RIP, Futurist
Twenty years ago, I spent Easter locked down in a concrete holding cell at CCDC—Clark County Detention Center—after being jailed on trumped-up charges by Caesars Palace, who couldn’t handle that my teammate and I had won a few thousand bucks playing Three Card Poker. From the jailhouse phone, I called Arnold Snyder, my publisher, to tell him to hold the presses to give my lawyer time to look over the manuscript for Beyond Counting, published a few months later. Like Jesus, I consider Easter something of a professional anniversary, typically celebrated by whacking a casino game while contemplating my career goals. This weekend there won’t be any game-whacking for me (can’t say about Jesus).
Today I’m spending my Easter locked down by the CDC—Center for Disease Control and Prevention—after a supposedly trumped-up coronavirus, without the flashy gore of Ebola and smallpox, caused a real pandemic after all. For me, it was real from the beginning. Ever since my own deadly bout with a pathogen years ago, Google has been feeding me every article on Ebola, MERS, E. coli, and brain-eating amoebas. I click on them all. I needed a ventilator for over a week, and had to re-learn to walk, so the medical implications of the coronavirus are quite real to me.
For others, there are different stages of realness. Did it become more real when the virus attacked a celebrity (Tom Hanks)? An athlete (Rudy Gobert)? When the NBA shut down, and then all sports, and hence sports betting, it started to feel real to some APs. Did it get real when Ireland shut down pubs? Maybe when Canada shut down hockey? Or when China shut down casinos?
Then the ides of March brought casino closures worldwide. That’s when it got real for APs. For some, the financial impact is palpable, but they don’t realize how lucky they got, medically. I am very confident that if casinos had remained open one more week, many APs I know—or you—would have gotten infected. No big deal, you say? A virus with a roughly 1% death risk, maybe a bit less for someone under 50 years of age—ha! I don’t know if you’ve looked at a calendar lately, but most of us aren’t young anymore! On top of that, most APs are male, possibly boosting the death risk twofold. Now we’re talking about something comparable to a one-outer in poker. Have you ever been in a “1n1” game of Ultimate Texas Holdem, on the river with the dealer down to a single out to beat you? Put your life against that last card the dealer is about to flip over. If everyone at the Blackjack Ball is put up against that, one or two people die.
It’ll become more real when someone you personally know dies. I’m there. A hobbyist card counter who often played a double-deck game that I sometimes played got COVID19 and died. He was such a fixture that my crew had a nickname for him. We called him “The Futurist” due to his resemblance to Dr. Michio Kaku, a scientist who is popular for his conjectures about the future. I suppose I didn’t personally know The Futurist. If you had asked him if he knew me, he would surely have said no, or he would have just said that I’m a local gambler he recognizes. I knew his name and his game, though, so that’s pretty close in my world.
The Futurist would always sit at third base on DD, playing one or two spots, always enjoying himself, especially when betting the Lucky Ladies in unison with other counters at the table. He probably enjoyed the camaraderie of it all more than whatever money could be made off that game. He was a friendly fellow, and he so consistently anchored that band of counters that it became a bit unnerving to occasionally see that table deadspread on a weekend afternoon.
And now, when the casino eventually re-opens, The Futurist won’t be sitting anchor. This isn’t real.
What is To Be Done?
When the coronavirus forced casinos to close last month, the smart APs I know were not in the casinos at all, or they were bouncing around the country liquidating chip inventories, making sure they had enough cash on hand to survive a protracted lockdown. The fake APs? Well, they were, I imagine, just panicking. Panicking about possible death from a relentless virus? No!! Rather, some are panicking about not being able to pay for basic expenses for a few months. APs are not peculiar in this regard. A recent survey estimates that over half of Americans do not have enough savings to survive three months of expenses: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/nearly-half-americans-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-bank-survey. It should be embarrassing for any AP to be living game-to-game after winning six or seven figures in the last few years. Fiscal responsibility is especially important for an AP, whose income can be highly variable and unpredictable. Who knows when the next big score will come?
Even a squirrel is smarter than most Americans. A typical squirrel works hard all year long, and builds up a bankroll of 10,000 units, er, nuts. And no, the squirrel doesn’t forget where they all are. Studies show that squirrels have organized storage systems: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/504458/squirrels-are-probably-more-organized-you-study-finds. So the typical squirrel is smarter than Johnny Chang, the MIT counter of Bringing-Down-the-House fame, notorious for discovering caches of chips previously hidden and forgotten in his house. (I have no doubt Johnny Chang will comment below with a link to a squirrel trying to hide a nut in the fur of a Bernese Mountain Dog, and say, “I’m definitely smarter than that squirrel!” I’ll beat him to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTPOSdyA7Uo)
So while half the world is whining about what a nightmare this lockdown is, and comparing it to the UIGEA Black Friday in 2011, the competent people I know are all seizing this unique opportunity to be productive, to get caught up on projects and start new ones. We’re running around like Quicksilver while the rest of the world is on Pause: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMp_5HtO-aE.
On top of my standard workload writing code daily and working on my next book for Anthony Curtis, my publisher, I’ve added several activities to fill the extra time the lockdown has gifted me. As Kevin Garnett famously said: “I take a lot of pride in my craft. I work really hard on my craft every day, and I’m a true professional.” Here are some specific recommendations on what to do:
- Wash your hands frequently. Real APs use soap. Fake APs have the misconception that while soap will mechanically remove the virus by making it slip-and-slide down the drain, sanitizer will chemically kill it, or that soap is recommended as a cost issue. Wrong! Soap does not just wash the virus away; soap chemically kills the virus. Please read https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2020/3/11/21173187/coronavirus-covid-19-hand-washing-sanitizer-compared-soap-is-dope
- Watch a movie. I watched Inside the Edge, a cool card-counting documentary by KC and Chris Buddy. It turns out IMDB and RottenTomatoes list me as part of the cast. Who knew? It’s a ton of work to make a movie (or write a book), so I hope they get some views beyond the AP community. For about three seconds, this movie made me want to count cards. I wish I had KC’s stomach.
- Lose weight. I’m considering getting P90X to turn this into a fun project. For me, the lockdown has forced a certain amount of deliberation on my food acquisition. Gone are the relief-dealer snacks that caused me to balloon in recent years. Combined with daily exercise, I’ve lost 3 pounds so far, with my goal of 12 in sight if the lockdown lasts long enough. I wish I had KC’s stomach.
- Learn a language. Visit http://babbel.com, pick the language you always wished you could speak, and one month into this lockdown, you could be speaking it well above tourist level.
- Learn a language. Visit http://khanacademy.org, pick the language you always wished you could code, and one month into this lockdown, you could write a Three Card Poker simulator.
- Read a book. I read The 21st-Century Card Counter, by Colin Jones. It’s great, I give it an A. I’ll have much, much more to say about it later. For about seven seconds, this book made me want to count cards. I might have given it an A+ if the subtitle had been “A Pro’s Approach to Beating Today’s Blackjack.” It irritates me that a lot of APs (and teammates!) are going to skip this book and miss out.
- Work on your game. If you’re a poker player, you can be reading books, using software, playing online. If you’re an aspiring counter, you can be learning at https://www.blackjackapprenticeship.com/. If you’re a hole-carder, you can be studying your Paints. Now is the part of the movie when you’re up in the mountains learning kung fu before you get unleashed on the world to exact revenge.
- Write a blog post.
- Comment on a blog post!