Cigar Aficionado

During the early years of the Blackjack Ball, this secret, elite event was true to its name. Nearly all in attendance beat blackjack for a living. The annual gathering, which launched modestly in the basement of host Max Rubin’s home in 1997, drew a couple dozen advantage players who discussed the latest gambits, settled debts and socialized without worrying about casino personnel spotting them together.

At a time when casino bosses were not exactly up to speed on winning ploys and the technology to spot them remained primitive, many of these professional blackjackers were card counters. They used camouflage, played coy with betting patterns and avoided the most obvious deviations from basic strategy. Time at the table was kept to a minimum.

Many at the Ball were willing to eat into their profits if it prevented them from getting caught and booted off the table or even out of the casino. After all, casino gambling had yet to blow up across the United States. The stateside focus for advantage players was still primarily on Atlantic City and Nevada, and they were incentivized not to lose access to those outlets.

By contrast, last October’s 29th annual edition took place in a luxe event space, catered by a ritzy restaurant on the Strip. While most guests were advantage players, many of them would do anything but count at blackjack. Card counting, if it wasn’t a dirty word, was at least a silly word. Casinos had gotten wise to the play and tightened rules. Facial recognition made counting all the more difficult. The most successful players in the room had beat horse racing, outfoxed slot machines, bet sports advantageously, even devised approaches for taking down the casinos’ so-called carnival games.

Many of those who still make it in blackjack have dispensed with subtlety. If they card count, they play a balls-to-the-wall game, grabbing for all the chips they can get rather than trying to avoid getting asked to leave the table. They play so aggressively—splitting 10s and 4s when it is advantageous, jumping and dropping bets rather than slowly ramping up and down—that getting backed off is a foregone conclusion. These players called themselves maximizers, so named because they maximize profiteering at almost any cost.

Just don’t ask them their real names.

A Blackjack Ball regular who goes by Byrnen Down The House got into the game, at least partly, to make things right for his father. The dad of BDTH (as he likes to call himself) was a problem gambler. He frittered away loads of money in the casino. BDTH vowed that he would never do the same thing. Then he happened to join a well-heeled friend in a casino near their home in Florida. “He handed me $500, so I could play blackjack with him,” recalls BDTH. “And if I went bust, he gave me another $500. He wasn’t a card counter or anything. But he brought in $10,000 or so and played until he lost it.”

Then, on one of those trips, BDTH won $3,500. “It just came to me so quickly that I figured I’d keep doing that and become rich,” says BDTH, who was earning good money as a musician. “I lost the $3,500 and just kept going back to the casino. I figured I could win it back.”

Of course, he didn’t. He lost $10,000 over the course of a year. “That was a lot of money for me—and I lost it in the same casino where my father dropped his money. I was just pissed off.”

His turning point came when he met an old woman in the casino elevator. She was cursing the blackjack tables for taking all her money. Maybe he saw his father in the lady. Maybe he saw himself becoming like her. But he knew that something had to change. He also knew that there was a way to beat blackjack. BDTH had seen the movie 21, the tale of an MIT blackjack team. He discovered the online instructional site Blackjack Apprenticeship and devoted himself to learning card counting.

From the start, BDTH never played with cover or camouflage. He jumped bets, split 10s, accepted that he’d eventually be asked to leave. He believed that the breakneck style was the only way to win—and he needed to win. “I have a family to support,” says BDTH, who estimates that he’s ahead by some $1.5 million over the last several years. His most profitable casino stand came on a trip to the Caribbean. “In four days, I took $110,000 out of there.”

Conventional wisdom would have been to optimize: play conservatively, hoping for longevity at the table. Instead, BDTH says, “I don’t believe in optimizing and I don’t even think it works. You don’t spread that much, they see you counting and they kick you out anyway. They don’t care how little you play for.”

BDTH starts at $25 per hand and as the card count increases he jacks his bets up to two spots of $2,500. “If they’re not catching me, they’re stupid and I keep playing until they stop me,” he says, acknowledging that he’s banned from 100 U.S. casinos.

His father died before he was able to see his son avenge his losses. But, BDTH allows, “Maybe my dad is watching me and knowing what I’m doing.”

The man who taught BDTH and the other maximizers in this article views the approach as a young man’s game, something that he has aged out of. Colin Jones cofounded Blackjack Apprenticeship as well as the Church Team, a group of card-counting Christians who played with unbridled aggression. “You made the money and spent less time in a miserable casino,” he says—but he points out that the heavy-handed approach is now more difficult than ever. “Markets move toward efficiency and everybody gets smarter,” says Jones. “Nevertheless, here’s a young crop playing in the maximizing way, just like we did. They push it to extremes, and I don’t blame them for it, though the casinos will be pushing back.”

The approach also takes an emotional toll. Maximizers are lone wolves. They travel solo, they play mano a mano, they keep their own counsel and sleep alone. BDTH copes by staying in touch with his family and communicating with people on social media (his blackjack handle is his Instagram handle).

The need for secrecy means that maximizers can’t afford to brag about where they are and what they’re doing. Some of that comes through before a scheduled phone interview with a guy who calls himself Rick from Canada. A few minutes prior, he texts that we should connect on WhatsApp because “I’m overseas.”

Pressed for something more specific, Rick responds, “I have to be careful what I tell.”

His sense of caution has been honed since high school, when a friend showed him a basic strategy chart. “I was blown away,” he says. “It said that if you play perfect basic strategy, the casino has only a 0.5 percent edge. I thought the number would be much higher. That caused me to start diving into the numbers.”

One year later, when he was 18, the legal age to play in Canada, Rick took the plunge. After graduating from high school, he had a day job operating heavy machinery, but blackjack became his passion. And he had no desire to take it slow. “I couldn’t afford to!” says Rick. “When I started, I had a tiny little bankroll saved up. There was no room to optimize. Optimizing is expensive on a small bankroll and your risk of ruin skyrockets.”

Rick remembers a single session in Lake Charles, where he walked into the casino with $70,000, bought into a game and quickly rode his bets up from one spot of $50 to two spots of $1,500. “The count rose, the cards came and I just maximized on their blackjack,” he says. “I was there for multiple hours.” The more cautious approach has players leaving after just an hour or less, whether they are winning or losing, in order to keep casino management from getting wise to what the player is up to.

Rick says that he tries to make his sessions last for five hours. “And getting in those hours at a table is a big part [of making money],” he continues. “The casino personnel in Lake Charles weren’t watching. We like to say they were sleeping. It was a day where I got really lucky on the felt, combined with the casino being lousy at detecting an AP [advantage player] and I pushed out the money. All of that contributed to giving me a big win.”

He was careful not to look like too much of a winner by dusting large denomination chips off the table and into his pocket. Plus, he makes it a point to operate without the grumpy, all-business demeanor that defines many APs. “The casino workers saw me winning and they were all cheering for me,” says Rick. “My strategy, as far as a casino personality goes, is to be as enjoyable a human as possible when I am playing. It’s in the hopes that they won’t kick me out.” At least not for a while.

After a full day at the table, remembers Rick, “I finally left with $44,000.”

He returned the next day and lost, but after that came a win and then the inevitable happened: “It ended badly. I got kicked out.”

But he also exited with the money, which is the point.

In terms of how he views a successful year, Rick is as cagey as you’d expect him to be. He replies, “Any year that I make more than I did operating heavy machinery—which was $100,000 Canadian—is a success.”

After becoming a winning maximizer in his own right, he bankrolled and tutored two friends—one who goes by the name Goodyear and the other who calls herself Andrea—to beat blackjack in the aggressive style. Crushing casinos across Canada, the U.S. and beyond, Goodyear videos her play for the group’s YouTube channel and has developed a good act that justifies her aggressive ways.  

While Rick likes to come off as a nice guy and BDTH portrays himself as a bit of a high-rolling badass, Goodyear maneuvers as a she-devil in a rotten marriage. “I tell them that I am trying to spend all my husband’s money,” she says. “They buy the story and just treat me the way they would any other high-rolling customer.”

It’s believable—pulled off with an edge of abandon—and a generator of sympathy. Her persona also helps to justify what looks like crazed aggression from a person who can’t burn through her spouse’s money quickly enough. It certainly helps to justify splitting 10s. For a normal person, it seems stupid. For an astute counter with moxy, it’s what you do against a dealer six when the true count is five or higher.

“It feels audacious to have them fooled,” she says, adding that it was especially true during the session where she won $37,000. “I was betting as much as two spots of $1,000 and sat there for 10 hours straight. It was very early in my career and such a rush. I called everybody I knew. I went from working nine-to-five for a phone company to making that kind of money in one day.”

Asked what she earns at the tables, Goodyear is more forthcoming than Rick. “Probably $500 or $600 an hour,” she says.

While maximalist card counting outshines Goodyear’s previous job, she acknowledges that a work session at the old gig never ended with her getting stiffed on her pay. Sore losing casinos sometimes invoke their right to refuse payment to players who breach their terms and conditions—like no card counting—to keep from making good on the chips that a hard-charging advantage player wins fair and square. When the win comes from a maximizer, who has pressed every edge, it stings even more.

“I had a casino in Canada that refused to cash out $15,000 in purple and blue chips,” Goodyear says, adding that they were worth $500 and $1,000, respectively. “I got the gaming agents involved and they told me that nothing in legislation says they have to cash me out. That shocked me. This went on for six months. Then I threatened to take legal action—not against the casino but against the commission. The next day I got a call from the casino manager. He asked if we can schedule a time for me to come and cash out. But it took me threatening to sue the commission itself in order to get my money.”

While such harsh treatment is more the exception than the rule for Goodyear, her male counterparts can get taken to the edge of physical confrontation after being made as maximizers. To that end, she chalks some of it up to her gender, which could be a built-in advantage-play in its own right. “I think you can get away with so much more as a young female,” she says. “Sometimes the casino people see you counting and view it, at least a little bit, as kind of charming. They treat the male counters as roaches or something. But for women, the back-offs are actually nicer.”

Such thinking may hold true until management doesn’t want to cash out your chips. Then the gender doesn’t matter and it hurts all the more when you consider how hard it is to beat blackjack on a regular basis. As Colin Jones puts it, breaking out an old saw: “Card counting is a hard way to make an easy living.”  

Like all gambling endeavors, maximized card counting comes with thin margins and is not as easy as it looks. To be successful in that world, you need a thick skin, the ability to tolerate back-offs for doing your job well, losing streaks via high variance, lonely stints of travel and bouts of doubt. “No one’s saying it’s a cushy job,” says Rick from Canada. “You’ve got to do a lot of things right. But when you do everything right, you can get a beautiful result out of the maximizer strategy. It is still very much alive today. That’s for sure.”