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GameMasters Secret's Page
The GameMaster's Secrets
A Blackjack Sting

As I reported in a recent column, "Video Poker in Las Vegas", it had been a while since my last visit to Sin City and it had been even longer since I walked down the Strip. Usually when I go there, I take a cab to the hotel and sometimes don't see the light of day for the whole trip. But this time I decided to walk from Treasure Island to Casino Monte Carlo and it was a revelation. Bellagio is fabulous, the replica of the Eiffel Tower is unbelievable, the 'party' girls that used to hang out at the corner are gone and kids are all over the place. South of Bellagio I was happy to see that some of the old Las Vegas tackiness lived on; the T-shirt shops and emporiums of dice clocks, Elvis memorabilia and "Genuine Casino Playing Cards" are still there - fewer and more besieged than ever - but still there. As I strolled along, I passed the old Jockey Club condominiums which played a part in one of the most exciting casino adventures of my life. This is the stuff from which Hollywood makes movies, but it is, as fantastic as it may seem, all true. (Please understand, dear reader, that I need to exercise some 'poetic license' here in order to protect the innocent and the not-so-innocent, but it all happened essentially as I've described.) And, until now, it's been a secret.

Atlantic City had been my primary 'beat' on the Blackjack circuit since I had learned to count, but in 1981 the casinos started getting their own way so the fabulous rules under which we had been playing were about to be changed. The bloom was about to come off the rose, so to speak, so most of the big Blackjack teams from out of town had left and we locals pretty much had it to ourselves. Somewhere along the way we had run into a couple of guys, Joe and Jack, who had been part of Kenny Uston's team. For those of you who don't who he was, Kenny was a prolific author of books on beating Blackjack and was a good team manager and an outstanding player in his own right. Sadly, that gentle soul went to the big casino in the sky some years back, but most of his books are still in print and you'll learn something from any or all of them.

Anyway, Joe and Jack had been, as I said, on Kenny's team, but they were local guys and were looking to get involved with another team after Ken left town. They hooked up with us just as the favorable rules were eliminated and we did a bit of playing, but just couldn't make any serious $$$. Then one day Jack contacted me and said that Kenny was planning a big 'play' in Las Vegas and I should go out there and participate. I met with the guys from my team and they agreed to invest some of our $$$ in Kenny's Vegas effort which was going to operate with a $60,000 bank. We took a nice percentage of that and a few days later, Jack and I left for Sin City.

The headquarters for the team was Kenny's condo at the Jockey Club, which I mentioned earlier. Jack and I had checked in at Caesar's on a Sunday, I believe, and we walked down to Kenny's place to meet the rest of the team. I had never met Ken personally before, but he knew who I was and we got along fine. A few other guys arrived right after us and, once everyone was settled, Ken closed all the curtains in the living room, turned off the lights and began to explain the demonstration we were about to see.

"As most of you know", Ken said, "brother Dave here has been training for this for the last six months and he wants to demonstrate his accuracy so we'll all feel comfortable with the concept." Kenny then switched on a device that looked something like a slide projector with a small box attached and directed our attention to the screen.

The screen was totally dark and then there was the briefest flash of light and Kenny asked aloud: "Did you see it?" There were a few mumbles and murmurs in the darkened room, but it seemed to me that all of them had seen what I saw, a brief flash of light and nothing more.

Kenny then asked, "Dave?"

"The nine of diamonds", Dave replied.

"Let's try another", said Ken.

Again, a brief flash of light, but I could see that something was different about this one.

"The Queen of Clubs", said Dave.

The lights came back on and Kenny pointed to the projector: "The object attached to the projector is called a tachistoscope , Ken said, "and it's used by eye doctors for vision therapy and to teach people to see things quickly and accurately. It can be set to show a picture on the screen for varying intervals of time, so Dave has been working hard to get it to a minimum time and still be accurate."

A complete demonstration then followed. Dave when through an entire deck of cards and was able to name the card with an accuracy of 90% or more. We were all very impressed, yet some of us began to 'see' the cards ourselves but with nowhere near the accuracy of Dave.

Now some of you are probably wondering what we were up to. Back then Caesar's was The Premier Spot on the Strip and they were dealing a single-deck game for high-rollers ($100 minimum - $3000 maximum) where the basic strategy player had a slight edge, because double after split and late surrender were allowed. Being able to identify a card from the briefest view can serve the savvy Blackjack player in three ways. The first is (or at least used to be) called 'flashing'. If the player sits at 'first base' (the spot at the dealer's immediate left), s/he may be able to see what the dealer's hole card is when the dealer checks underneath his or her 10 or Ace to see if s/he has a 'natural'. The second way it is of value is through a technique called 'spooking' where a player's team mate stands behind the dealer, at another table across the pit and may see the hole card. That player then signals a confederate who is playing at the first table to tell him or her what the card is and the player reacts accordingly. Those two techniques have considerable value to a player, but the information regarding the hole card only comes about if, A) the dealer has a 10 or Ace 'up' and, B) if the 'spook' actually sees the hole card when the dealer 'peeks'. Having a good idea as to what the dealer has as a hand allows the player to alter Basic Strategy in such a way as to give him or her a roughly 2% edge over the house! If you're thinking that this is illegal, you need to know that the courts have ruled that it's the responsibility of the casino to make sure that the player doesn't see the card; if the player does see it, s/he may act on the information as s/he sees fit. I will admit, though, that I was always uncomfortable about 'spooking' since that seemed a little extreme and might not be as accepted as 'flashing'. In any event, that's not what we did.

We did what's called 'front-loading' and it was really simple. We put Dave in a wheelchair and took him to the $100 single-deck game and we'd stay to play with him. When certain dealers would deal their hole card, Dave was situated where he could often see it, so it didn't matter if the dealer had a 10 or Ace up; he usually saw it anyway! Then, through a series of subtle hand signals, he'd tell us what the dealer had and we would play our hand accordingly. Plus, we were counting anyway, so it just added to our advantage. For example, if the dealer had a 9 up, but Dave signaled that there was a 7 in the hole, we obviously wouldn't want to bust our hand, because the odds greatly favored the dealer to bust. Naturally, if we had a total of 12, we'd hit, because few players stand on a 12 vs. 9, but if we had 16, we'd stand, since that's not all that unusual, especially if we had a $500 bet out there. That's it in a nutshell; there's a lot more I could tell you, but space is limited and you want to know how much we won:

$205,000 in 5 days.

See you here next time.

  

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