Once a year for the past 20 years, the finest blackjack players in the world get together for an evening of drinking, visiting, drinking, dining, drinking, and testing themselves against one another. The event is hosted by wit and raconteur Max Rubin with some help from Barona Casino. A few lawyers and other gambling professionals are also invited, including one grateful video poker writer and teacher.
This year we had entertainment. There was music throughout and a musical solo by a young lady named Minnow. She has a singing scholarship to the Berkeley Conservatory of Music in Boston. She sings in her native Spanish (she’s from Panama), and also speaks and sings fluent Mandarin and English. She’s also the fiancée of a long-time player and she’s a strong player in her own right. She chose to sing Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way.” For a group of APs, that was a very appropriate song choice.
Before dinner, we voted for the newest inductee to the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Among six worthy contestants, we selected Bill Benter to be the newest inductee. I only know Bill as someone who is rumored to have made hundreds of millions of dollars betting on horses using complex computer models, but prior to that he formed and played on several very successful blackjack teams — back when using computers at the table was legal. You’ll hear from Bill on the February 9, 2016 Gambling with an Edge radio show, which is being devoted to the Ball.
A highlight of the Ball is the competition between the players. Max asks 21 difficult questions, and the ones who get the most correct compete in a skills competition — which typically involves counting decks, card memorization, estimating deck penetration, and sometimes playing under “unusual” rules.
Before taking this test, there was a “Calcutta” where we bet on who was going to win. This is the part that’s the most enjoyable to me. Max groups the players into 15 or so teams (recent champions, MIT graduates, Hall of Fame members, Gambling Writers, Geezers (people over 60 not on other teams), etc.)
There were four teams that received bids of $400 or $500, and the Men’s Field team (men less than 60 not on other teams) went for $4,000. It is usually the best bet. Players can buy back up to half of themselves (or more, subject to negotiation). The group I was in was called Gambling Writers (Henry Tamburin, Blair Rodman, and me). We went for $700.
There is money to be made in the Calcutta. Everybody pays $20 at the door (plus a bottle of premium champagne) and the $1700 or so collected goes into the Calcutta mix. (There are more than 85 people at the party, but only 85 pay the $20. There are spouses and dates who may play the game, but if Max judges beforehand that they have no chance in hell of winning, they don’t have to cough up the twenty bucks. Then there are James Grosjean and Richard Munchkin who have been disqualified for having the nerve to each win the competition three times.) The money bet in the Calcutta varies each year, but if it were $17,000 (this time it was less than that), ten percent of that was “dead money,” meaning it had no chance to win. So long as you pay reasonably fair prices for the teams, there is an 11% overlay. Advantage gamblers (the room was full of them) recognize this and compete for that overlay.
Plus Max is a hoot as the Calcutta auctioneer. Since everyone there knows most of the others, Max builds up each team like it’s a surefire winner and he has no compunction about teasing, needling, and downright insulting various players during the auction.
While I did win the written contest a few years ago, I only did that once and usually am not very close. I was not confident of my chances this year (even though I did submit a question that ended up being included in the 21 Max used, although I didn’t know it was chosen until after the competition had begun), so I only bought back $100 of myself. If I placed in the top four (or one of my team members did), I would collect one seventh of the prize.
The contest itself was very tough. Out of a possible score of 21, the two top scores were both 10 — by Blackjack Hall of Famers John Chang and Tommy Hyland. About 10 players had nine answers correct (only four of them were going on) so there was a playoff to determine who would continue.
My question related to an incident discussed on the December 22 radio show. A player was “backroomed” at a casino in Central Arizona for winning at a video blackjack machine. He had, as a conversation starter, a plastic donkey on top of his machine. The casino was sure it was a type of cheating device and confiscated it (and probably sliced it up looking for electronics inside). I asked a true or false question about that. I had all of the details correct except that I called it a plastic elephant. It was false, of course. It’s an election year and you should be able to keep straight your political symbols!
I also answered one question in a way that would have been correct a week later, but at the time of the ball was incorrect. Max asked us, according to the OddsChecker betting site, who were the two Republican presidential candidates with the best chances of winning — in order. Trump had to be in there, of course, but I wasn’t sure about Rubio or Cruz. I knew Rubio was rising and Cruz was falling — so I put down Rubio/Trump when the correct answer before the Iowa caucus was Trump/Rubio. After Iowa, however, the order changed. (After New Hampshire, it might well change again!). Anyway, being prescient about what the answer would be a few days later meant that I missed the question at the Ball.
We’ll talk about some more of the questions on the radio. Not that it matters to anybody, but I got six answers correct. Since there were 10 people who got nine answers right, I assume there were probably a couple of dozen who got either seven or eight correct, so I wasn’t close. Maybe next year.
The playoff question involved naming in turn a casino in the South, between Florida and Louisiana, that offered blackjack and hadn’t been named by anybody else. They went round and round until they narrowed the field down to four — who, along with John Chang and Tommy Hyland, made up the six contestants competing to win the Grosjean Cup or the (much smaller) Munchkin Trophy for second place. “Bubble Boy” was Don Johnson, who named a casino on the wrong side of the Mississippi River where he may have had significant success some time ago.
The contestants were:
Tommy Hyland — member of Hall of Fame team,
John Chang — member of MIT team (he could easily have been on the Hall of Fame team instead, but Max made most of the teams three members each so this required some choices as to which team any specific person belonged. Max made those choices in private before the ball),
Lee Jensen — a member of the men’s field — lives in the Northwest somewhere. He was also extremely lucky to snag a last-minute invitation was somebody else couldn’t get to Las Vegas because of the weather. I’m sure Max will discuss this on the radio.
WRX — a member of the men’s field — lives in California,
J — a member of the men’s field — lives in Florida,
David — a member of the men’s field. He recently lived in Las Vegas. I’m not sure where he lives now, possibly in hotels around the country as he plies his trade.
So whoever bought part of the men’s field was sitting pretty. They were going to collect on at least two winners — possibly all four.
Unlike previous years, this year’s skill test moved along very quickly — for which I congratulate Max heartily.
Test 1: Max placed a shuffled deck in front of each player, extracted one card from each, and placed it face down in front of the deck. Each player announced his counting system (all used Hi Lo, although there were other choices available. In Hi Lo, 2-6 are low cards, 7-9 are neutral, and ten-A are high cards.) When Max said “Go,” each player counted his pack of 51 cards and predicted whether the card Max had extracted at random was low, neutral or high. Players slammed down their deck when completed. The last guy to finish counting had to make his prediction first. Once one guy was wrong, this test was over. The fastest counting down the deck were Lee and John, in that order. It was never determined whether they accurately predicted their card or not because one of the slower counters, David, said it was a high card and it was actually a low card. Down to five players.
Test 2: This involved card memorization. Max gave each player a new unshuffled deck, and then he spread a shuffled deck for all to see. Let’s say the cards were in order KK4KQ43 etc. Players had 30 seconds to memorize all the cards they could and then the visible cards were hidden. For the first card, everybody had to place a card of any suit matching the first card in the sequence (in this case a king) down on the table. Then Max revealed the king and had each player turn over his card. Everybody had a king down, so they moved on to the second card. And then the third. Then Tommy was the only player not to get the fourth card correct, so he was out and we were down to four players. Tommy and David get bragging rights for making it to the skills test, but the money only went four deep and those two were “SOL”.
Test 3: Max placed a slug of cards in the discard tray and players had to write down in secret how many cards were in the slug. There were 145 cards — almost three decks. Nobody got really close. Players were 10 away, 10 away, 12 away and 23 away. WRX made the worst guess and was out in fourth place.
Test 4: Here Max placed a deck of cards in a discard tray and had players try to cut exactly 15 cards from the bottom — using a cut card — within five seconds after being handed the cut card. It was close, but J missed by six cards and was eliminated in third place.
Test 5: This was the last test and it was down to John Chang and Lee Jensen. This was the same as Test 1, except now they used two decks instead of one — and Max again extracted one card at random. Whoever counted down the decks first made his prediction of low, neutral, or high. If he was correct — he won. If he was wrong — he came in second. Whether the guy who counted more slowly got the right prediction or not is irrelevant.
On this final test, I believe John Chang made a strategic error. He already knew that Lee counted faster than he did from the results of the first test. So assuming Lee was accurate — a reasonable assumption, but not locked in stone — John had no chance to win if he counted down the two decks. He therefore should have slammed his deck down immediately and announced either high or low. That would have given him a four in 13 chance to win the Grosjean Cup. Not great odds to be sure, but better than no chance at all.
The winner of this year’s Grosjean Cup was Lee Jenson. A worthy winner — he was the fastest counter both times and at the top of each of the skills test. The prize was an engraved fifteen liter (about three feet tall) bottle of Luc Bellaire Rare Rosé champagne (good luck putting that in your carryon luggage on the plane home!). The bottle was courtesy of Don Johnson, who barely lost out to Bill Benter in the vote for the newest Hall of Fame member. I didn’t ask Lee how much, if any, he bought of the men’s field. If he didn’t buy a piece of the men’s field after the Calcutta, he received no money for the win. I’ll ask him on the radio Tuesday night.
Some day I’ll get to the skills test again — maybe — especially if Max keeps finding my questions “interesting.” Since I haven’t played serious blackjack for more than two decades, I’m at a severe skills disadvantage to the other invitees to the Ball and need all the help I can get!