I reached the table just as he was sitting down, money not yet out of his pocket. Though I had performed this ritual several times a week for almost 30 years, I was almost trembling from excitement. I looked back to make sure I had my security detail with me, as was required. 

I reached into my pocket for a business card and handed it to him with the tight-lipped smile I always used. “I’m sorry, sir, you are just too good for us. We don’t want your play. These gentlemen will see you to the door.” 

I could see the surprise spreading across his face. I’d just cut off a legend in the card-counting business and he didn’t even make it to the buy-in.

I’ve always loved card counting — the black and white of it; the knowledge that the remaining cards in a deck tell you exactly the best way to play, the amount to bet, and that sometimes you had the advantage while most of the time you didn’t. 

There’s almost a music to it — the slow, steady rhythm as you wait for the low cards to play out, then the quick crescendo as the true count rises and the bets increase. 

The two-deck game is like a rap song with its quick ups and downs, while the eight-deck version plays out like a folk tune, longer and slower and less driven by the beat as it picks its way along.

I played a lot on the other side of the tables in the late ’80s and early ’90s, specializing in correlation play. This take on team play is unlike that of the Big Player made famous in the movie 21, where several counters spread out across tables waiting for the count to go high before signaling in the Gorilla, or Big Player.

Correlation play puts several counters at the same game, though much like the Big Player move, no one can know they are acting in concert. Through practice and signaling, this team will move their money with the count, but not in unison. 

Perhaps one player will bet table minimum into a high count while other players increase the team’s total bet. And then, during the next hand, one of these will pull back and the others will bet higher. Done properly and discreetly, it can convince most floor people and surveillance agents that no one player is counting individually.

I also dabbled in team tournament play, where we would use everything from counting to psychological tricks to try and put at least one, if not more, of our teammates on the final table. Trust me: Stanford Wong’s book on tournament play is a real eye-opener. 

It soon became apparent that while I was having a blast and meeting a whole cast of characters, I was never going to have the focus and attention span that a true professional requires. So I did what any wannabe counter would do: I simply transitioned to the other side of the table. 

The Wonder Years

When I made my transition, video surveillance still consisted of VHS tape, and people sent faxes instead of emails of known advantage players. While I worked my way up to a floor supervisor, I continued to dabble in my counting on the side, up until a particularly bad beat in a small casino several hundred miles away, when my rather unhappy casino director had me in his office with my grainy black and white photo clutched in his hand the next day.

But somehow, after that, whenever there was trouble, I got the call. The mid-’90s into the mid-2000s were a dream time — not just for counters, but cheats and advantage players of all stripes and persuasions. 

The huge wave of gambling spreading across America left massive talent gaps — not only in dealers and supervisory personnel, but also in surveillance rooms in these new, far-flung outposts of gambling, often staffed by inexperienced locals and perhaps overseen by someone with a year or two experience and a two-day class. Hence, teams of players were soon leaving Las Vegas for greener pastures in the Midwest and South.

While the MIT team and the Big Player ruse had mostly been stopped with the simple fix of not allowing anyone to bet more than $100 mid-shoe, there were dozens of other counting teams in action. The splinters from the MIT team, the Greek team, and an Israeli team all stand out to me, as well as members of the Hyland team. They were called counters, but at least the ones I saw were much more into shuffle tracking and ace sequencing. 

What made these teams so dangerous wasn’t just the relative inexperience of casino staff in places like Illinois, Mississippi, and Indiana, but these teams operated almost like crime families, with small cells and no clear leaders. 

You might boot one group, only to have another small group from the same team playing in the same seats taking advantage of the same hole-card-flashing dealer the next day. The good ones — the ones that lasted and went on to become legends — were run like businesses and shared a single-minded determination to exploit any advantage to get the casino’s money.

The Way We Were

The count teams, for the most part, stuck to legal means, but if they could track card clumps through your shuffle, they were going to do it. If they could locate aces by using cards around that ace on the previous shoe to predict when it might come out in the next, they had the mathematicians and computer models to beat you into a bloody pulp. 

Other more “enterprising” players also came to play. I watched a man with a camera up his sleeve use the cut card to fan the six decks of a shoe, send it to a waiting van, and then crush us for $140,000 back in 1994 when this was bleeding-edge technology.

I watched a roulette player take down a biased wheel, one that tilts just a bit to one side. He beat us out of over $200,000 — not once, but twice. I watched countless less-skilled amateur magicians try Richard Marcus’ Savannah move, which involves pinching a losing bet on the columns in roulette and every other pass-posting, chip-switching, and bet-claiming shenanigans you can imagine.

And while distracting a dealer was always de rigueur, dozens of teams made their living out of just seeking out bad dealers — dealers who just couldn’t count and who exposed hole cards, not just on blackjack, but on carnival games like Mississippi Stud and three-card poker. 

There were dealers who needed the players to tell them the payouts on roulette or craps, and most dangerous of all were disgruntled dealers who might take a $1,000 bribe to not shuffle a blackjack shoe or leave clumps in a baccarat shoe, so that players could know the order of the cards from the previous shoe and win an insane amount of money. 

It was always an adventure watching these people and their scams. The sheer amount of brainpower that went into these schemes always amazed me. Even the people I used to play with should have been building rockets, not trying to win a few bucks in Reno at the Peppermill at 4:00 am on a Tuesday. 

And putting these people out was also an adventure. You just never know how it ‘s going to go when you put that hand on their shoulder and ask them to step away from the table. I’ve had drinks poured on me and punches thrown at me. All in all, I’ll take a hardened cheat to a drunk any day of the week when it comes to walking a player. 

A New Tomorrow

Sometime soon, with improvements in artificial intelligence that can spot counting on a table quickly and without outside input, and new technologies that don’t just use facial recognition but a player’s gait or stride for identification, counters will be a thing of the past, and the few that remember chasing them will be as well. 

Today, as we approach the twilight of counting, things are very different. It’s been years since I’ve been called to watch a team of counters, and when I have, it’s almost uniformly young, white males turned out by card-counting schools that offer a quick class, or those interested enough to work their way through a few books on the topic and are just learning. Most will never be any kind of serious professional.

My bosses and I know that the vast majority of these folks pose no serious threat to our bankroll, but we exclude them and cut them down like wheat with a scythe if they can even move their money with the count. This is, at its heart, a cost-saving, cover-your-butt method, since neither the pit nor surveillance can afford the manpower to actually spend the hour or so it would take to see if they can alter their play with the indices and track the count accurately over time. 

Worse yet, we exclude anyone with an active Be On the Lookout (BOLO) from another property, because if we or someone else has identified a “possible” advantage player and they accidentally win a large sum of money, we will look bad. While it’s true that we run off dozens of probably profitable wannabe counters every couple of months, we never have to sit down and explain to the general manager why someone surveillance pointed out to us just beat us for thirty grand. Shortsighted? Absolutely. Effective? Yes.

This means the vast majority of counters or wannabe counters, along with other undesirables and cheats, are identified either by facial recognition or other means before they even reach the tables. It also explains how I was able to meet one of my heroes and longtime inspirations, a crucial member of the Greek team and someone who went on to build half a dozen other legendary teams, and give him that half-smile and tell him that he was just too good for us before he ever got money on the layout. 

No cat and mouse, no detective work, no long hours poring over tapes of play — just technology doing what it does every day.

Photo: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images