Colin Jones (S1 E6): The Secret to Investing—OPM??

I walked off a game the other day, and I have Colin Jones to thank. On paper, the game could be a 20% edge or higher. In the real world? Not so much. My frustration grew. Why am I playing this 10% garbage? I’m out.

Where does Colin Jones fit into this? Something he wrote on p. 14 of The 21^st-Century Card Counter hit home, because I’ve wrestled with it my whole career, even though I’ve never seen it in print before: “Being responsible for other people’s money is a whole different animal. I never lost a night’s sleep riding out the swings with my own money, but shouldering the weight of family and friends’ money definitely came with bouts of night sweats and indigestion.”

That problem affects me, not so much with friends and family, but with rookie teammates. Over the course of a team trip, there are invariably opportunities for me to make a bet or execute a brief play myself, with no teammates witnessing the play. That’s standard for an ECA (Every Counter Alone) team, but my team trips generally involve a primary target that involves multiple players together (such as a spotter and BP). So it’s a bit of a grey area when a team member goes off and plays something alone during the trip.

There should be some discussion or understanding about that. For instance, what if the team’s primary target is HC play, and a team member says, “I lost $5000 on a hot deck in a monster count while checking dealers in the high-limit pit.” I’ll chop the loss, but that teammate probably won’t be a teammate for long. Sure, we could strictly outlaw that, but I’d rather give people some flexibility, see what decisions they make, and then chop them off if they self-reveal idiocy, degeneracy, or recklessness.

I think the 2^nd-best compliment I ever got was from D Money, an old BP teammate from Vegas (whom I ran into in an elevator fifteen years later in a small hotel in Europe just before the covid lockdown), who said: “I’ll always take a piece of your action.” That shows that he trusts both my skill and my counting of the money. (The best compliment I ever got was from a dealer in the Rio high-limit pit, who said: “We have a word for people like you—‘degenerate’!”)

The problem when gambling with OPM is that maybe those Other People don’t actually have the Money! A rookie teammate might be unable to chop a loss. A rookie who’s been winning with the team for two years or longer should have saved up some money, but, inexplicably, some people are just too irresponsible to save any money whatsoever. That puts the team in a bind, because now we’re floating that loss, and the rookie owes us, but possibly the only way the rookie can make money is continued play with the team. So we have to dig the rookie out of his own hole. Instead of the rookie being our minion, the veterans on the team become minions for the rookie. We’re out there scouting, running numbers, finding and hitting targets to put money in this rookie’s pocket, so he can pay us back the money he owes. And then the rookie complains that we don’t respect his skills. What a joke. But I digress.

In other cases, the person can afford the loss financially, but getting in a big hole can cause depression or grumpiness, especially if winning was expected. And rookies often have the most unrealistic expectations about winning every time. On a good game, we will win every time, but not every game is a good game.

A third problem is that if I play something without witnesses, and then lose, the rookie might want to know what I was playing. Veterans on my team know that I have a bit of a “don’t-ask-because-I-won’t-tell” policy, and there have been many times when I played something and put the profits in the chop that they knew nothing about. It’s like the bag of money that the movie villain/hero leaves at the orphanage, telling Sister Theresa, “Don’t worry about where this money came from, just do some good with it!” But explaining advanced moves to rookies is something that isn’t about to happen.

There is a bit of ego involved as well. Losing too often without witnesses might raise red flags and damage a player’s credibility. There are two—only two—ways that frequent losing can occur: either the game is negative, or there’s skimming. I wouldn’t want to be suspected of either.

So, like CJ, I find myself under stress when OPM is involved. I think that’s a good litmus test of a team player. You will encounter some players who play fast and loose with team money, while people like me and CJ probably play tighter.

I knew a team that had brought on a rookie, and bankrolled him to go play some supposedly high-edge games (that was the team’s first mistake). Anyway, they found that he was tipping too much, way too much. I spied on this player (he didn’t know me) and confirmed excessive tipping, among other mistakes. So they changed the team policy and said that all tips would henceforth come out of his own pocket. Guess what happened. The guy immediately started complaining about toke-hustling dealers, and how these tips were adding up ($100-$200 per day). It didn’t take long before his tipping level went to zero. Zero!

At that point, you might think that the team had solved its problem, because they eliminated the EV-offensive behavior of excessive tipping. That was true in the short-term, but long-term, they had a bigger problem: this guy plays fast and loose with the team money, but when it’s his own money, he’s tight as a drum. To me, that’s a huge warning sign. That might even warrant cutting the guy loose right there.

(Their “solution” that led to the guy not tipping at all isn’t optimal for the team anyway, because now the guy isn’t making the modest professional tips that he should be making. For high-edge games, some amount of tipping is generally optimal, and strategic tipping is a useful tool for a veteran.)

I want teammates who are as tight or tighter with team money than their own personal money. You’ll see some players start blasting on a super-marginal game with maybe no edge at all the second they get their hands on a big team bankroll. (Overbetting marginal games is one of the red flags for skimming, BTW.) For me, it’s always been the opposite: my game selection is tighter when I play on a team bankroll.

In between team trips, I might play marginal games on my own bankroll. There’s a team benefit to that. Maintaining my solo exposure and persona at the casino can be good for the team later, provided I don’t get backed off. However, I’m at a point in my career when I want to do more coding, less playing. To that end, I’m trying to skip the marginal games that I tend to play on my own time.

So it came to pass that I was on a marginal game the other day. I was in the middle of a small loss, and frustrated by the inconsistent game quality. In my youth, I would have stayed to dig out of that hole. The game was a crappy 10% game, but mama always said, “Finish your game—there are starving card counters in Vegas!” Low edge be damned, I’m digging out! That was the old, young me.

The new, old me asks, “Would I be playing this game on a team bankroll?” Hell no! If Colin Jones and Sister Theresa could see me on this crappy game, they’d assign some inter-denominational penance, like writing “I will not play poorly cut shoes” a thousand times on the chalkboard. Or worse, they’d make me play those shoes.

So I walked away from that game. Thank you, Colin Jones, you saved me.