Gambling Wizards: Conversations with the World’s Greatest Gamblers<\/a>, and, like Tommy Hyland, a member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame.]<\/em><\/p>\n[Note from RWM: Tommy Hyland runs the most successful blackjack team in the history of the game. For twenty years he has trained and tested card counters, then sent them into casinos with piles of money. He fully expects them to be truthful when it comes to reporting their wins and losses. He says, \u201cWe\u2019ve made a lot of money by trusting each other.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland enjoys the high life at the casinos. They provide him with first class airline tickets and limousine transportation. Arriving at a Las Vegas Strip casino for our interview, I give the front desk the name that Tommy is using this week. I ride a private elevator to a luxury suite. Tommy greets me at the door. This cavernous suite with its marble floors and gold fixtures is larger than my home and probably cost more to build.<\/em><\/p>\nI glance in the bedroom and although huge, it looks like a college dorm room. Books and papers are strewn everywhere, and a battered set of golf clubs occupies the second bed. \u201cLet\u2019s order room service,\u201d he says. After all, the casino is paying.]<\/em><\/p>\nIn the Beginning<\/h5>\n
RWM: Do you remember the first bet you ever made as a kid?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Seems like the first gambling I ever did might have been a bet on some sports event. We also used to pitch coins against the wall at times.<\/p>\n
RWM: At how old?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I\u2019m going to guess I was in fifth grade, maybe ten or eleven years old. We used to pitch nickels, dimes, quarters against the brick wall. The closest one would win and take the other guy\u2019s coin.<\/p>\n
RWM: Did you practice at all? Did you try to get an edge?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yeah, I think we did practice. Might have flipped by ourselves sometimes. I used to bet on myself in sports a lot, shooting baskets or other games. What else did we do? Golf.<\/p>\n
RWM: How old were you when you started playing golf?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I think I was about ten or eleven. We used to play for a soda or a dollar or something.<\/p>\n
RWM: Where did you grow up?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: New Jersey.<\/p>\n
RWM: Did your parents gamble?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: My Dad gambled but nothing serious. He liked to go to the racetrack a few times a year. He liked to play golf for a dollar or two-dollar Nassau. He used to be a pretty good pool shooter. Bowling too. Just once a month, or something like that.<\/p>\n
RWM: Did you play a lot of sports in high school?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yeah. Basketball, golf, baseball. I played pretty much everything.<\/p>\n
RWM: Once you got into high school, did you start betting sports?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yeah, but not to a great extent. In high school, I\u2019m ashamed to say now, I was the house in giving out the parlay cards. I used to get one from a guy and I\u2019d photocopy it and back my own cards. It\u2019s pretty much the only time I\u2019ve ever been the house. I\u2019ve always been a player. Some guy at my Dad\u2019s work had them, so he\u2019d bring them home. The payouts were so bad, I raised them.<\/p>\n
I think there were other guys doing it, but they were just returning the standard payouts, so I eliminated the competition. I made money for a while: Thirty dollars a week, or fifty dollars a week, something like that. Then, I remember I got the bright idea of trying to create more business. I made up my own spreads on high school games. Apparently they were pretty bad. I got waffled one week and I remember having to sell my pool table. I lost about four or five hundred dollars and I think that was the last time I did the cards.<\/p>\n
RWM: How did you get into blackjack?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: By the time I was in college, in Wittenburg, Ohio, I was playing cards all the time. I played a lot of poker and I got interested in gambling in general. We used to golf a lot for money. I was basically being a bum. I was supposed to be studying political science, but I was on the golf team. I was playing golf and shooting pool and playing cards. I\u2019ve always been an avid reader and I just picked up some books on blackjack. I started reading them and my roommate and I started practicing.<\/p>\n
RWM: Did you also pick up books on poker?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: No, I never really did. I was beating the game there, but I remember in college the game kind of deteriorated. There were a lot of bad debts. I gradually got out of playing poker. We were playing a little backgammon. I wasn\u2019t any good at either poker or backgammon, but I was better than the guys I was playing with. Based on what I know now, I was horrible.<\/p>\n
It seems like we got Revere\u2019s book from the bookstore. [Playing Blackjack As A Business<\/em>\u00a0by Lawrence Revere.] My roommate and I started practicing blackjack, and he was more interested in it than I was. He was from Ohio, but he stayed at my house for Christmas break. I lived about fifty miles from Atlantic City. This would have been 1978, I guess, Christmas \u201978.<\/p>\nThe Hyland Blackjack Team is Born<\/h5>\n
RWM: So Resorts had just opened.<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yeah, it opened earlier that year. My roommate stayed at my house for about ten days and he drove down to Atlantic City and back every day. I went down with him two or three times. We\u2019d memorized basic strategy, but we really couldn\u2019t count. I didn\u2019t have any significant result, but he won. That was when they had early surrender and you had an advantage off the top.<\/p>\n
I guess he was able to count a little bit, but he won eight out of ten times or nine out of ten. He won several thousand dollars. He\u2019d always been a loser in our college gambling, a heavy loser. I said, man, if this guy can win all these times, there might be something to this. So, after I went back to school, I started practicing more and reading. We only had the one book as I recall.<\/p>\n
Then I guess I went down to Atlantic City on and off. I thought you had to be a memory expert to keep the count. That it wasn\u2019t really possible to do it yourself unless you had some extraordinary gift.<\/p>\n
Revere\u2019s book, and even with the later books, they don\u2019t actually tell you how to physically do it. They really don\u2019t say how you get your speed up or anything like that. It was pretty confusing. Some of Revere\u2019s charts were great. They\u2019re still good today, his color charts. But the physical act of counting wasn\u2019t explained properly.<\/p>\n
A friend and I would sit next to each other and I\u2019d count the high cards and he\u2019d count the low cards. We\u2019d whisper after every hand what he had and what I had and then we\u2019d get a count. We did this for hours and hours. We were winning. We did really well. We both put in a thousand dollars and after several months we had three or four thousand each.<\/p>\n
RWM: How much were you betting?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: We were way over-betting. I know you had to play a five-dollar table back then. There weren\u2019t any two-dollar tables. Resorts International was the only casino open. I\u2019m going to guess we were betting five dollars to fifty dollars, or something like that. We were fortunate not to tap out.<\/p>\n
Then we met a guy who told us about a new book by Stanford Wong [Professional Blackjack<\/em>]. He came on our table and he realized we were counting. He\u2019s the one who told us you have to wait until the person on first base gets his second card, and then you start keeping the count and canceling out. So we started practicing, and obviously after a little while we were able to do it ourselves.<\/p>\nThen we met two other counters. They each had a few thousand dollars. By this time I\u2019d read Ken Uston\u2019s book [Million Dollar Blackjack<\/em>] which talked about the teams. Having a team seemed really glamorous to us. We decided to trust the other two counters.<\/p>\nMy recollection is we each put in four thousand dollars. Now we had this massive sixteen-thousand-dollar bankroll. We started really firing at them. This would have been about October of \u201979. We didn\u2019t realize you could keep books. We used to each start at the exact same time. We\u2019d each have $4,000 and we\u2019d agree to all play until a certain time.<\/p>\n
Back then it was pretty hard to get barred betting small. I guess we were betting up to a hundred or two hundred at this point. We usually played at night. We\u2019d start at eight p.m. and we\u2019d play until almost closing, and then go over to their apartment and split up the money.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t keep track of hours. We just all assumed we were all going to play the same time. We didn\u2019t do it by win or anything like that. We just whacked it up each night. It seems like we did this about four or five nights a week for quite a while.<\/p>\n
Then we met this annoying guy, Not Too Smart Art. He was pestering us, pestering us. Oh, can I get on your team? He thought we were big shots now. He begged us and begged us to get on the team and we brushed him off a few times and finally we decided to put him on the team. Our bankroll was maybe up to twenty-five grand at this point, plus he put in an equal share. So now we had maybe a thirty-thousand bankroll. It seemed like we won pretty regularly.<\/p>\n
Like I say, he begged for two weeks to get on the team and then every time he played he won, so he said, \u201cOh, I should have kept playing on my own.\u201d That\u2019s what I remember about Art. Just complain and complain: \u201cWhy\u2019d I ever get on this team? I should have taken a shot on my own.\u201d<\/p>\n
RWM: By this point, did you guys know anything about how much to bet?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: A little bit. I could figure out a little but I\u2019m not super sharp at math. I think that by the \u201cExperiment\u201d we had a forty or fifty thousand-dollar bankroll. That was in December \u201979. [In December 1979 Resorts International experimented with allowing card counters to play unmolested. The casino was not allowed to bar anyone from play and would not shuffle the cards until two-thirds of the shoe had been dealt. The experiment lasted two weeks.]<\/p>\n
We crushed them during the Experiment. After the Experiment, I wanted to keep playing, maybe go to Vegas. The other guys had gotten Stanford Wong\u2019s book,\u00a0Blackjack In Asia. They decided to go to Asia. That\u2019s when I started teaching all my friends from the golf course. That\u2019s kind of how I got into the whole team thing. We had fifteen or twenty guys by the end of 1980. I\u2019d teach them, test them, and put them on the team.<\/p>\n
RWM: What percentage of guys would actually test out?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Pretty much everybody I tried to teach. I just looked around to see which people I thought were honest. I made some poor judgments and ended up with some bad people, but over the years I\u2019ve been fortunate to have mostly good people. I\u2019ve never really found anybody that – there\u2019s maybe like one out of twenty that I tried to teach that I just gave up on.<\/p>\n
After a while I just gave people a basic strategy card and showed them how to count, then said, \u201cCome back when you have basic strategy memorized and you can count down a deck within thirty seconds.\u201d Some of those people never came back. Pretty much everybody else was able to learn the rest of it.<\/p>\n
RWM: So you started teaching these guys, and you became the administrator of the team?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yeah, then we\u2019d just play with my money and when we\u2019d win a certain amount we\u2019d whack it up. We did it in a really simplistic fashion, and I know there were lots of inequities in the way we did it. It was either unfair to investors or players.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t really know much about bankroll requirements. Sometimes the way I structured it we had the wrong incentives. You\u2019ve got to be really careful how you structure a bankroll. It can be pretty bad if something extreme happens. If you start losing real bad and you don\u2019t have it structured properly nobody wants to play. That\u2019s happened a lot in the past.<\/p>\n
RWM: What happened with the first big losing streak?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: These things all seem to run together. I was always pretty lucky. I remember meeting a couple of other guys who were much better blackjack players than we were. They were much more knowledgeable, but they were having some tough luck and were struggling.<\/p>\n
They couldn\u2019t believe how we just always won. During some fight–maybe the Holmes-Cooney fight, or one of those fights a long time ago–we won several hundred thousand just over a weekend. I think we had twenty players out here, and eighteen or nineteen of them won.<\/p>\n
RWM: Have you ever had a bankroll that crashed and burned?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I remember we got involved with a guy named Rats Cohen. I always admired people who were really sharp with math and things like that, because I wasn\u2019t that good myself. This guy Rats talked a really good game. I was a young guy, kind of impressionable, and he was pretty impressive.<\/p>\n
He had an apartment in Brigantine. He brought me over and showed me this computer equipment. All he needed was a bankroll and we were all going to get rich.<\/p>\n
We took one-third of our bankroll and gave it to him. There were all kinds of delays. There were never really any significant results, and he kept asking for more money. His players seemed very skilled. I liked his operators, but the money just disappeared. He was buying four-hundred-dollar eyeglasses and a real nice apartment. It was a nightmare. He was also superstitious. He seemed to not always bet the money mathematically. That bankroll was a disaster. I think we ended up losing two-thirds of our money.<\/p>\n
I think that\u2019s when we lost early surrender in Atlantic City. My recollection is we ended the bankroll, and a few of us came out here to Vegas to play, and shortly after that I ended up joining up with Pitts & Red and a few others.<\/p>\n
The Blackjack Computer Plays<\/h5>\n
RWM: How did playing with computers come about?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: We\u2019d been hearing about them. We rented a house out near Sam\u2019s Town, and we ordered the hardware from a guy. I remember all of us were in this house, or maybe four out of the five of us, and we had absolutely no furniture. We had one table and we all slept on the floor. I slept in the bathroom because we had no curtains either. That was the only room with a tinted window, so it was a little darker.<\/p>\n
We were playing blackjack on a bankroll, but we were waiting for these computers to come. They came with the boots and all, and we\u2019d practice every day in this house. We did really well with the computers. We made a lot of money.<\/p>\n
In 1985 they made it illegal to play blackjack with a computer in Nevada. Computers were a relatively new thing. They weren\u2019t used in everyday life the way they are now. The hidden blackjack computers had been glorified in a Sports Illustrated article. The story made Ken Uston and Keith Taft sound like two entrepreneurs blazing a trail through Nevada making money.<\/p>\n
It said right in the Sports Illustrated article that the FBI had ruled that these weren\u2019t cheating devices. When Nevada passed a law against them, my mind set was that the only reason Nevada was ever able to get it passed was because the casinos control all the politicians. Clearly they should be legal. You\u2019re just using the information that\u2019s freely presented to you, and it would never be illegal anywhere else.<\/p>\n
I had our lawyer at the time check to see if there was any law in the Bahamas that prohibited us from using them, and there wasn\u2019t. So we continued to play everywhere else in the country with the computers, except in Nevada. We were playing in Atlantic City and in the Bahamas and maybe some other islands in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n
The casinos were starting to figure out how to spot the computers. They\u2019d look for people with boots, with their feet moving, or sitting with their feet flat on the floor.<\/p>\n
At Cable Beach in the Bahamas they caught me with a computer and pulled me into the back room. The casino manager was there, and some Bahamian police that were assigned to the casino. They asked me to pull up my pant legs. When I did they saw the computer. They said, \u201cYou\u2019re in a lot of trouble. We make a nice casino down here for you Americans to enjoy yourself and this is the kind of thing you do.\u201d<\/p>\n
The casino manager didn\u2019t even seem upset; it was the Bahamian police that seemed really upset, or maybe it was just part of their act. My wife was on the beach. She didn\u2019t even play blackjack at the time. When she came into the hotel they grabbed her and detained her. They took all the money I had in a safe-deposit box. They held me and started combing the books to see what they could charge me with. They held my wife for about thirty-six hours. They put her in a cell with somebody that was being charged with murder. They did all kinds of things designed to intimidate me.<\/p>\n
They finally decided to arrest me, and put me in the central lockup with ten other prisoners, in a really filthy situation. I was in there for two days. It looked like a real serious situation. They were talking about trying to keep me in jail for five or ten years.<\/p>\n
Somehow I got word to my lawyers in Las Vegas. My two lawyers came down. They weren\u2019t allowed to practice there, so they hired a Bahamian lawyer. There was no real law down there. The only thing they understood was money. Everybody you ran into was figuring out how they could get some of the money. I think they had a $140,000 of mine and they were trying to figure out how they could all whack it up.<\/p>\n
So anyway, my wife got out of there. She flew home. There were all these negotiations. We negotiated that I\u2019d plead guilty to some sort of fraud and get a suspended sentence. It was clear they weren\u2019t letting me out of there. I wasn\u2019t going to win any trial down there, so even though I hadn\u2019t done anything illegal or unethical, it was clear that I had to pay them off and get out of there.<\/p>\n
The lawyer negotiated this deal where they kept about half the money and they returned the other half. Then, right when I was supposed to sign the agreement, this Bahamian lawyer said, \u201cBy the way, when you get the other half of your money back, I want twenty- five-thousand of it. We had paid him fifteen-thousand-dollars and he\u2019d only worked about two hours at this point. He had me over a barrel. We decided to do that too. I lost close to a hundred-thousand dollars.<\/p>\n
I also ended up going to an actual court proceeding. With their accents you couldn\u2019t even understand what was going on. It was amazing. You\u2019d have to be there because you couldn\u2019t imagine. They might as well have been speaking in a foreign language. I didn\u2019t know what was happening. I don\u2019t know what I pled guilty to. My lawyers assured me that it wouldn\u2019t matter. That it would never be recognized in the U.S. as anything.<\/p>\n
RWM: But it showed up in Canada?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Well, to the best of my knowledge, it doesn\u2019t show up anywhere on a computer or anything. But it got a lot of publicity, and the Canadian casinos used this to get our group and me out of there.<\/p>\n
Apparently, Canada\u2019s immigration laws – if you\u2019re convicted of a felony in another jurisdiction that would be punishable by more than ten years in jail in Canada, you can be deemed as not admissible into Canada. So the Canadian casinos, together with Canadian immigration, tried to do this. I was able to win this case and I\u2019m allowed in Canada.<\/p>\n
RWM: Was this just harassment?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yes. A bunch of my friends were counting cards and were exchanging the information through signals. The Canadian casino in Windsor tried to make this out as some sort of fraud. These were people who played for me.<\/p>\n
I tried to go up there and get them out of it, and I was talking to the press. Public sympathy was obviously on our side. This was a big deal in Windsor. It was the front-page story three or four days in a row; all about this trial and about these people who\u2019d been accused of cheating. Once the press got a hold of it and interviewed the people involved, they were on our side and so was public sentiment. I think the casino tried to bring up the incident in the Bahamas to stop our momentum. They tried to make me out to be a convicted felon.<\/p>\n
RWM: Wasn\u2019t there something from that Bahamas incident involving Gambling Times Magazine?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Right. At that time the publisher of Gambling Times wrote this article, the tone of which was kind of I told you so. He used to be partners with Rats Cohen and I think they had a falling out. Now he took this high moral position that these computers were unethical.<\/p>\n
He wrote this article where he basically exaggerated what happened to me in the Bahamas, and said that I was sexually assaulted while in jail. We sued him for libel, but we lost. New Jersey had a high standard. You had to prove that it was deliberately malicious or something. So he just said that that\u2019s what he\u2019d been told.<\/p>\n
RWM: You talk about using the press. Didn\u2019t you even hire a lobbyist at one point?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: All we want to do is play a game according to the rules that a casino lays out. That\u2019s always been my view. The casino can make any rules they want. We\u2019ll either beat the game or we won\u2019t play it if we don\u2019t think we can beat it.<\/p>\n
Even though we operate ethically and legally, casinos are constantly harassing us. Unfortunately, it\u2019s been necessary to hire lawyers and yes, we even hired a lobbyist. The casinos are very powerful and they\u2019ve gotten a lot of laws passed that are probably not in the best interest of the public. We hired a lobbyist a couple different times to try to get our views heard by the New Jersey legislature.<\/p>\n
On Running a Blackjack Team<\/h5>\n
RWM: Do you think that running a blackjack team is the same as running a small company?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I\u2019m sure there are lots of similarities. One of the main differences I\u2019ve noticed is that people, when they meet blackjack players, can\u2019t believe that we just hand each other massive amounts of money. A player comes back and says how he did. He might say he lost $20,000 or $50,000 and we just say, okay. We write it down; we believe him.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s probably the biggest difference that comes to mind. People just can\u2019t believe that we don\u2019t lose all our money from people stealing it. We\u2019ve had a few bad incidents, but most of the time we\u2019ve been pretty successful. We\u2019ve made a lot of money by trusting each other. I may not even know a person, but if he knows a few people I know and they\u2019ll vouch for him… We\u2019ve loaned large amounts of money to people we hardly knew just because other people could vouch for them.<\/p>\n
RWM: Didn\u2019t you have trouble at another island casino?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: St. Kitts, yeah. It\u2019s an island in the Caribbean. That\u2019s been pretty much where all my foreign play has taken place. I\u2019ve played most every place in the Caribbean. I went to this island, St. Kitts. They only had one casino. They had a pretty good game, maybe six or eight blackjack tables. I got friendly with the casino owner. This guy took an active role in running the casino. He was always on the floor; sometimes he\u2019d push the dealer out of the way and say, \u201cLet me deal for a while.\u201d He got to like me while I was there. I played golf with him every day. I was doing pretty well. I won almost $30,000 in the course of four or five days.<\/p>\n
On the last day, he saw me walking through the lobby and called me over. He said, \u201cTommy, you\u2019re going back to Philadelphia in the morning aren\u2019t you?\u201d I said, \u201cYeah.\u201d He said, \u201cWould you mind giving something to a friend of mine back there?\u201d I said, \u201cSure, I\u2019ll do that for you.\u201d He said, \u201cCome on with me to my room and I\u2019ll get it.\u201d So I went with him to his room and he went to a desk. He reached in a drawer, pulled out a gun and pointed it at me, and he said, \u201cI know who you are. I know what you do. I want the money back that you won.\u201d<\/p>\n
He had a piece of paper, it was a Griffin report, and he was reading from it. Tom Hyland, alias so-and-so, card counter, card-counting team. He\u2019s reading from it and he says, \u201cI want my money back,\u201d while he\u2019s holding this gun. I was young and foolish at the time, and I said to him, \u201cI can\u2019t give it to you. It\u2019s not all my money. Besides, I won it fair and square. You do whatever you have to do, but I\u2019m not going to give it to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
RWM: That\u2019s pretty ballsy with a gun pointed at you!<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I\u2019d hand it over in about three seconds nowadays. So he said, \u201cOK, we\u2019re going for a walk then.\u201d It was night. We walked out of his room and he started prodding me with the gun in my back. We were walking down this narrow stone path. After we took about twenty steps I said, \u201cI changed my mind. You can have your money back.\u201d<\/p>\n
RWM: Do you think this guy really would have shot you?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I doubt it… Maybe. He ran that whole island. He might have been able to do it. He was flabbergasted by the whole thing and he was really pissed. I think he was also hurt. He thought we were friends. So, we walked back to the main building. He went to the office and said, \u201cGive him his safe-deposit box.\u201d The girl gave it to me. He said, \u201cCount out $30,000,\u201d because I had what I started with also. I said, \u201cI think I only won $29,000.\u201d He said, \u201cAll right, count out $29,000.\u201d I gave it to him and he said, \u201cOK, have a nice trip. See ya\u2019 later.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, he went back toward his hotel room and I was all shook up. I went back to my room, which was right across the way from his, and I saw him leave. I don\u2019t remember exactly how it happened, but I was with somebody else and I said, \u201cI\u2019m going to go in there and see if I can find my money.\u201d I went into his suite and looked around for the money, but I never found it. When I got back here I tried to get a lawyer and write nasty letters and call the Prime Minister, or whatever he was called on that island. I never got any satisfaction. It was lost.<\/p>\n
RWM: Have you had other incidents where money has been stolen from you like that?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Unfortunately, we\u2019ve had a fair number of these incidents. I also remember one of my teammates got his money taken in Aruba. He was down there with his girlfriend and the casino got a flyer from Griffin saying that he was a computer player. By this time we would never play with a computer anywhere we weren\u2019t sure it was legal. We would never have taken a computer to the Caribbean at this point. It would be a ridiculous thing to do.<\/p>\n
He was down there in Aruba just counting cards. They insisted he had a computer. They searched him. They searched his girlfriend. They searched his rental car. They searched his hotel room. He had front money on deposit, and they said, \u201cWe know you had a computer; we just can\u2019t find it. We\u2019re keeping your money.\u201d Coincidentally, I think that was about $30,000 also. He did the same thing I did. He made inquiries, but it was lost. It didn\u2019t look practical to go after it.<\/p>\n
RWM: Tell me the treasure map story.<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: That\u2019s when I was playing with Spike. This is before we had the bad incident in the Bahamas. We were all traveling back and forth to Freeport and Nassau to play. They had a high limit and they had a good game for these computers.<\/p>\n
We didn\u2019t want to carry massive amounts of money in and out of the country, and couldn\u2019t really figure out how to leave it down there for the next guy. So Spike decided to bury it a couple miles away from the casino. He drew this map for himself, because he was planning on going back there. But then he got tied up with other things and he didn\u2019t really want to go back to the Bahamas to play.<\/p>\n
I did want to go, so he asked me to get his money down there. He said, \u201cIt\u2019ll be easy; you can\u2019t miss it. All you gotta do is find this spot, and from there you follow the map.\u201d Well the map left a little to be desired. Spike had landmarks that were out in the water on another island, and you were supposed to figure it out from there. My wife and I took probably an hour or so to find this money. When we did, the box he put it in was all rotted, the money was moldy and smelled terrible.<\/p>\n
We took it into the casino to play and they said, \u201cWhere did you get this?\u201d It was about $140,000.<\/p>\n
RWM: Has carrying cash become a big problem in the U.S.?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: It seems like it. Especially traveling through airports. Driving the interstate with money we\u2019ve had problems and I\u2019ve heard of other people having problems. They passed these laws to supposedly stop money laundering and drug dealing. People don\u2019t realize how much the laws also affect the law-abiding citizen.<\/p>\n
Some of the ways the laws are written, local police who stop people with money and confiscate it benefit directly. So they\u2019re anxious not to give you the benefit of the doubt. There have been some real horror stories. These drug agents, police, and custom agents prey on people that don\u2019t speak English. They find any excuse to take their money, and then it\u2019s a nightmare to get it back.<\/p>\n
RWM: Let\u2019s talk about the Griffin Agency. What was your first experience with them?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: My first experience with them was when I got barred at the Sands back in the early \u201980s by a guy made famous by Ken Uston\u2019s book. [The Big Player by Ken Uston and Roger Rapoport]. A guy named Herb Nunez. He pulled me into the back room and forced me to have my picture taken. I found out several months later that there were flyers out on me, that I was now in the Griffin Book.<\/p>\n
RWM: Did you notice an immediate effect when you walked into new casinos?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yeah, I found that now, instead of being barred because they recognized my style of play, frequently when I got barred they would call me by name or something like that. I don\u2019t think back then I knew how all this Griffin stuff worked, and I was kind of taken by surprise by some of the things they knew.<\/p>\n
The bad thing about the Griffin Agency is a lot of these foreign jurisdictions don\u2019t really understand card counting. Sometimes Griffin doesn\u2019t really make much of a distinction as to what activity you\u2019re up to. They see you in a Griffin book and they explode. They figure you\u2019re a scam artist and you\u2019re cheating them out of money.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s led to a lot of nasty incidents. The other thing they do is when they list me or some other old time player today, they always put them in there as a computer player. Well, none of these people have used computers since the laws were passed against them. They only used them when they were legal. So a lot of times in these foreign places, the casino either legitimately thinks you have a computer or they use this as a guise to search you, harass you, and take some of your money, claiming they know you had a computer.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what happened to my teammate in Aruba. The reason he lost his money was because he was listed in the Griffin Book as a computer player. They don\u2019t make any distinction that you only used a computer when it was legal.<\/p>\n
RWM: Isn\u2019t that libel?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: You would think so. Some other card counters and I have tried to sue this Griffin Detective Agency. We never seem to get anywhere. Libel and slander are some of the toughest cases to win. If they can prove you\u2019re a public figure, you have to prove it\u2019s deliberately malicious. Somebody like me, even though my name wouldn\u2019t be known by the general public, for purposes of the case I\u2019d be a public figure, because I\u2019m a well-known blackjack player. Someday I\u2019m sure Griffin is going to get what they deserve. Hopefully somebody will win a big case.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure if some sheriff in the middle of Kansas sees this picture that looks like a mug shot, and finds out the casino is holding you, he\u2019s going to treat you as some sort of criminal. Right on the top of the page it says Cheating Activity, and then it has your picture. Then they just happen to mention that you\u2019re a card counter.<\/p>\n
But I don\u2019t want to overemphasize the effectiveness of the Griffin Agency. They hurt us a little bit, but I can play more blackjack than I have time for. I can\u2019t play in every single casino that I want to. Particularly in Atlantic City I\u2019m really well known but that\u2019s not because of Griffin. It\u2019s not a big factor for us. We can all play pretty much as much as we want to. We just have to move around.<\/p>\n
RWM: Do you wear disguises?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: These days I don\u2019t wear any actual disguise. I try to change my appearance so I don\u2019t have to go to a lot of trouble each time I go out and play. I don\u2019t quite have the energy to do that. I\u2019ll dye my hair and grow a beard, or get my hair curled, cut it short, grow it long, things like that. I have ordinary features and an ordinary build, and people seem to forget my face fairly easily.<\/p>\n
RWM: Didn\u2019t you get barred once as Santa Claus?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yeah. That was back in Atlantic City, where they used to do this three-step process. The first time you got barred they\u2019d tell you that you were welcome to play any other game except blackjack. The second time they\u2019d bar you they\u2019d say you weren\u2019t welcome on the premises at all. And if you got barred a third time you\u2019d get arrested for trespassing.<\/p>\n
I think at the time I had already gotten the second step from Harrah\u2019s, so I got the bright idea on Christmas Eve of dressing as Santa Claus. I was just going to fire away from minimum to maximum. If they barred me they would treat it as the first step. They wouldn\u2019t have any idea who I was.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s what happened. There were four or five of us in there at once. One guy heard a floorperson on the phone say, \u201cI got a guy betting two hands of a thousand down here. Got a guy over there betting purple chips, and Santa Claus is really going crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was pretty funny and it worked out perfectly too. They just read me the first warning, and they were laughing while they did it. They thought it was pretty funny. They took it in the Christmas Spirit.<\/p>\n
RWM: When you did go to the trouble of wearing a disguise, did you ever go black, or Asian, trying to change your race?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I never did that. The best disguise I ever had was when I went to Hollywood and got a couple wigs from this guy Ziggy, who\u2019s a famous wig maker. I guess he made wigs for a lot of the Hollywood celebrities.<\/p>\n
This was a long time ago, maybe fifteen years ago. He was the only guy who could make a realistic looking bald wig. I paid $2,500 for this balding blond wig. It looked really good. Nobody ever realized it was a wig. I got a lot of play out of that. It was worth more than the $2,500 I paid for it.<\/p>\n
I also got fake teeth from Mike Westmore, who I believe won an Oscar for the make-up in the movie Mask. They were a little uncomfortable. I remember going back to him to modify them. That was probably the best disguise I ever had. I had to have my eyebrows dyed. They had to keep re-dying them. I had this spirit gum to attach the wig. It took a good hour to get ready to go play. My wife used to have to put it on me. You couldn\u2019t put it on yourself.<\/p>\n
RWM: Any other particularly outrageous stories that happened in casinos?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: When I first was playing I wasn\u2019t the sharpest guy around. I\u2019ve learned a lot over the years from the people I joined up with. A lot of the stuff we did wasn\u2019t particularly profitable, but we used to have a lot of fun.<\/p>\n
We would all go into these Atlantic City casinos at the same time. Twenty guys would just go in and bet. We really didn\u2019t care if we got barred. We would just all go in there at the same time, figuring they couldn\u2019t get everybody at once, because they had this really elaborate procedure that they were required to do. They had to come over and pull you away from the table and read you this card, and only a certain person was authorized to do it. We figured if we had fifteen or twenty of us, they couldn\u2019t get everybody at once. That used to be fun.<\/p>\n
RWM: When did the law change? When were they no longer allowed to bar you for counting cards?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: That\u2019s when Ken Uston won his case. I guess that was in 1982.<\/p>\n
RWM: And did that hurt the games? Was it better for you when they could bar you?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Some people think that. I don\u2019t. I know a lot of card counters like it where they\u2019re allowed to bar you. They think the rules are better, the games are better.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll always campaign for no barring. I just don\u2019t think it\u2019s right that they should be able to do that. And we\u2019ve certainly made plenty of money in Atlantic City since they haven\u2019t been allowed to bar us. It\u2019s much more comfortable to play when you\u2019re not worried about getting hauled off to some back room, or getting arrested or harassed.<\/p>\n
As far as I\u2019m concerned, and I\u2019m sure most people agree, if you\u2019re playing blackjack there, Atlantic City is the place you\u2019re least afraid of some sort of casino nastiness. The worst that can happen is they\u2019re going to shuffle the cards on you. I like that feeling.<\/p>\n
RWM: You\u2019ll no longer play out of the country?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I\u2019ll play out of the country. I won\u2019t play in those ridiculous places anymore. I won\u2019t play in the Bahamas or any of those islands, but I\u2019ll play in Canada. I\u2019ve played in Australia. I don\u2019t plan on going to Europe, but I\u2019d play in some of those countries. All the countries that I view as civilized.<\/p>\n
It shocks me that some of these guys with all kinds of money will go to these crazy places to play blackjack, just because they have a good rule or something. It just doesn\u2019t seem worth it to me. Boxer was talking about going to Russia to play. They have some great game there or something. That just seems like insanity to me.<\/p>\n
RWM: On your team, do you have different people who do different things?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: We have different levels of skill. That\u2019s another thing about this Griffin Agency that makes me laugh. We have people that can barely pass our test. Griffin makes them sound on these flyers like masterminds. They\u2019re interested in self-promotion. If the Agency makes these people sound real dangerous, like all Einsteins, the casino is likely to renew their subscription. Most of our players are just regular card counters.<\/p>\n
RWM: Have you branched out into other forms of gambling?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I do a lot of sports betting. I don\u2019t bet my own opinions, but I have some people\u2019s opinions that I value and I\u2019ll bet money on games.<\/p>\n
RWM: One of the things that Alan Woods mentioned was that computers have changed everything in gambling.<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: That\u2019s true. Unfortunately, I\u2019m computer illiterate. I don\u2019t use a computer.<\/p>\n
RWM: Do you use it to analyze games at all?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: We use Stanford Wong\u2019s program,\u00a0Blackjack Analyzer.\u00a0That\u2019s great. You used to have to try and figure out win rates by hand, and make all these assumptions. In the old days you\u2019d ask knowledgeable people, what do you think this game is worth? Now there\u2019s no more of that nonsense.<\/p>\n
RWM: The sports betting that you do, is there a computer model involved in that?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I\u2019m sure these guys do computer work. I\u2019m not really privy to it. I\u2019m not an active participant. I just bet my money and they get a share.<\/p>\n
RWM: Alan mentioned a horseracing story that you did together.<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I collaborated with Alan on that. We made $27,000, and the horse\u2019s name was House Speaker. I\u2019m not sure if that was the horse that won, or that was the horse we pumped so much money on. Back then there was no pari-mutuel betting in Las Vegas. You\u2019d bet at the race book and the money didn\u2019t go into the track pool at all. They would just pay you off at track odds up to a certain amount. They would pay as much as ten or fifteen to one.<\/p>\n
You could bet money at the track on a bad horse and make him the favorite, and make the true favorite a long shot in Las Vegas. That\u2019s what we did. We went to Keystone racetrack in Philadelphia, three or four guys from our blackjack team. Then we had friends in Vegas, I guess we had our watches synchronized. We bet as much as we could on the worst horse in the race, to show. This was a small track so it didn\u2019t take much money to pump it up. As long as the best horse finished in the top three we would win. It paid a small amount to win and paid a monster show because there was relatively no money on him in the show pool. All the money was on this 50-1 shot.<\/p>\n
That was fun. I believe our total take, split about twenty ways, was $27,000. It was not a big deal, but we got stories in the newspaper. Both in the paper out here and in the Philadelphia paper. \u201cStill investigating. It doesn\u2019t appear that there was any illegal activity.\u201d I think it was done maybe a few more times with the dogs in Arizona, but that got to be an old trick. You couldn\u2019t bet a lot of money to show or to place in Nevada after a few more of those incidents.<\/p>\n
RWM: How did your parents feel when you first started playing?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: They were pretty conservative. They were hoping that it was only a phase and that I\u2019d grow out of it and get a real job. My father is deceased, but my mother accepted it. She\u2019s used to it now. My mother actually is pretty amazing. She\u2019s eighty-seven years old and she still plays golf or tennis five times a week. They did a special on the Philadelphia eleven o\u2019clock news sportscast; they did a feature on her playing tennis. She still moves around pretty good.<\/p>\n
RWM: Are there more benefits to playing on a team than just evening out the fluctuations?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Yeah, there are a lot of great things about playing on a team. There\u2019s the camaraderie. You have somebody to travel with. You learn things from each other. You share information. It seems like you can really come up with ideas when you have a team. One guy has the germ of an idea, and he bounces it off somebody, and this guy adds to it, and all of a sudden you\u2019ve got a great project. There are advantages to playing on your own, too. I\u2019ve never really played on my own, but there are a lot of successful people that have done that. There are not really many people out there that play blackjack as their sole source of income on their own.<\/p>\n
RWM: Any more stories come to mind?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I\u2019ll tell you my famous one. It\u2019s not really famous, but Wong asked me if he could use it when he was giving one of his talks. This is when we were playing mostly in Atlantic City. I had these old friends that grew up in my neighborhood. They had a son who was a little younger than me, and he was going to college. He asked me as a way to make money in the summer if he could come and play blackjack for me. He was a real smart kid and I knew he was honest. So I said sure, I\u2019ll teach you how to play.<\/p>\n
I taught him how to play and he played Atlantic City and he did well. Toward the end of the summer he decided he\u2019d make a trip to Las Vegas. One of his first plays was at the Sands. He was winning and winning and he couldn\u2019t lose a hand. They didn\u2019t have anything bigger than hundred dollar chips in the rack, so he had all these black chips piled up, maybe seven or eight thousand dollars worth in front of him.<\/p>\n
The shoe went negative and he decided to count his money to see how much he was winning. He took all his chips off the table, and as he was heading to the restroom, he noticed a security guard looking at him. Now he had heard from guys who came back from Las Vegas about getting barred, and he heard about people getting roughed up in the back rooms. So he ducked into the restroom, went into a stall, and shut the door.<\/p>\n
He pulled out his chips and was counting his money while sitting on the toilet. All of a sudden there was a knock on the stall door. He opened up the stall, and there was this big security guard. The guard looked down at him and said, \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d He had all his chips, and he was fumbling around, and he said, \u201cI was just counting my money.\u201d And the security guard said, \u201cIn the ladies\u2019 room?\u201d<\/p>\n
Another time… when I first started out we were really aggressive and we used to get barred all the time. Most times we wouldn\u2019t say anything while we were being ushered out the door, but sometimes we\u2019d ask them why, or say all kinds of things. Every situation was different.<\/p>\n
One time, one of our players was in Puerto Rico and he was down $4,700. The casino manager came over and said, \u201cWe don\u2019t want you to play blackjack anymore.\u201d A lot of times how we\u2019d respond if we were losing was, \u201cWell, are you going to give me back the money that I lost?\u201d And of course they would always say no. Well, this time, the casino manager said \u201cOK, we will,\u201d and he gave him $4,700 back! He gave him the $4,700 and he said, \u201cOK, just never come back in here again.\u201d That was at the old Ramada in Puerto Rico on the main drag there.<\/p>\n
How Casinos React<\/h5>\n
RWM: You mentioned being backroomed. Does that still go on?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: There don\u2019t seem to be many backroomings, but there\u2019s still a lot of nastiness that our guys have experienced. The popular thing nowadays is to electronically lock you out of your room. Your plastic key card suddenly doesn\u2019t work. So it\u2019s the middle of the night, you go up to your room, and you can\u2019t get in. You go the front desk and you say that your key doesn\u2019t work. They check on it by looking on the computer, where there\u2019s a note to call security or the casino manager. They bar you and stick you with a hotel bill even though they promised to comp it.<\/p>\n
I hate to get people comps anymore, because things just always seem to go wrong. We actually have a rule that you\u2019re not allowed to get room comps for people that aren\u2019t on the team. I\u2019m afraid people play too conservatively, because they\u2019re afraid of getting kicked out of their rooms. That\u2019s just foolish on the casino\u2019s part, because we just get more determined to beat that place. It hasn\u2019t happened to me, but it\u2019s happened to other guys.<\/p>\n
RWM: But you think barrings have become much more civil in the last five years or so?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: In general.<\/p>\n
RWM: What about in these little places that have sprung up all over the country?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: Casinos are afraid of litigation. It does seem like most places go out of their way to be nice about it. And we\u2019re nice about it too. I\u2019m always nice about it. I\u2019ll always go back eventually, but I won\u2019t try to push it in their face. I won\u2019t go back the next week, or something like that. I\u2019ll stay out of there what I consider to be a reasonable period of time – six months or a year. I\u2019ll never just go back out of defiance.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think it\u2019s ethical that they bar you. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s legal. No place is going to intimidate me into not going back. Well, the islands have definitely intimidated me. I\u2019ve decided not to go to them. But no place in the U.S. is going to intimidate me into not playing blackjack. If they have a good game and I think I have a chance of fooling them, I\u2019m going to play.<\/p>\n
RWM: If your son came to you and said, \u201cI want to be a professional gambler,\u201d what would you tell him?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: That actually is a realistic possibility. He just turned twenty. I don\u2019t think he wants to do it for his career, but I think he does have an interest in playing. He\u2019s a real good golfer. I think he\u2019s hoping to make his career in golf.<\/p>\n
I think blackjack is a great profession. I get a lot of enjoyment out of it, not just because you can make a good living at it, but I think it\u2019s the perfect way to make money. It seems to me that you\u2019re taking the money from greedy corporations. The more influence they get in a particular area, I think the worse off that area will be. I think the money is better off out of their hands. I think you\u2019re on the good side of the equation.<\/p>\n
I mean, I would never want to be the house. If somebody told me I could make $10,000,000 a year working for a casino, I wouldn\u2019t even consider it. It wouldn\u2019t take me five minutes to turn it down. I wouldn\u2019t be interested. I don\u2019t like casinos. I don\u2019t like how they ruin people\u2019s lives. The employment they provide, I don\u2019t think, is a worthwhile thing for those people to be doing. They\u2019re taking people that could be contributing to society and making them do a job that has no redeeming social value. That\u2019s my view.<\/p>\n
RWM: In your case, your son has the benefit of having you to teach him, but if it were somebody who wrote you a letter from out in the hinterlands, who said, \u2018I want to become a professional gambler,” what would you tell him to do?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: I actually get that a lot. The thing I really get a lot is, strangers asking to get on my team, or for me to back them. I\u2019m not interested in that. Unfortunately, there\u2019s a lot of really bad stuff written on blackjack. I\u2019d try to steer them to the right books. Emphasize that you have to have a bankroll that\u2019s discretionary money.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a tough grind. It\u2019s not a sure thing. I\u2019m more optimistic than most people about blackjack. I think it\u2019s clearly possible for somebody starting out at blackjack to make quite a bit of money. It\u2019s certainly not as hard as playing poker, or trying to beat sports betting. The good thing about blackjack is that it\u2019s cut and dried. There is not much subjectivity to it. If you follow the books and you\u2019re a reasonably intelligent guy, there really isn\u2019t any reason you can\u2019t make money.<\/p>\n
To me the contrast between blackjack and poker is clear. Poker you have the benefit that you can put in as many hours as you want. You\u2019re not going to get barred. But, to make twenty or thirty dollars an hour at poker you have to be quite good. You have to beat a lot of real sharpies, guys who have been playing for years. To make twenty or thirty dollars an hour at blackjack is easy. You can do that after one month of study, as long as you don\u2019t make mistakes. As long as you learn properly and you have the bankroll, that\u2019s a very low win rate at blackjack.<\/p>\n
RWM: How do you think the game has changed? Do you think it\u2019s gotten better or worse?<\/em><\/p>\nTommy Hyland: The individual games have definitely gotten worse, although there are still places with really nice rules around. I think that right now, it\u2019s a great time for blackjack players. There are so many casinos, it seems no matter how well known you are as a player, you\u2019re always going to find somewhere to play. I think the state of blackjack is good. \u2660<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interview with Tommy Hyland by Richard W. Munchkin (From\u00a0Blackjack Forum\u00a0Volume XXII #1, Spring 2002) (From RWM\u2019s\u00a0Gambling Wizards,\u00a0Huntington Press, Las Vegas 2002) \u00a9 2002 RWM [Note from A.S.: Richard W. Munchkin is the author of\u00a0Gambling Wizards: Conversations with the World’s Greatest Gamblers, and, like Tommy Hyland, a member of the Blackjack Hall of Fame.] [Note from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[631,1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122361"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lasvegasadvisor.com\/shop\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}