Taft: We had a few BPs also that we rotated every trip.

Marty Taft: We didn’t make money for quite some time.

Keith Taft: We struggled for several trips. We were just making expenses, or coming close to it. Then it all turned around very suddenly.

RWM: Why did it change?

Keith Taft: Good question. Part of it was one of the two guys, who was always a wild man. We always had rules to protect the BP, and make him look right. We had rules about how much to win, and how much to bet. The rules just went out the window with him. He’d start pushing the money out there, and things were working. He won $17,000 on a play, and things just started to click.

Marty Taft: Then we were going to go back, and make some more improvements. We refined the algorithms, and just ate them up. I say that, but I still remember sessions where we would lose, lose, lose. Other sessions you just looked like a complete genius.

RWM: Did you keep track of individual dealers? Did you find that certain dealers were better because they riffled better or picked them up in order better?

Keith Taft: We did. One of the things I programmed was the clumps. If there were five cards in a row that hadn’t been shuffled it switched into clump mode. It assumed the clump was going to keep going, which usually it did for a while. We knew exactly what the next card was. It was feast time. We did a lot of analysis of dealers. We could tell by the sound of the riffle how clumpy they were. But Narnia liked them all.

Then our former teammates showed up with machines of their own. That didn’t make us feel very happy.

Marty Taft: Atlantic City had some real bad areas. We went to meet them in Brigantine, and we were going through one of the bad areas, at night, on bicycles. We were on this narrow road, and these four guys came along in a car. They drove by my dad fairly slowly, and this guy leans out the window and says, “We’re going to run you down.”

My dad, rather than take a hint, and stay away–when they stopped at a stop sign he blew by them and said, “I’m going to give you another chance.” They start trying to bump him off the road. They were playing games with him back and forth. He was peddling on one side of the road, and I was on the other. My heart was pounding.

Finally they screeched to a stop in front of him, forcing him to stop. One of the guys jumped out of the car, and in one smooth motion he brought his fist up and stopped it about a half-inch from my dad’s jaw. He got back in the car, and they drove off. The adrenaline was pumping through me. He doesn’t remember it.

Keith Taft: I don’t.

Marty Taft: A mile later we were on the top of the Brigantine bridge, and I was still shaking. I have to give those guys credit. They could have killed us both. I remember telling my dad, if I had a gun I probably would have shot them. He said, “Gee, I feel bad that you are so upset about this–that you took it so seriously.” For him it was just a game. For me it was life and death. We just got lucky that it was four guys who were fairly reasonable.

Keith Taft: A lot of it may have had to do with my approach. It wasn’t like I was hostile to them.

RWM: It sounds like there were quite a few computer teams playing in Atlantic City at that time.

Keith Taft: That’s true. There were at least three or four.

Marty, remember the pit boss who was so friendly to you?

Marty Taft: One time with Narnia I had been playing, and I’d been winning money at Park Place. They decided to send the counter catcher down. The guy comes down, and he’s watching all the cards. He engages me in conversation.

I was loading up Narnia, and playing basic strategy. We’re talking, and he is very respectful, but he knows he is going to throw me out. In the meantime, we share this moment of camaraderie. They shuffle and one of the first things out of the shoe I double down 9 against a 7. He turned his back to me, and hardly watched the game. One play and that was it for him. Shuffle tracking provides a lot of cover for you.

The Tooth Inputter

RWM: At some point you devised a way to input with your teeth–how did that work?

Keith Taft: You only have two contacts, an A and a B.

Marty Taft: We had left side contacts, top and bottom, and right side contacts.

RWM: How did you get all the inputs that way?

Keith Taft: The computer generated a series of tones. [At this point Keith sang a series of ascending notes.] Do, me, so, do.

Marty Taft: By the way, he programmed it to be perfect pitch. It wasn’t four random notes.

Keith Taft: The right side was an octave higher than the left. The idea was you closed one side, and you listened. As it went up the scale, when you released it that was your number.

Marty Taft: They were in groups of four. The do, me, so, do, represents the numbers four, eight, twelve, sixteen. You fill in the ones on the other side.

Keith Taft: You did the rank first, and the suit next.

Marty Taft: Let’s say you put one side together and got do, me, and then released it; that would represent an eight.

RWM: How would you put in a two?

Marty Taft: By going to the right side directly. The tones on the right represent one, two, three, four, and the tones on the left are four, eight, twelve, sixteen. We set it up that way because we hit sixteen quite a lot and wanted it to be easy. Sixteen was a control code.

Keith Taft: You switched back and forth. You had to be careful because you always switched to the opposite side to finish with the suit. The rule for the suit was one tone was spades, two hearts, three clubs, and four diamonds. A two of hearts would be the right contact for two tones, then the left contact for two tones to represent hearts, or one tone if it was the two of spades.

RWM: When I close my teeth both sides make contact.

Keith Taft: Marty did an ingenious job. He got a jeweler’s casting setup. He had a dentist make impressions of the teeth. They were designed so you didn’t close them down; you moved them side-to-side.

Marty Taft: With your jaw slightly open you could move it slightly left or right to make the contact. There was a little spike that came up from the bottom, and another coming down from the top.

RWM: Were there little wires in your mouth connecting everything?

Keith Taft: Yes. I had a mustache and beard, and these tiny wires came out of the mouth and back through the beard, and down into the shirt.

RWM: Could you drink, and talk?

Keith Taft: Yes.

RWM: This is amazing.

Keith Taft: The concept worked so well that we preserved the tones as the way we recognized suits in Narnia.

RWM: Do you think you were inputting accurately this way?

Keith Taft: Yes, I think the error rate was higher than with a hand keyboard, but it was pretty good. I could run through one deck, rank and suit, in thirty-eight seconds consistently. My record was thirty-three. That’s not bad. Amazingly, the jaw did not get that tired. It was a pretty reasonable way to do it. It was important to have a good earpiece so you could hear clear tones.

RWM: Did you go to this because you thought there was heat on the hand inputting?

Keith Taft: Exactly.

RWM: Marty, did you practice this as well?

Marty Taft: I did, but I never got good enough to play. I didn’t put in the time.

RWM: I would think this would be really hard.

Marty Taft: It is hard. Narnia made money for quite a while. The shuffles changed, and the edge started to go down. Those were good times. Eventually the laws changed and it ended.

Looking Back

RWM: Have you been working on inventions outside of blackjack?

Keith Taft: We had ideas for using inputs with the toes, or teeth, for people in wheelchairs. But I’ve found that to succeed at anything you really have to focus. If you are going to break new ground it takes total dedication.

There hasn’t been time to ever get to it. I never achieved my initial goal. When I first started I wanted to win $200,000. I thought that would be sufficient to give me lead-time to develop some inventions, and make a living that way. In the early years I never made the $200,000 or came close to it. Of course the price of success kept going up. I’ve had a lot of ideas but never pursued them. I just pursued gambling concepts.

RWM: What are you doing now?

Keith Taft: I’m semi-retired. My backyard needs landscaping in the worst way. We have ten acres, and my wife is hard on my case to work on that. It’s time to make her happy, and be more of a conventional husband. I don’t have any dreams of great things to accomplish at the moment.

RWM: Marty mentioned that the real potential for electronics has never been realized.

Keith Taft: That is very true.

RWM: Why do you think that is?

Marty Taft: Too much effort. The kind of people that you wind up dealing with are not disciplined enough. Maybe it is not just them, but the resources, time, and energy we have available don’t produce much beyond prototype equipment. Not all the bugs get worked out.

We probably rush it too much. It takes maybe three months of making no money, to make sure it is just right before putting it into action. Sometimes we survived that initial period, and started to make money. Another thing is, no matter what you do in blackjack, once you start pulling the money out, you can’t put your foot to the floor with the throttle or you blow up the situation. They start looking for what you are doing. It’s like a spring tension. As you push harder they are pushing back harder.

Usually the opportunities you’re going for with electronics are very specific, and too limited. Maybe it is only in a couple of casinos, because it is some unique thing about the game that you are trying to exploit. I don’t think we have ever come up with a device that had universal large edge capabilities. David could play any blackjack game, but the edge was quite low. We had a good opportunity in 1984 with the video. We didn’t quite get past the prototype hump. We hadn’t worked out all the procedures and disciplines.

I think the weak link in all we have done is the people we worked with.

RWM: Why blackjack? Why casinos? It seems to me your life could have gone in so many directions. Why not insulin pumps?

Keith Taft: None of those other directions have the total self-dependence, and self-determination that blackjack does. With insulin pumps you have manufacturing, and skills that are unknown to me. There is a bit of a hermit quality that tinkerers possess. Like the Bible study that asks, “Why did God select Mary to bear Jesus?” The answer is, “She was available.”

With blackjack it looked like if you just did A, B, and C, then success would be assured. There is less risk in my mind than with an insulin pump. Actually we had some other good humanitarian ideas.

RWM: What are you doing now, Marty?

Marty Taft: I work in fiber optic communications. We’re trying to make the switches that will switch the light waves.

RWM: Do you miss it?

Keith Taft: There are parts I miss, and parts I don’t. Some people have been very disappointing. It’s no fun to work on blackjack teams where there isn’t harmony.

I really enjoyed the lab work. I liked developing the concepts, and then implementing them. That’s been more enjoyable than going out and doing it. That’s always a very hostile challenge. You are always concerned about getting caught, and what that might mean.

We’ve done some things where we were quite successful, but you still have those worries about safety. There is the legal aspect. Some of the things we’ve done are very borderline, and there is a question how they would be seen by the law, or by a jury.

RWM: What about you Marty? Do you miss it?

Marty Taft: Oh yeah.

RWM: This seems to have been a good partnership between father and son.

Keith Taft: Excellent. To succeed at a project like this, it involves people, invention, hardware, and software. I wouldn’t have accomplished this alone. Marty is one reason we have had the success we’ve had. He has been the other voice, and many ideas are his.

RWM: It must be fun working with your son as well.

Keith Taft: Absolutely. It has been one of the great success stories of my life. A lot has to do with his temperament. He has been wonderful to work with. We’ve worked together for over twenty years, and it was always a joy.

Marty Taft: We’ve had a lot of fun together. It’s been a terrific experience. Most sons don’t get to know their Dads that well. He has the best ideas, the implementations, and analysis. It is a good synergy.

Keith Taft: With that attitude you can see why we have succeeded. [laughing]

Sidebar

Regarding the trial of Ted and Rod, the Tafts mention that Arnold Snyder was present to testify as an expert witness. Their lawyer decided the prosecution had not made their case, so Arnold never testified. Though they didn’t play, and there was no law against this device, they were convicted of a felony, fined $10,000, and spent 60 days in prison. This is what Arnold Snyder wrote in the March 1986 issue of Blackjack Forum.

“The jury understood nothing of the legal issues involved. No one ever explained to the jury that front-loading was not illegal. The prosecution stated repeatedly that these things were illegal, and the defense never adequately stated otherwise. They didn’t want to admit that Ted and Rod had ever actually done anything in a casino with their device.

The prosecution claimed that the device could be used to gather hole-card information from any dealer, and that this information was not available to any other players at the table. This was not true.

The vast majority of dealers, according to Ted, are not so sloppy as to tip their hole cards up towards players when “loading” it under their up cards. In many casinos, not a single front-loading dealer could be found.

And those dealers who were front-loaders were not always consistent. There was no sure-win situation with their device. Like all players who try to benefit from the hole-card information provided by occasionally sloppy dealers, Ted and Rod were attempting to get an edge. Sometimes they were successful. Sometimes not. But for all intents and purposes, they were just using a crazy technology scheme for front-loading. Their expectation was solely dependent on dealer errors.

The jury never knew this. Ted and Rod never told their story. They never had a defense. The prosecution described the device, how it worked, what it did. All wrong. Neither Ted nor Rod ever corrected the record. Their silence convicted them.

Keith and Marty Taft were pioneers. Their ploy was actually brilliant. They really had found an ingenious high-tech method to get a legal edge over the casinos.

They weren’t cheats. They had read books about front-loading, and knew it was not illegal. They knew devices were not illegal. Both had used blackjack computers in the past, and knew they were within the law. In my opinion, neither of them would ever have considered risking breaking the law to beat the casinos. They knew they were in the right.

It’s a tragedy.”

Snyder Comments 2004

A few clarifications are in order.

The Las Vegas attorneys for Taft and Weatherford were John Curtas and Stephen Minigal. I believe Curtas is still practicing law in Nevada. At the time I wrote the above comments (BJF March 1986) I was not aware of some of the facts of the case.

There had been a prior case in Nevada (Einbinder/Dalben, 1983) in which two players who were using a “front-loading” strategy to see the dealer’s hole card were found not guilty. I was under the impression that the Einbinder/Dalben decision had rendered hole card play legal. In fact, that decision had come from a district court and was not binding on any other court in the state.

The state had appealed the decision to the Nevada Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court had upheld the lower court decision; but still, that did not make all hole card play legal.

I was also unaware that Steven Einbinder and Tony Dalben’s attorneys in 1983 were John Curtas and Stephen Minigal, the same attorneys who represented Taft and Weatherford in 1986! So, Curtas and Minigal were well aware of the implications of the Einbinder/Dalben decision.

Tony Dalben was kind enough to send me a transcript of their trial, including the Supreme Court’s ruling on the state’s appeal. In that case, the Supreme Court stated flatly that the lower court decision was being upheld based on the facts of the case, which included the fact that the defendants had not used any devices (other than their eyesight) to obtain the hole card information.

Since this was a big part of Curtas’s and Minigal’s defense in the Einbinder/Dalben trial, it would have been impossible for them to cite the Einbinder/Dalben decision in their defense of Taft and Weatherford. In a later issue of BJF (June, 1987), I published some excerpts from the Einbinder/Dalben trial, plus the wording of the Nevada Supreme Court decision on the appeal, as well as comments by attorney Stephen Minigal on the legal status of hole card play in Nevada.

As a witness to the Taft/Weatherford trial, I am still of the opinion that Taft and Weatherford were railroaded by the court and were not given a fair hearing, and that the attorneys were “handcuffed” by the judge in what they were allowed to present in their defense. At the time that Taft and Weatherford were arrested, the simple fact is that Nevada had no anti-device law that would have convicted them.

I suspect their attorneys would have presented the case to the jury differently had they known that the judge would disallow them from making the closing arguments they had prepared, which were based on the exact definition of cheating in the current statutes. But they did not learn that the judge would not permit the statutes to be read to the jury until after it was too late to go back to the witness stand with more testimony.

Essentially, Taft and Weatherford were convicted of cheating, not because their attorneys had failed, but because the judge, Donald Mosley, would not allow a fair trial in his courtroom.] ♠

What to Do if You are Barred or Backed Off by a Casino

By Robert A. Loeb, Attorney at Law

(From Blackjack and the Law by I. Nelson Rose and Robert A. Loeb)
© Blackjack Forum 1998

Before giving the answers to what a card counter should do if he is barred, some of which are obvious, let me ask the following question: Are you really going to talk them into letting you stay and play? Are you really going to convince them that if they let you stay, they will see that you are not counting cards? Of course not. There is nothing to do but cash in your chips and leave quietly.

If you are not a card counter, it may be worth it to try to persuade the casino of that fact, because the casinos do actually hassle non-counters who may be winning, or because of a faulty conclusion that you are counting cards. Even non-card-counters, however, do not want to be so adamant that they risk some of the consequences listed below.

If you really think that there may be legal action, brought by you or the casino, try to learn the names of the dealer, pit boss, security people, casino manager, or fellow players. It will be important if there are any further legal proceedings. However, you don’t want to make things worse. Therefore, what shouldn’t you do if the casino is barring you?

What Not to Do if You are Barred or Backed Off by a Casino

♠  Don’t admit you are a card counter. They don’t know for sure. You might deny that you are a card counter, but don’t get into a big explanation. It doesn’t matter that you bet big off the top of a shoe, or that you’ve been losing your shirt. And you don’t think that you’re going to persuade them to let you continue playing without heat, do you?

♠  Don’t wait long enough for your picture to be taken (or for more and better pictures to be taken). High stakes players are more likely to already have a picture on file, but there is no benefit to either the big or small player to have his picture on file.

♠  Don’t start an argument, or make a loud fuss. You don’t want to be arrested for being disorderly.Don’t go to the bar and have a drink. You don’t want to be arrested for public drunkenness, or have the casino follow you to the parking lot and tip off the police that you are driving drunk.

♠  Don’t go to the cage and cash out. That is the casino’s preferred time and place to snap a good close-up of you. Return to the casino on a different shift, when everyone’s forgotten about you, and cash out your chips quietly.

♠  Don’t show your identification, if at all possible. They don’t need it, nor under the typical trespassing statute, do they have a right to demand it. You may have to be very polite in your refusal to show an ID, but you don’t want your name in the Griffin book, which contains photographs and descriptions of card counters, alongside photos and descriptions of cheaters.

If you are actually being arrested, you probably will be legally required to produce identification. Don’t state that you forgot your driver’s license or that you don’t have a license. They may follow you to the parking lot, and tip off the police that you are driving without a license (I’ve learned of an actual incident in which a casino did this). You should merely decline to provide identification rather than making excuses for not having identification.

♠  Don’t touch any casino employee. You may find that they may exaggerate the incident and you may end up getting charged with assault and battery, or the equivalent in your state. Don’t let the heat of the moment cloud your judgment. Don’t escalate the tensions.

Regarding Confiscation of Chips when Barred

Even though confiscation of your chips should never be legal in the absence of illegal cheating, card counters have had their chips confiscated on occasion, and casinos have refused to redeem their chips on occasion.

Unless the issue is so important to you that you want to become a legal crusader, be practical and prudent. You are on their turf. With rare exceptions, you can’t do better than just getting your money and leaving.

If they confiscate your chips, get a receipt, get the names of everyone involved, ask for the basis of the confiscation (in writing if possible), and leave quietly. Then call your lawyer! ♠

[Note from Arnold Snyder: Professional gamblers who will be playing in Las Vegas carry the number of Bob Nersesian in case of confiscation of chips or rough behavior by casino personnel during a barring or any type of illegal detention by a casino. You can find Bob’s number in our Interview with Bob Nersesian.

If you will be playing in the Midwest, I’d suggest carrying Bob Loeb’s number. He’s in the book.

I would also add a suggestion to the advice given by Bob Loeb above. Don’t automatically assume that a casino barring will end your career. Every professional gambler has been barred repeatedly, and still manages to keep playing.

Although all casinos will share info on barred players within their corporate group, fewer casinos share information outside that group.]

For more information on your legal rights as a card counter or other type of professional gambler, as well as advice on how to handle the situation if you are barred or back-roomed, see Beat the Players: Casinos, Cops And the Game Inside the Game by Bob Nersesian, a Las Vegas attorney who has won difficult and huge lawsuits filed in recent years by professional gamblers against casinos.♠

The Windsor Trial, and a Conversation With Tommy Hyland

by Arnold Snyder

(From Blackjack Forum Volume XVI #1, Spring 1996)
© 1996 Blackjack Forum

When we did our last major reader survey in 1994, three areas stood out as topics our readers wanted more information about: comps, shuffle tracking and blackjack team play.

We have since provided in these pages quite a bit of information on both casino comps and shuffle tracking strategies. We have continued to be inundated with requests from readers who want more information about all aspects of team play. Our reports on the successful Tommy Hyland teams in the past two issues of Blackjack Forum have especially cranked up these pleas for more team play information.

In this issue of Blackjack Forum, we’re going to focus on various crucial areas of blackjack team play, including legal issues brought up by the Windsor trial, and interview Tommy Hyland and two Hyland team members. Bear in mind that this is a mammoth topic, one that could easily extend through several issues of this publication. At this point in time, I’m envisioning this article as Part I of a two-part series. Reader interest and contributions could extend this series further.

I would initially recommend that players interested in this subject familiarize themselves with the late Ken Uston’s three major books: The Big Player, Million Dollar Blackjack, and Ken Uston on Blackjack. These books provide a solid framework for the concept of blackjack team play. Much of the common terminology used by professional blackjack players today in talking about team play comes from Uston’s books.

Al Francesco and the Birth of the Blackjack Team Concept

Ken is often credited as being the “founder” or “father” of the blackjack team concept because he wrote these books which initially defined the theory and methods. Anyone who has read his books, however, knows that Uston credits a man by the name of Al Francesco (a pseudonym).

Though Al Francesco has never written a book, never appeared on TV, nor ever tried to sell a blackjack system, he is a living legend among knowledgeable blackjack players. [Note from Arnold Snyder: Since the writing of this article, Al Francesco was elected as one of the seven original inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.]

The dozens of players who know Al Francesco personally, through the blackjack team ventures he has put together through the past 30+ years, know him to be a good-natured gentleman, straightforward and honest, with an uncanny ability for perceiving and legally exploiting the weaknesses of casino games. What Keith Taft was to the high-tech electronic exploitation of the games, Al Francesco was to the psychological strategies for exploiting the casinos’ weaknesses in their blackjack games.

I first met Al in 1986; the first thing I did after meeting this man, who had told me he was the man who had literally taught Ken Uston how to play blackjack, was call Ken to find out if this guy was for real. I told Ken Al’s real name, described him physically, and told him where Al lived (he had been a Blackjack Forum subscriber for some time).

“That’s him,” Uston stated. “Still living in the same modest house. This man is personally responsible for more money being legally taken off the casino blackjack tables than anyone but Ed Thorp. Al invented the whole big player concept. Do you realize what that means, Arnold? Just about every blackjack team in existence today owes its existence to Al. Give him my best. I hope he hasn’t said too many negative things about me…”

Ken wouldn’t elaborate on this final concern, other than saying that he and Al had had a “falling out” some years back.

Al became a regular at the blackjack “round tables” I hosted monthly at my Oakland apartment in the 1980s. He was always among the handful of serious players who hung out into the wee hours, drinking coffee and swapping tall tales of intrigue at the tables. No one could match his stories. He knew everyone, had been everywhere, had done it all.

In 1992, I conducted a series of interviews with Al Francesco, and taped about four hours of conversations with him. I wanted to write a book about him — yet another unfinished project! I did learn his side of the story regarding the “falling out” with Ken Uston. It was not a subject Al cared to talk about much — he didn’t like bad mouthing people and Ken had passed away some five years earlier by that time, a legend in his own right, a hero to many.

The conflict was a direct result of Uston’s first book — The Big Player. Al was upset that Ken had written a book about the blackjack teams, exposing Al’s method of attacking the casinos to the world, describing in detail everything that Al had taught him — the blackjack team bank concept, the big player (BP) who was secretly signaled to the tables by small-betting confederates, the training methods, the security systems, everything.

Al didn’t learn about the book Uston was writing until the book was almost finished. There was virtually nothing in print about team play the way Al had been doing it. He felt Uston had no right to publish his secrets. As the mastermind behind the scheme, Al felt the big player approach would have remained a mystery to the casinos for many years more had Uston not written his book.

In putting together this article on blackjack team play, I have been fortunate to have been a confidant of Al Francesco, Ken Uston, and Tommy Hyland — and to have taped interviews with all of them. Most of what is known by the general public about team play is what Uston has published. In this article, I’m going to try to provide some of the secrets of team play hitherto unpublished — especially some of the innovative concepts developed and utilized by the Hyland blackjack teams, which Tommy has generously agreed to share with Blackjack Forum readers.

The Blackjack Team Legal Issue

Let’s start by getting the legal arguments out of the way. The trial of Zalis, Dancey and Conroy in Windsor last year was the first test of the legality of team play as an approach to beating the blackjack tables. The prosecution’s argument primarily revolved around the idea that secretly passing signals is inherently a fraudulent act.

Even before the judge’s decision on this issue, the same argument had been made to me by (guess who?) — our favorite devil’s advocate, John Leib. In a letter dated August 29, 1995, Leib wrote:

I must say that I have an unpopular (with the blackjack community) view of “team play.” I see no argument against its being made illegal. Surely, the observation that this would deprive current team players of their chosen livelihood doesn’t make the grade. That is only a reason why team players don’t want it to be illegal. It is hard to see how society gains by forcing casinos to support the fraud inherent in team play.

“Harsh words,” you immediately shout. Calling blackjack team play a fraud needs to be explained. It is not a fraud if you tell the casino management what you are doing, giving them a chance to elect not to play with you. Of course, you will not do this, because the response is a foregone conclusion.

To answer why I consider it a fraud, let me suggest a closely related situation: At various race tracks, an owner frequently runs his best horse under the name of his worst horse. He bets big on this entry and, over the long haul, makes a large amount of money at the expense of the other bettors. Is this fraud? Few of us would deny it. The opposition (in this case, the other bettors) was deceived about the skill (speed) of the horse and, by extension, the horse’s owner.

In blackjack team play, the opposition (the casino) is deceived about the skill (playing advantage) of the Big Player.

Now, I strongly defend individual card counting, altering bet and play in response to “the count.” I don’t think the player is obligated, either legally or morally, to announce his skill level to the casino management.

Blackjack, like tennis, is a skill game. The casinos know and understand this. Usually the casino has the legal right to decide, based on observation or reputation of the player, to decline his action. The player can also decline to play in the casino. Fair is fair.

But blackjack team play is exactly the same as “past posting” a race book. You may not win, but the odds are (illegally, in the case of past posting) skewed in your favor. (Yeah, I know that books susceptible to past posting are also illegal. It’s the similarity I’m pointing out.) Morally, both are frauds, by anyone’s standards. Lining up laws to match widely accepted morals is the way democratic government works (or is supposed to work).

Just because I think team play commits a fraud on the casino does not necessarily mean I wouldn’t do it. I pride myself in being able to recognize immoral behavior without feeling a compulsion to be constrained beyond the laws. While it is legal, I say “go for it” (team play, that is). But don’t cry “foul” if and when it is made illegal.

I strongly disagree with Leib’s argument, but it is nearly identical to the argument made by the prosecution in the Windsor trial. One argument against this perspective was presented by the blackjack team’s defense attorney, Don Tait, in his cross examination of the Casino Windsor shift manager, Ken Davenport. From the trial transcript:

Tait: All right, the wife’s sitting there and maybe the husband is standing behind her, right?

Davenport: Yes.

Tait: And she gets a pair of tens come out and she says, “Shall I split these?” and he invariably says, “Don’t be a damned idiot, you don’t split 20,” right?

Davenport: Yes.

Tait: And there’s a lot of that kind of exchange going on amongst players, too, isn’t there, who are sitting right at the table?

Davenport: Yes.

Tait: Like you know, “Don’t split that, don’t do this.” So people give advice while they’re playing the game?

Davenport: Yes.

Tait: All right. And that’s a common occurrence, would you agree?

Davenport: Yes.

Tait: Is there anything in the rules of the game that say you can’t get advice from other people as to the strategy of how you’re going to play that game?

Davenport: No, there’s not.

Tait: No. Now, have you ever played with people you don’t understand, foreigners, that speak a foreign language you don’t understand when they’re talking in a foreign language?

Davenport: Yes.

Tait: You don’t know what they’re saying to each other?

Davenport: No.

Tait: Could be giving advice to one another, right?

Davenport: Could be.

Tait: That’s not prohibited?

Davenport: No, it’s not.

Tait: Okay, and but you don’t know what advice they’re giving because you can’t understand them, right?

Davenport: That’s correct.

Tait: Have you ever played with mutes, people who can’t speak or hear, but they use sign language? Have you ever seen them?

Davenport: Yes.

Tait: And again, you wouldn’t have any idea what they were saying to one another?

Davenport: No, I wouldn’t.

Tait: So, it wouldn’t make any difference to you what they were saying?

Davenport: Well, it depends.

Tait: As far as giving advice as to the strategy about playing the game?

Davenport: That wouldn’t matter to me.

This brief exchange between Tait and Davenport is the crux of the argument against team play being labeled “fraud” simply because the players are excluding the house from their communications. Unlike poker, blackjack players are legally allowed to communicate with each other about their hands and their strategies.

(You can be sure that poker players would be gravely concerned about two players having conversations about their hands and/or strategies in a foreign tongue, or via sign language, as the rules of the game specifically prohibit such private communications.)

John Leib’s horse race analogy, to me, is poor. There are laws against running a horse under a phony name. The owner of a race horse cannot falsify the information which is being provided to the betting public. This would be illegal whether the owner did this in conspiracy with others (as a team) or acting entirely alone.

In seeking an analogous situation, I would look for an activity which is not illegal if done openly, but which could be done conspiratorially for financial gain. Let’s consider grocery shopping.

Manufacturers often use deceptive packaging. This is legal, provided the net weight and ingredients are listed on the package somewhere. Careful shoppers are legally allowed to read the fine print, and even use calculators, in order to make their purchase decisions, but most shoppers are not this astute. The store owners, distributors, and packagers, in fact, make lots of money by their deceptive packaging. Profit margins are estimated and prices are set by assuming that the majority will be fooled into making less cost-efficient choices.

Now, what if a group of little old ladies who couldn’t read fine print, and whose fingers were too arthritic to use a calculator — precisely the type of shoppers the store’s marketing experts expect to be victimized by deceptive packaging — hired a grandchild to come shopping with them every Saturday for the express purpose of doing a cost analysis on the corn flakes selections using a pocket calculator? Now, let’s say they don’t want the cashiers or stock boys to think they’re “cheap,” so they keep this child’s job a secret.

If the store owner discovers that these old ladies have been deceiving him by making more intelligent choices than his market researchers give them credit for, would he have a legal leg to stand on if he wanted to press charges against them for defrauding him by secretly conspiring with a child to decrease his expected profits? Could he sue for the moneys he believed he should have been able to profit from them, simply because they were deceptive in their shopping strategy?

I would argue that just because someone is secretly using a method to make more intelligent purchases, even if done conspiratorially with others, and even if it costs the store owner money, does not in itself make it an illegal act of fraud. If what a person is communicating secretly is perfectly legal when communicated openly, then it can’t be against the law to secretly communicate the same information.

Furthermore, there is a long history of card counters working in teams, utilizing secret signals, in their attempts to beat the game of blackjack. It is common knowledge in the casino industry that counters work in this way. Numerous teams of counters have been identified by casinos in the past few decades, yet none has ever been charged with committing a crime for these clandestine acts (prior to the Windsor case).

When Keith Taft’s computer team was first arrested in Nevada, and had their concealed computer confiscated (prior to Nevada’s anti-device law), no charges were pressed after the FBI determined that the computer being used was simply a calculating device. (A perfect analogy to the little old ladies shopping!)

When Einbinder and Dalben were arrested for secretly passing signals in a “first-basing” team effort, the Nevada judge found them not guilty because the dealer hole-card information being signaled had been legally obtained. There was never any suggestion at this trial that signaling itself was illegal — the not-guilty judgment was solely based on the fact that the information being secretly passed had been legally obtained.

I introduced into evidence at the Windsor trial twenty-five different books on blackjack, all of which described methods of team play using secret signals. The oldest book was Thorp’s Beat the Dealer (1962), in which Thorp describes sitting at a blackjack table and signaling plays to “Mr. X,” one of the anonymous millionaires who had bankrolled his play.

One of the more recent books entered into evidence, which described secret team signaling, was Henry Tamburin’s Blackjack: Take the Money and Run (1994), which had actually been purchased at the gift shop at Caesars World in Atlantic City!

Can a casino sell a book to the public that describes a method of beating their games which is illegal, especially considering that the book presents the method as valid and legal? Can you imagine buying a book at a race track on how to past post your bets, with this being offered to the public as a valid method of beating the horses, with no mention that such a strategy might be illegal? (And how far would a racetrack get in court if it attempted to prosecute a past-poster who had purchased his betting scheme at the racetrack gift shop?!)

I do not believe at this point in time any casino anywhere would be able to get team play declared illegal, except perhaps in the state of Nevada, where the casinos seem to own the court system, and can often get whatever they’re willing to pay the lawmakers for. But at the present time, blackjack team play is legal everywhere, and I expect it to remain so.

A Conversation with Blackjack Team Manager Tommy Hyland

Tommy Hyland may be the most successful blackjack team operator in history, and he is certainly the most successful to have been publicly exposed. The trial of three of his teammates in Windsor, Canada, last year (see Blackjack Forum, Dec ‘95, for the complete story), made public figures of Tommy and numerous of his players and business partners, who found themselves answering questions on TV news shows and for newspapers across Canada and the U.S.

Tommy Hyland has recently filed a class action lawsuit against the Griffin Detective Agency and 77 casino corporations for violating anti-trust, consumer fraud, and fair credit reporting laws for their discriminatory treatment of card counters. Here is my interview with him.

BJF: Let’s say this lawsuit goes through as filed, and all 77 corporations are found to be guilty of these violations of the consumer protection laws, do you imagine that this would have any immediate negative effect on the conditions of blackjack games?

Tommy Hyland: I doubt it. I don’t think it would be detrimental. I guess people might be afraid the casinos would make the rules worse because they would be bombarded by counters, or something. But I wouldn’t have filed the suit if I thought it would really cause harm to the blackjack games because I plan on making lots of money from blackjack.

What I’m trying to stop is the harassment of players and the all-too-frequent horrible incidents, like our Windsor thing. It just seems to me that the right thing to do is to try and stop this ugly stuff.

Griffin seems to be promoting this “us against them” mentality. They make it seem like card counters really hurt the casinos much worse than they do. They blow the threat that card counters pose way out of proportion, in order to promote themselves. Casino countermeasures that are prompted by the paranoid attitude Griffin encourages costs the casinos far more money than the card counters actually do.

BJF: How far did you go in school?

Tommy Hyland: I went through four years of college, but I didn’t graduate. I majored in political science.

BJF: Prior to being involved in blackjack and blackjack teams, did you have any normal jobs?

Tommy Hyland: I worked for three weeks as the sports director on a cruise ship. That was my only job.

BJF: Did they have a casino there?

Tommy Hyland: Yes, they actually did. Ironically, that was the first time I was ever told by a casino not to play blackjack. It wasn’t because I was too good. I was still a novice at the time, but it was because members of the cruise staff were not supposed to gamble.

BJF: When did you first start playing blackjack professionally?

Tommy Hyland: 1979. I was 23 years old. As I recall, I started with $1,000. This was in Atlantic City when Resorts was the only casino open. You’d have to wait outside in line to get in every morning. It was only open from 10 AM to 4 AM. I used to drive down a couple of times a week.

A buddy of mine from the golf course, Leo, was learning at the same time. We eventually started sharing our results. Basically, that was my first team, a two man team. In the first 5 or 6 months, this was with early surrender and everything, my bankroll increased from $1,000 to $4,000.

On our visits to Resorts, we met two other card counters, Doug and Dave, who were playing small also and we got friendly with them. After weeks of wrestling with the idea, we eventually decided to trust them. Doug and Dave had $8,000 between them, so we had a four-man team with a $16,000 team bank. By the end of December of ‘79, we ran the $16,000 to over $100,000.

We all purchased Wong’s Blackjack in Asia, [note from A.S.—now a collector’s item] and Doug and Dave decided to go to Asia to play. Leo and I decided to stay in the U.S. I started training other people from the golf course. Fairly soon we had a pretty big team, maybe 10 to 15 guys within about a year. Shortly after Doug and Dave went to Asia, we started making trips to Vegas. But Atlantic City still had early surrender, and our guys were all from the New Jersey area, so we were concentrating mostly there.

BJF: At that time, were you aware of Ken Uston? Had you read The Big Player?

Tommy Hyland: I’ve always been an avid reader, so I grabbed everything I could on blackjack. I read Uston’s book right away. I met Uston in Atlantic City, and had a couple of meals with him. But I didn’t know him that well, or any of his players. I remember that we used a lot of his ideas on our early team.

Blackjack Team Bankrolls, Targets and Compensation

BJF: The basic ideas that you find in Uston’s books with regards to divvying up the funds between investors and players, is that still the best way to go about it?

Tommy Hyland: That stuff’s complicated. I remember when we originally set up our teams — it was kind of a simple set up. It’s good to keep things as simple as possible, but it’s more important to make things fair and give all parties the right incentives. You can end up under some scenarios that can be real unfair if you don’t think of all the different contingencies.

In my early years of playing on teams, I made a lot of mistakes in bankroll agreements that cost both me personally and other members of the team lots of money. Since then, I’ve learned a lot about setting up bankrolls from some guys who tend to be good at those things. For example, say we agree to split the winnings 50% to investors and 50% to players. It doesn’t work. A set-up like that is fine only when the team wins steadily.

If the team loses a lot in the beginning, the players don’t have enough incentive to keep playing hard because it’s apparent it’ll be a long time until they see any money. Similarly, it is very easy to make other mistakes that either favor or harm players or investors dramatically.

There is also always the question of how much of the players’ share should be based on table time and how much on individual winnings. The bankrolls I’ve been involved with in the last ten years or so have been quite complicated in their set-ups, but they have been made that way so that the bank will run smoothly, and will continue to work regardless of what kinds of fluctuations — positive or negative — that we experience.

BJF: When you form a bank, do you generally use the formula described by Uston — either play until the bank dies or you double it?

Tommy Hyland: We do something similar. We don’t necessarily try to double the bank, but we play to a money target. Usually, our bank’s bigger than our target. We just play until we win a certain amount. Our bank might be quite large, but we might have a money target of one quarter or even one eighth of the bank. It’s hard to hit huge money targets. The prospect becomes daunting. It seems like it’s going to take forever to hit the target.

So, you want to have a target that’s reasonable. You don’t want to have a target too small because it would be kind of silly. But you want to have it where if you have a couple of good fluctuations, people get to split up some money. That way they can raise their investment for the next bank. We also always bet a small fraction of the optimal Kelly Criterion bet. Even when we were starting out, we thought one-quarter Kelly was pretty aggressive. Now, I don’t think we bet even one-eighth Kelly.

BJF: Have you ever run into a situation where you had to quit a bank because it was going so badly for so long? Or do you always stick to your decision to hit your target?

Tommy Hyland: I should emphasize that this target set-up and many of the other ideas our blackjack teams have used are not my inventions. Some guys that are really sharp have set these things up, and I just learned a lot from them.

The way we do it — where the players get some sort of reasonable compensation for all the hours they play, everybody’s committed. We always play till we hit the target. I don’t think we’ve ever dumped a bank short of a target.

In the last 10 or 12 years, I don’t recall stopping any bank short of target. We might have had some small projects or some side teams, and for various reasons we stopped them sooner than we’d intended. But the major efforts I’ve been involved in have always played till we hit the target. It’s just understood that you have to dig it out. And as players, we really don’t mind because we are getting a fairly reasonable compensation and as we’re usually also investors, we don’t want to lose our investment.

BJF: What’s the quickest you ever hit a target in the years you’ve been playing?

Tommy Hyland: In the old days, I remember we won a ton during a big heavyweight fight in Las Vegas, I forget which one it was. We had 20 some odd guys out there and 18 or 19 of them won. Just something ridiculous like that. Fairly recently, we hit a target in three weeks or something, quite a large target.

BJF: What’s the longest it’s taken you to hit your target?

Tommy Hyland: Probably a year, maybe even a little longer, a year and three months.

BJF: What’s the average length of time for getting out of one bank and into the next?

Tommy Hyland: The banks I’ve been involved with have generally hit 2 to 3 targets a year; so 4 to 5 months.

BJF: On the banks that have taken long, in the neighborhood of a year or more, is that usually because of some huge loss or losses that occurred over the course that you then had to dig out of?

Tommy Hyland: Yes, that’s happened. Sometimes we’ve had a few losses that have really buried us. Other times we’ve just kind of spun our wheels for awhile. Basically, we’ve pretty much had normal fluctuations, which, as you know, can be quite large.

Recruiting Blackjack Team Players

BJF: Regarding finding players for the team — how do you go about looking for players? Is there a big turnover?

Tommy Hyland: I certainly don’t have to look for them. I get asked quite frequently, “How can I get on your team?” and things like that. And I know a lot of other blackjack players do also. People are always asking about getting on the blackjack team.

Most of my players are people I’ve known for a long time, or friends of people that I’ve known for a long time that they’ve known for a long time. We generally never hire strangers. Other than my early experience, joining up with Doug and Dave, I’ve really known people for a long time before I was willing to share results with them. At this point in my life, I am even more careful about who I play with, and I am definitely not looking for new players.

BJF: Do you personally take part in training and testing your players?

Tommy Hyland: Yes. Basically, I do a lot of that. Usually, I make them learn a lot by themselves first. I give them a basic strategy chart and some hints on how to memorize it. I then show them how to keep the running count. They can call me with any questions, but I really don’t meet with them again till they know basic strategy and count down a deck in something like 35 seconds.

BJF: How do you go about maintaining honesty and trustworthiness? When you have a large team, even if you seem to trust people, it seems like there would always be others wondering if they can trust somebody else that they might not know.

Tommy Hyland: There are some people I trust so much that if I actually saw them stealing money I probably wouldn’t believe it. But you’re right. I haven’t known every single person I’ve ever played with inside and out. Certainly, one of the most important obstacles to having a successful team is the honesty/trustworthiness issue.

There are also some other things you can do to try to verify results. You have to really be pretty sure of the person beforehand. But there are a few things you can do to check on people’s honesty. The obvious one is the polygraph, and we do give those. You can watch them, but it’s tough. Eventually, you basically have to make a decision and not constantly worry about it. You have to take a chance.

There’s no foolproof way to make sure someone’s honest. There’s no way you can watch everyone, and verify their results on every play they make. They’re going to have money and they’re going to play, and you’re going to have to trust their results.

Big Players

BJF: How much of a problem do you have with your big players being recognized in the casinos?

Tommy Hyland: In recent years, this has been the biggest problem on the bankrolls I’ve played on. Most of the people I’ve played with are pretty “hot.” They’re either in the Griffin book, or are recognized by the bosses in the major casinos.

On my teams that has been the main reason why we haven’t made a lot more money. The honesty issue has really not been a problem. I’ve been fortunate enough to play with really solid people. Our main problem is being able to play. A lot of our players now have been playing for 10 or 15 years and they’re really well known. So, we have trouble getting the games down.

BJF: Do you have certain BPs who have become so well known that you can’t even use them at all anymore?

Tommy Hyland: In recent years, in the banks I’ve been involved with, we haven’t really used the big player technique, per se, that much, with several spotters and one big player. Most of the time we’ve just gone out and played as individuals. There are lots of casinos now, so everyone can usually find somewhere to play. Also, many of my associates do a number of other things, and don’t really want to play blackjack all the time. End of interview.

Key Factors in the Success of a Blackjack Team

For me, the most intriguing revelations from my conversation with Tommy Hyland were are the “mini-target” concept, as opposed to the old “double-your-bank” concept, combined with always betting a very small fraction of Kelly. Teams that typically play close to Kelly (in order to maximize expectation), while attempting to double the original bank, risk suffering losses that will decimate the bank, and may doom the team to failure.

Obviously, if you put together a $50,000 team bank, then try to double it, your chances of success will be less favorable than if you were to put together a $300,000 bank, then aim for a $50,000 target.

Hyland’s contention that in the past ten to twelve years of play his blackjack team has never failed to hit a target sounds fantastic, unless you consider the implications of fractional Kelly betting. Suppose two teams are each betting similar amounts, but one team has started with a $50,000 bank, and is betting full Kelly, while the other has started with a $200,000 bank, but is betting only one quarter Kelly. A drawdown of $30,000 would have little effect on the team that started with the $200,000 bank, but it would severely hinder the team that started with a $50,000 total bank. The latter would be facing an uphill struggle for survival.

Another sure factor in Hyland’s long term success must be his use of only trusted friends as team members. Many teams go out hunting for players, instead of allowing a team to form naturally among friends, close acquaintances, and relatives. And even within his group of trusted teammates, Hyland continues to utilize polygraph exams — a safety procedure first employed by Al Francesco.

Al recently told me: “I wouldn’t be on any team that didn’t use polygraphs. There’s just too much money involved. You need it for the peace of mind of everyone on the team.”

A Conversation with Hyland Team Member Barbara D.

[Barbara D. was one of the players arrested at the Casino Windsor in 1994, and was acquitted by the provincial court of Ontario. She has since filed a lawsuit against the province for wrongful arrest and malicious prosecution. Barbara is a grandmother, and works part time in a flower shop in a suburb of Detroit. She was a sheriff’s deputy for 17 years in Orange County, California. She also sold real estate in southern California for 4 years before moving to Michigan. She met Tommy Hyland through a close relative who was one of Tommy’s original team partners.]

BJF: In the Windsor incident, you were not actually playing blackjack, but passing signals to the player who was betting multiple hands of $2500 each. You and Karen were actually the “brains” of the operation. Have you ever played blackjack for large amounts of money, thousands of dollars per hand, yourself?

Barbara: No, but I think it could be done. I remember watching a wealthy woman playing at that level — she was the founder of a large corporation, or the CEO of it or something. The pit didn’t seem to pay any more attention to her than to anybody else. And she used to bet very, very big.

BJF: Would it appeal to you to do that, or do you prefer not to?

Barbara: I don’t know. I guess I’m a bit skittish about spending other people’s money to that degree, although I probably would get over it. I know when I first started, if we would lose $10,000 or $20,000, my God, my head would just swim. And eventually, I could walk around with lots more than that in my purse and not think anything of it.

So, I guess you do get accustomed to it. I think I could. If I were confident enough in my skills as a big player, which are different than my skills doing what I do… But I have complete confidence in my skills doing what I do — telling somebody else to bet big money. So, I think that if I worked on not only getting my counting down to perfection, but also all the variations that are necessary depending on the system you’re playing, then I probably would feel comfortable with it.

BJF: Do you have much interpersonal contact with the casino personnel, like the pit bosses and casino managers and things like that?

Barbara: No.

BJF: Don’t they try to talk to the players when there’s that much money being played?

Barbara: They do sometimes, but it depends. The host is the one who might come around and get into conversations with you, and then, if it stops your play, usually they say, “Well, I don’t want to interrupt you,” and go on their way.

It depends on how you receive them. If you start out very friendly with somebody there in the pit, be it the dealer or one of the floor people, and start chit-chatting, especially if they’re not extremely busy or they only have your table and maybe one other to keep an eye on, then they will go into lengthy conversations. But if you just kind of answer their question and don’t offer them any more, then they leave you alone.

BJF: Do you have any problems with being recognized in casinos right now?

Barbara: Not from walking in and being recognized, like Tommy would in some places.

BJF: But you have no problem with being recognized?

Barbara: I couldn’t walk into the Casino Windsor, to tell you the truth. As a matter of fact, I was out dancing last night, and a fellow asked me, “Gee, Barbara, let’s go over to the casino.” And I said, “I can’t.” He said, “Well, you don’t have to bet. I’ll bet. Just come over with me.” And I said, “I can’t.” I said, “They won’t let me in.” But they did rescind that order.

BJF: If someone told you he was interested in playing blackjack professionally, and really trying to make some money at it, what kind of advice would you have for him?

Barbara: Did you see the TV interview I did last month in Detroit?

BJF: No.

Barbara: Bill Bonds asked me if someone had $300 and was going over to the Casino Windsor to bet his money, what kind of advice would I give him? And I said, “Take the $300 and go play bingo at the church.”

I said that for the simple reason that I don’t care how much skill you have, how knowledgeable you are — if you don’t have the resources behind you to see you through bad times, let alone the knowledge and the skill to know that it will turn around because it’s just mathematics — the bankroll is the main thing — if you don’t have the resources behind you to see you through the bad times, you could go into a skid and not be able to come out of it simply because you don’t have the money to keep going. People don’t realize that. End of interview.

Arnold Snyder comments: Barbara D.’s remarks about her initial nervousness with the large sums of money being won and lost reflect a common problem team players have always had. It is one thing to work out a plan on paper, but quite another to maintain a cool head, and a natural act, when enormous amounts of cash are being won and lost, sometimes in the course of just a few minutes.

A Conversation with Hyland Blackjack Team Member Karen C.

[Karen C. was also arrested at the Casino Windsor, was prosecuted for cheating, and was acquitted of the charges. She too has sued the province of Ontario over the incident.]

BJF: What were you doing before you got involved with the Hyland team?

Karen: I was a sales rep for a small company. We sold items that other companies used for promotion, give away, that type of thing.

BJF: How did you meet Tommy Hyland?

Karen: One of his team members was a friend of mine, and he played with him for about a year, and kept telling me, “You should do this. It’s great. You’d be good at it.” And finally after about a year, I was looking to do something different and that’s how I got started.

BJF: Have you ever worked as the BP or the person who’s actually betting at the table?

Karen: Not the BP, no. I have not.

BJF: Have you bet big money at the tables as part of the team play?

Karen: I have. Yes.

BJF: Do you find that as a woman there’s any advantage, or disadvantage, to being a woman in that position?

Karen: There’s good and bad. The good to being a woman, I think, is that many casinos have the stereotype that you are someone’s girlfriend or wife or whatever, so it’s not really your money. You’re just there for fun and you don’t really know what you’re doing, because most BPs are men. You look a little bit less threatening, if you will.

The bad part is that there aren’t a lot of women betting like that, so you’re sort of remembered a little bit more. There just are not too many of them. On the other hand, I think you’re not taken quite as seriously, or perceived of as big of a threat, as a man is.

BJF: If someone told you they were interested in playing blackjack professionally, what kind of advice would you give them?

Karen: The first thing I would say is read as many books as you can, and just actually knowing how to play, knowing how much to bet, getting together finances. I would tell somebody it’s not as glamorous and as easy as it looks, and that you’re not guaranteed. Even if you’re a great player and you know every single strategy move, you’re still not guaranteed any type of win. But really do a lot of research before you get into something like that.

BJF: How long have you been doing this?

Karen: I guess I’m going on four years with the Hyland team.

BJF: Do you imagine you will continue going for a while yet?

Karen: In a limited capacity, yes. End of interview.

Arnold Snyder comments: Both Karen and Barbara point out that the stereotypes held by casino bosses can be used by intelligent women to their advantage at the tables. Also note that in our conversation with Chris Z. which follows, Chris Z. mentions a number of other stereotypes that perceptive players can capitalize on in attempting to pull off an act.

A Conversation with Hyland Team Member Christopher Z.

[Chris Z., another Hyland team member arrested at the Casino Windsor for cheating, was prosecuted and acquitted. He too has sued the province for damages. At the time he was arrested, Chris had been spreading his bets from $100 to two hands of $2500 each over a period of three days.]

BJF: What is your background?

Chris: Economics degree from the University of Delaware.

BJF: What kind of jobs have you had?

Chris: Cold sales jobs. I worked for a chemical company.

BJF: Are you a salesman now?

Chris: No, I’m trading stocks in Manhattan.

BJF: Do you think the same type of personality that would go with being a salesman is the type of personality that would go well for being a big player?

Chris: Yes.

BJF: How long have you been a big player?

Chris: Three years.

BJF: Has that all been with Tommy Hyland?

Chris: Yes, all of it with Tommy, though I was involved with blackjack team play seven years ago.

BJF: How did you meet Tommy Hyland?

Chris: Through golf 14 years ago. I was about 18.

BJF: In being a big player, would you say you are successful at pulling off that act?

Chris: Being a younger guy, I always acted like the rich, snotty kid — like I had money given to me. I always used to tell casino people I had family money. That was kind of my thing. I never really said I earned it. I just said it was all family money. We were dealing with such a large magnitude of cash. I was 28, 27. I was pretty young looking. When I still had all my hair, I was younger looking.

BJF: So being young you think would be a drawback to trying to play with that kind of money?

Chris: Yeah, it’s a drawback. You’ve got to really sell it. A few of the younger guys I don’t think work. I think I was pretty good at selling, a lot better than a few of the other younger guys that we had playing for us.

BJF: Do you get asked a lot of questions by casino personnel when you’re playing with that kind of money?

Chris: Yeah. When they’re with me, a lot of the guys… The older guys try to just keep anonymity. I kind of stand out with that kind of money. I always try to bring it out. Tommy always says don’t talk to the host. You can always come back again, they’ll forget you. I always say they’re never going to forget me, so I played it right through them. If I saw them walking by, I wouldn’t hesitate to grab them. “Hey, come over here. Look at this hand,” or something like that.

BJF: What kind of skills from being a salesman would be the same types of skills you would use with trying to sell an act as a big player?

Chris: Just that. You’ve got to take it, take it to them. Like anything else to make a sale, you’ve got to make the sales call. I think for being a young guy, it’s the same way.

If they start giving me attention, I make it look like I should get attention. That’s the attitude I took. Even if they were pit bosses, I’d say, “Hey, come over here. Check this out.” I used to have a big joke with them, especially if I knew they were bad guys, I used to say, “Man, since you got here, I started winning,” especially if I was winning, “Stand here, buddy. You’re giving me good luck. Don’t go away.”

Sometimes they would stand there for a half hour. It was great. They wouldn’t think anything of it. A lot of times it would throw them off. “If this guy was up to something, he wouldn’t want me to be here.”

I used to do all sorts of things. Stuff where I’d go to the pit bosses to get jackets and stuff like that. I’d say, “I’m a little cold. Will you get me a jacket?” They have to go to the gift store and get me a jacket or something like that… I’d do it to get rid of them.

One of our big players ran into a couple of guys in the Mirage. He had just been barred there, and he was cashing some chips out and ran into a couple of guys from another casino that were in Vegas from another town, and they were saying, “Hey, how you doing, buddy?” And he said, “Jerry, you want to go get a couple of drinks?” He acted like he was supposed to be there. He was using a totally different name at the other casino.

Me personally, I used to go up and have drinks with the hosts and the pit bosses. If they would have a drink, I’d have a drink with them. I used to do anything. “Okay, give me a massage.” I used to really take full advantage of it. I’d get them to do anything for me. I played like a real bratty kid. The girl I used to play with said I was a brat all the time. I used to get them to do things for me because I wanted to sell that.

BJF: What’s the most convincing act to pull off when you’re betting big money?

Chris: Depends on who you are. I think the older guys have a big advantage. I think they see an older guy betting big, it’s nothing. If you’re Asian, you’ve got the best act in the world. End of interview.

Arnold Snyder comments: Chris Z.’s camouflage technique as a young player is similar to that employed by Ken Uston. Instead of trying to blend in and be anonymous, he tries to be so obvious that he is considered more of a pain in the neck than a serious threat. His outgoing friendliness toward pit personnel, hosts, etc., is also reminiscent of Ian Andersen’s approach to acceptance, as Andersen describes in his classic, Turning the Tables on Las Vegas (Vanguard Press, 1976).

In forming a team, the major considerations are: (1) the size of bank; (2) the number of participants; (3) the financial arrangements; and, (4) the playing strategy. There are many conceivable ways to work out these details, and no one right way to do it. But there are also a lot of wrong ways to go about forming a team plan that should be avoided.

The Blackjack Team Bank

For safety, meaning minimum risk of tapping out, the Hyland team method of setting mini-targets, combined with a fractional Kelly betting strategy, is probably the best approach. Many players, however, would find it impossible to put together a sizable enough bank to make this approach feasible. Hyland himself acknowledges that he began with a personal bankroll of only $1,000, a substantially risky proposition in any casino blackjack game, at any level of play.

This does not mean, however, that the team concept is entirely useless for players with small bankrolls. If you’ve got $2,000, and you have a couple of friends who have $1,500 each, the three of you playing off a $5,000 team bank are immensely more powerful, and more likely to last, than the three of you playing individually.

It would also be very difficult to play at a small fraction of Kelly with a $5,000 total bank — at least from the practical perspective. There would be no difficulty limiting your max bets to $20, which would certainly allow you to play a fractional Kelly approach, but you would also very likely be limiting your bet spread, which would cut into your potential profits. Your expected hourly rate at this level may also be unacceptable, especially if you have expenses (travel, lodging, etc.).

Anyone considering a team venture, however, must start from wherever they are, and it would be far more dangerous to go out and find strangers to hook up with, just to increase your team bank. Remember, your team bank could be stolen by a dishonest teammate quicker than you could lose it at the tables. A prime purpose of forming a team bank is to avoid risk. This leads us to…

The Number of Team Participants

Rather than seeking a specific number of teammates, you should be looking to only those people you can trust. If you have only one trusted friend or relative who might be interested in this venture, then the perfect size for your team is two players.

It is far safer to look for people you already trust to join you in this type of endeavor, even if you must teach them how to play from scratch, than it would be to look for players who are already good card counters, then try to decide if you can trust them with your money.

The Hyland team today has dozens of players, and according to Tommy, he was up to 10-15 players (mostly his golfing buddies) within the first year. There is definitely power in numbers due to numerous factors.

If most players are bankroll contributors, the team bank also grows with the team size. The more players you have, the more hands per hour, per week, per month, etc., you will get in, and this translates to a higher $ expectation. More players also mean more brain power working on strategies, figuring out problems, etc. Some big player strategies require numerous counters/spotters, as do some advanced shuffle-tracking methods.

But these positive team factors do not necessarily mean that you should have a dozen or more players. A large team requires a lot of organizing ability, which many people do not possess. A two or three man team that functions smoothly will succeed far more often than a ten man team that is in a constant state of chaos, mistrust, etc.

Blackjack Team Financial Arrangements

With any large team, and especially if unequal participants are involved, the financial arrangements will be complicated, and must be figured out according to the precise situation. Two or three players who contribute equal $ amounts to the bank, and who agree to all play the same number of hours, should have little difficulty making an agreement as to how to divvy up profits. It’s an equal split.

The problems arise when various participants are contributing different amounts to the bank, are playing different numbers of hours, are utilizing different levels of skill, have different levels of expenses, etc. These complications are yet another reason to go into a venture like this slowly, so that you may figure out these details as they come up. Even with only two or three players, problems can arise based on factors of inequity in bankroll contributions, hours, talent, expenses, etc., and for any specific team, a fair agreement will be specific to that team only.

Other Considerations for Blackjack Teams

Will you have outside investors, i.e., investors who are not players? If so, they will want to know up front what the return on their investment will be based on.

Will you have players who are non-investors? If so, how will these players be compensated? Will they be compensated for the number of hours they play? If so, any extreme negative fluctuation which causes the bank to go an inordinate number of hours until the target is hit, could find itself eaten up by hourly “wages” to the players before the target is reached. But if you do not pay players who are non-investors, how will you keep them committed to the team effort when it appears it may take months until they ever see a penny in pay?

Will you have players at different levels of talent? Is counting/spotting a lesser talent than doing a big player act, or vice versa?

All of these types of things contribute to the complexity of devising equitable financial arrangements for a blackjack team. Again, my advice would be to start small and simple, and complicate the arrangement only as it becomes necessary.

Blackjack Team Playing Strategy

One of the real benefits of blackjack team play, mentioned by Tommy Hyland, is that multiple brains can do things strategically that a single player could never pull off. This is a big topic, and is one that we will address in Part II of this Blackjack Team series, in the June issue of Blackjack Forum. ♠