If you’ve ever kicked the top off an ant mound to trigger and reveal an alarming frenzy of activity that is ultimately meaningless, then you know what it’s like to make an online post defending Colin Jones. The lurkers come out in full hater mode, trying to sting and bite everything in sight. A meta-analysis of the various websites now puts Colin Jones in a statistical tie with Jake “The Snake” Roberts, measured in terms of Villain Power Ranking. FiveThirtyEight projects CJ’s VPR to surpass Marlo Stanfield by the end of 2021.
There really weren’t any new criticisms. There are still three main categories: CJ markets easy money from counting like a snake-oil salesman; I learned on my own; CJ is killing the games.
What about this easy money? Is CJ an optimist?—sure. Is he favorably biased due to his own experience, which might have been lucky (I mean “above EV”)?—perhaps. But here’s a direct quote from his book, The 21st-Century Card Counter (p. 74): “It might be easier to become a card counter than a marine biologist, but it’s no walk in the park. If you believe it is, it’s the first sign you probably won’t make it. There’s truly no shame in discovering that you don’t have what it takes to live the life of a card counter.” Hallelujah! I am healed!
Then, if you think he’s going for the upsell to the bootcamp, there’s this (p. 77): “Am I saying you have to attend a Blackjack Bootcamp to make it as a card counter? No. But if you want to be successful, you do need to invest the time, energy, and possibly even some money in developing your skills and knowledge base to make sure you’re playing like a pro and not just gambling with your bankroll.”
Where’s the upsell? Where are the false promises? Where is the bait-and-switch? Where is the mail fraud? Where is the Ponzi scheme? Tell me about Burisma! I’m not seeing it.
Then there’s the “I-learned-on-my-own” school of criticism. And your point is? And you are here regarding … ? What does that have to do with CJ’s teaching empire? The BJA empire consists of a book (good way to learn), software (really good way to learn), online videos (easy way to learn), a movie (good way to get inspired), and bootcamps (another pretty good way to learn and get inspired).
How is the I-discovered-X-on-my-own statement even relevant if we’re discussing the merits of CJ’s business? It’s not. It’s just a boast, and an empty one at that. Even if a guy discovered HC on his own, or practiced counting on his own, so what? Did he compute BS on his own, too? I’ve heard the same boasts from readers of Exhibit CAA, from “I didn’t learn anything from it” to “I could have written that” to the greatest boast of all time (the “G-BOAT”): “James may have wrote The Book, but I am The Book.” On that last one, imagine it with a Middle Eastern accent dripping with biblical melodrama, like when someone declares the founding of a caliphate, with lots of references to swords, blood, and infidels. Or when Qaddafi’s son boasts about defending the regime “to the last man, the last woman, the last bullet.” Easy there, big boy.
Learning on one’s own may be gratifying to some, or impressive to others, but it’s generally highly inefficient. Having the guidance of a competent mentor is vastly more efficient. Even if you could invent the wheel, why would you want to? You can buy one for a very reasonable price. I learned BS for a very reasonable price (pre-Internet) from the book Winning Casino Blackjack for the Non-Counter, by Avery Cardoza, and I never would have spent years running numbers if I could have just bought a book of charts for $250, or $5000.
A twist on the I-learned-on-my-own was I-learned-by-networking-on-my-own. The main argument there is that private networking keeps stuff proprietary. Fair enough, but CJ just isn’t giving out any proprietary info. His students might talk too much and lack discretion, but that’s actually common among all rookies, whether they be BJA rookies or not. So the real “problem” with BJA, so far as I can see, is not any flaw in the pedagogical method, or even the quality of the students, but the sheer number of them. The problem is that CJ is too successful! I’m reminded of the seniors on the Notre Dame football team who complained that Rudy’s work effort was making them look bad.
Some posts said that CJ is doing something that no one has done. GWAE co-host Richard Munchkin correctly pointed out that card-counting schools or teaching programs have been done. They just weren’t as successful as BJA. Johnny Chang, Mike Aponte, and Semyon Dukach have all tried to train people or distribute educational material. They just didn’t have CJ’s success at scaling. Revisionist history would say Aponte was trying to recruit BPs (that’s really just the evolution of the business plan after scaling card-counting instruction to the masses proved too difficult), and that Dukach “moved on” (that can be the result of success, but is often the result of failure). Those guys all had the MIT legend to build on, with a Hollywood A-Lister (Kevin Spacey!) cast as Johnny Chang, and now it looks like CJ’s BJA is the last school standing. CJ might be the true grand master of Wing Chun.
BJA’s success is creating a swell on the predator side of the predator-prey cycle, but that isn’t sustainable. If the wave of counters really does kill games, then the predators will start to starve or move on to new food supplies.
Are the games getting killed by CJ and BJA? That’s the big question, but the wrong one. The important question is: Are games getting wasted? Having personally witnessed a game getting wasted by amateurish execution (multiple counters on the same table, yucking it up in front of the Casino Manager), I’m comfortable saying that some games will be wasted. But I do not believe that the total amount of money sucked out of casinos will be reduced, which is what some have claimed. Online, it’s hard to get through the sour-grapes whining, and the fox-and-grapes dismissals of CJ’s enterprise.
I even saw the claim that the size of the card-counting pie will be exponentially reduced as the number of counters increases. There is no theoretical basis for that claim. What if casinos just back off players they catch, and the games themselves remain largely unaffected? It is an empirical question how much the pie is affected, but I see no indication that there’s any exponential decrease. That’s just a bunch of pseudo-mathematical gobbledygook. (PRO TIP for online trolls: Try to insert “logarithmic” or “ergodic” or “heteroskedastic” into your next baseless claim. Those are really good buzzwords. And you can’t go wrong with “machine learning”!)
My experience with BC games has been that most or at least many targets die a natural death. The game ends due to some exogenous cause that has nothing to do with the AP’s play (for instance, a pandemic). Another common outcome is that the AP gets backed off, but the target games remain available. And there are many, many games out there—right now as you read this—that aren’t getting played to their fullest, if at all. In the last few years, I’ve seen four different games that were significantly positive with basic strategy. How many APs did we run into on those four games combined? One. And he was under water on the game.
Some counters are blaming CJ for the proliferation of CSMs, but that’s a trend that has been happening for years anyway. The CSM is an efficient machine. If all the Mericans visited casinos abroad, they’d see that CSMs have been the norm throughout Europe and Asia, since before CJ ever found the Glorious True 1. If you know a bunch of BC methods, you’ve noticed that casinos have adopted many new procedures and devices in recent years that make AP harder, but card counters notice only what pertains to them, and think that every casino change is due to them—or Colin Jones.
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“In the last few years, I’ve seen four different games that were significantly positive with basic strategy.”
How do you define “significantly”? Were these edges readily apparent to the semi-educated AP, or did you need to simulate the games to find a better basic strategy?
Actually, my previous sentence presumed new carnival games, but in context I’m now thinking you mean blackjack games. But even then, some rules would require a different basic strategy… for example various Charlie rules. So the question remains: Were these four games beatable with regular old published basic strategy, or with a ‘less available’ strategy to play without other information?
“ logarithmic” is commonly used in inferential statistics to detrend a data series, e.g. remove the inflation component from a data series
“ergodic” – to the best of my recollections, only Grosjean uses this term. I have read many high level articles and books, even research papers, etc and only Grosjean is correlated with this word. (“Orthogonal” is another Grosjean favorite buzz term — must be due to that elite Applied Math education.)
“ heteroskedastic” – I still remember this term from my Junior year in college when I took Econometrics 301. It was the variance would blow up. I had to look it up online to be sure and one source stated: “ Heteroskedastic refers to a condition in which the variance of the residual term, or error term, in a regression model varies widely.”
I remember it was one of our sanity or “does it make sense” checks (including testing for multicollinearity, etc) for our regression equation.
“Machine Learning” is brand new to me.
I’m surprised Grosjean didn’t use my favorite term: Fuzzy Logic (as opposed to MP’s favorite term of heuristics) or low brow terms like AP lexicon or argot.
“Fuzzy logic” is a good one! That was all the rage about 30 years ago, but I don’t hear about it anymore. I think it got overused and didn’t seem so cutting-edge anymore.
[EV Bandit: “Orthogonal” is another Grosjean favorite buzz term] Citation?
My impression of Blackjack Apprenticeship is that Colin and gang have turned into educators. I view CJ as an educator and teacher of blackjack, a family man, a businessman, he speaks clearly, and he doesn’t seem like a full time blackjack player who is grinding. I’m sure he still plays blackjack but probably not to the extent that he used to when he was with the Church team but I could be wrong.
Colin’s in a documentary, he has the book, and he’s using the popularity of social media such as Youtube and Facebook to reach out and appeal to new prospects entering the game or players who want to improve their game. I don’t see a patreon setup on BJA’s Youtube page which is great and by not having a patreon it appeals to people in the sense that BJA are not E-beggars.
I’ve watched some of BJA’s videos on Youtube and Colin carries himself in a professional manner in my opinion. The videos seem like they have organization to them and they are well thought out. However I figure that not everyone who gets educated and trained by BJA will succeed at the game. I say that because Colin admitted in a BJA video where he was talking about CSM’s and ASM’s that one of their freshly trained students right out of bootcamp went and played/counted a CSM blackjack game. LOL! Colin mentioned that the student got lucky and won $1000s on that CSM blackjack game. I’m glad Colin shared the story because not everyone who gets trained by BJA will succeed and their students are still prone to making mistakes at the game. After hearing that I’m left wondering was it a failure on the part of the student because he didn’t follow the instructions of BJA or did BJA fail the student?
We had a counter sit on a CSM game once. Took him 3 hands to realize it, then he left. Thankfully, he didn’t take notice to what was going on.
When that happens, I politely ask if they’ll wait until the end of the shoe, and then see how long they’ll sit. The dealer usually can’t keep a straight face.
I learned enough from LVA and a few books to recognize “The Window of Opportunity” of The Las Vegas Hilton Craps Tournaments” in the Fall of ’05 and the Spring of ’06 !! $70,000.00 winnings in 6 months!
If I were to guess on the type of counting strategy that BJA initially teaches students at their boot camps I would have to say HiLo. According to BJA’s website they train with HiLo. After hearing Colin tell the story of that particular student who got incredibly lucky and won $1000’s playing a CSM immediately after boot camp for his 1st game at blackjack how could the student have employed what he learned from BJA? If the student was using HiLo the student couldn’t have done any deck estimation and was literally gambling. Paying for the BJA block of instruction was a complete waste with such a student. This student was a complete failure even though he may have won around $20K as Colin stated in his BJA video. Everything went in one ear and out the other. That BJA student needs to be retrained.
“Revisionist history would say…that Dukach ‘moved on’ (that can be the result of success, but is often the result of failure).”
If you don’t think running a venture capital fund has more upside potential than creating a blackjack training site…not sure what to tell you there.
Where do I say that pursuing blackjack would be a better choice for him, or for anyone with a similar academic background??? I’m not comparing the two career paths or results. I’m just saying that success in career path B (working at a “fund”) doesn’t imply success in career path A (blackjack). I think we can look at the accomplishments in A directly, and I don’t think there was much there for him in the blackjack world, so I’m saying this was NOT a case of “I’ve accomplished everything in field A that can be accomplished, and I’m moving on to the next challenge [which is what Tom Brady might say after this year].” But these days we see a common false narrative of people who are purported to have crushed every thing they ever did, especially in the case of athletes. The statement “Kobe will be remembered more for his second career than what he did on the court” (yes, I’ve heard that) is utter nonsense, but don’t get me started (yes, I know he won an Oscar).
There are people who put out educational material who are/were high-level practitioners of what they preach, and make a living or used to make a living doing it. I put Colin and Bob Dancer in that camp. Then there are those who put out educational material who are not high-level practitioners, and in some cases complete posers (e.g., the garbage book Blackjack Reality–poser). Some industry consultants (who claim to be former APs–ha!) come to mind in this category. We’ll never know, but I do NOT think Dukach could have achieved what Colin has in the blackjack-education space. (But believe me, I am NOT happy about some of the recent encounters I’ve personally had with BJA counters.)
It’s entirely possible (and admittedly, likely) that Dukach could not have created the cult of personality and hero worship that Colin did and thus effectively market this parallel universe version of BJA into the success that Earth-616 BJA is today. But he literally found a better opportunity. You know how many things I’ve done that have proven at least somewhat profitable and scalable that I later abandoned when I more gainful opportunity came up? Dozens since I was swinging a machete hacking down tree branches at my landscaping gig when I was twelve. Your wording in the article heavily implies that Dukach failed at creating a bj training program and that’s why he moved on, but if I were in the midst of creating a bj training program but realized I could move into venture capital, I wouldn’t think twice
“Your wording in the article heavily implies that Dukach failed at creating a bj training program.” Yes, that’s a fair assessment of my position, when we’re talking about saying that no one has done what Colin has done, and most of us wouldn’t have had Colin’s success even if we had tried. Colin had some good luck, too, as far as a movie putting him on the map. But the book Bringing Down the House and the movie 21 put the MIT guys on the map, and none of their BJA training empires came close to what Colin’s got. I also take the Under on the market’s line on SD’s playing skills and actual ability to make a living beating table games. Of course, he made a higher $$ choice to abandon the BJ path and head towards finance, but I consider that abandonment to be a failure or at best a non-at-bat, not a success. When we say that no one has built a BJ teaching empire like Colin’s, you CAN’T use SD as a counter-example. Now you could say that maybe one reason Colin is the most successful empire builder is that the people who had the chance to supplant him all had better options that they pursued, but that doesn’t change the fact that Colin has reached unprecedented success with his BJA empire. It stuns me that he has something like 230k followers on YouTube. 230k!! Maybe BJTraveler was building a comparable or bigger empire in Asia, but in the US, BJA is the apex predator of the BJ-teaching world.
[How would you describe Michael Jordan’s baseball career? His numbers in the minor league were okay, but he chose to move on to basketball–obviously a good choice. Though he might have succeeded in baseball if he kept going, we can’t give him credit for success that never happened. Most people would call his baseball diversion a failure, or an unfinished hypothetical.]
“ Of course, he made a higher $$ choice to abandon the BJ path and head towards finance, but I consider that abandonment to be a failure or at best a non-at-bat, not a success.”
To me, failure would be him (SD) continuing to try to peddle a second-rate product with little business, or even to go from trying to build a blackjack training program to, I dunno, working at McDanks. VC has such a higher ceiling than building a bj training program that i can’t call that a failure—when I learned hole carding I gradually lost interest in counting and then I learned machines and so now I count cards once in a blue moon, if that. Does that make me a “failed counter?” No, it means I learned how to more efficiently extract money with less heat from casinos so I abandoned the earlier, less effective method of counting
“I also take the Under on the market’s line on SD’s playing skills and actual ability to make a living beating table games.”
I have no idea as to how skilled SD was as an AP, he might very well have been lackluster, not sure if you’ve got inside info on his playing days, a bit before my time. But you realize that by Colin’s own marketing material, over the course of his career he made $600,000 as a counter, and as been doing this around 20 years. I wouldn’t really call $30,000 a year “making a living” either. I’d call it surviving. His team made like 3 million leveraging other people’s money and burning like 40 members of his flock’s names. Lol you give me 40 clean names and I’ll have to actively try to mess up to not crush that result
[Houyi: Does that make me a “failed counter”?] No, BUT IT DOESN”T MAKE YOU A SUCCESSFUL ONE, EITHER!!!!!! My point is that you can’t give someone credit for abandoning something or suggest that he succeeded at A and then moved on to B, nor assume that he would have crushed A had he continued. And nowhere am I saying SD is a “failure” in general, or isn’t making truckloads of money now in an obviously better career path for himself. Where are you reading that in my blog? The FACT of the matter is that SD did enter the BJ-education space, but did NOT build a BJ training empire anywhere close to what Colin has done. (I don’t believe SD would or could have even if he had continued, but that’s my own belief/conjecture, and a hypothetical we’ll never know.)
I’m not here to defend Colin’s results as a player, but you’re certainly twisting it. He wasn’t playing full-time for 20 years, and some of that time he spent was building his BJA business, an investment that is probably generating income now. But Colin doesn’t claim to be something he’s not. I don’t care how you slice it, winning $600k counting and teaming up with others and helping them also win comparable amounts of money is impressive to me, and it puts him into a pretty high percentile among counters, which is what BJA is all about. And the Internet is full of empty and meaningless boasts [hey, give me 5 clean names and the right game, and don’t countermeasure me, and I’ll bankrupt MGM!], which is also what I find appealing about CJ’s accomplishments. Nothing about the guy says “poser” to me, which is something I cannot say about many of the other names kicking around discussions of this type.
Your boast is apples-to-oranges. First of all, churn-and-burn is part of the structural model of a lot of count teams, because its players aren’t necessarily interested in a career in AP, but just want to make some quick cash for a couple years, and the team is willing to bring in new players. Didn’t the Czechs do this? The Greeks certainly did this. And what does “burned” mean anyway? Every highly active counter gets dozens of backoffs and “burns” his own name many times over, and keeps playing if desired. How is “burning 40 names” even a criticism? That’s what happens in counting. That’s why some APs choose not to count much. But you’re talking about having “40 clean names” and winning a gazillion dollars how, exactly? In table games? If YOU are going to use the clean names to facilitate your OWN play, or play with you at the table, that’s a completely different thing from training 40 people to go out and for THEM to play and beat the game without you. If I had 40 clean identities for myself and 40 new faces from some drug-cartel plastic surgeon, I think I could make some money, but I’m quite sure I’d have a hard time training 40 people to go out and play on their own with any edge, and come home with any net profit whatsoever, especially when the game is counting, and especially when its other people’s money. “Leveraging other people’s money” isn’t some panacea when it comes to a count team. The skim risk introduced by that is enough to sink a lot of teams.
Easy, James, no need to yell.
You are using “failure” to say that SD never reached the lofty heights of blackjack training that Colin did. Fair, no arguments there. I am saying that your wording in the article leaves an implication that the reason SD moved on to other things (i.e. venture capital) is because he never could reach those heights (“that can be the result of success, but is often the result of failure”), whereas I am saying that given that running a VC firm is a bigger and better opportunity than running a BJ Training site, it makes rational sense for anyone to abandon the initial goal of blackjack training, regardless of ability to scale it up. Even if SD had been on track to build a greater blackjack training site than anything in the history of 21, the fact is that for most people, running a VC fund is a bigger and better opportunity.
Now, whether or not SD was capable of that is, as you say, pure conjecture, and I actually agree with you that he probably could not have. I think we actually fundamentally agree on most points, and that this disagreement revolves around your use of the word “failure”. You appear to be using it to mean SD never built a training empire close to what Colin has done. Sure, I agree with that. But SD literally moved on to a better opportunity before we could see if he could. I’m sure SD made a little bank from blackjack lectures and such before he went into VC, so it wasn’t a complete waste. Basically, I agree more with calling his time in blackjack training “an unfinished hypothetical” than a “failure.”
As far as “how is ‘burning 40 names’ even a criticism”–it’s a criticism because it’s inefficient. If you are going to get 40 identities/faces/people/whatever flyered and databased, then you optimally should be able to extract far more value than they did (I speak from some experience here). Now what can you do to achieve this greater value? Those that know, know, but there’s definitely more than one way.
Now maybe you’ll respond, “Ok fine, you’re talking about stuff beyond counting (refusing to acknowledge count teams with greater overall wins than the Church Team). It’s not fair to compare wins with stuff beyond counting with wins limited to counting”. To that I say, “Why not?” In both instances, you’re extracting money legally from the casino. In both instances you’re risking exposure (obviously risking greater exposure with counting over most stuff beyond counting). Should I be impressed just because you choose to light a fire with two sticks whereas I light a fire with a book of matches? Lighting a fire with two sticks is only impressive when you have no matches. Then it’s just inefficient.
Now some teams might stick with what has been working, what they’re familiar with, whatever, and ok, that’s one way to go. But to place them in some “special” category just because they choose to work with methods that produce more heat for every dollar they take strikes me as illogical.