A Turn of the Cards Chapter 2. Here Comes Your Man by Rebecca Anderson I think crime pays. The hours are good, you meet a lot of interesting people, you travel a lot. – Woody Allen

Arun waited for a couple of days to follow up on the weekend, and when he did it was through Alice, again. She invited me to meet at a coffee shop just off Harvard Square, and when I got there Arun and Henry were with her. We made a bit of small talk, during which it was clear he now remembered our past history. He seemed as though he had grown up since our time in chess club, and in fact he was quite gracious. Since I was interested in Alice, and in what had happened at the Mohegan Sun, I tried to be gracious in return.

After we'd exchanged a little more small talk, Arun got to the point.

His team – I was only just beginning to realize it was his team – had been around for about three years. That made them newcomers by MIT standards. There were at least two other teams in operation, and another that had been in business long enough to actually retire. Like the other teams, Arun’s was composed entirely of first or second-generation Asians or Indian immigrants. My grandmother’s genes allowed me entry into the group, because I looked Asian enough. “One of us, one of us, one of us,” chanted Henry. I thought he was kind of deranged for a few moments, but it turned out to be a reference to an old movie called “Freaks,” which was fitting given the kinds of things that had been said about people like us – nerds and geeks – during high school.

As for choosing Asians and Indians, I found out later it was because the casinos thought most card counters were middle-aged white guys, and in fact it’s true that the typical card counter does fit that profile. Of course a typical card counter is no threat to a casino, but the casinos didn’t manage risk that way in the 1990’s – they were focused on threats that were so minor they didn’t see the really big ones coming.

One of the other benefits of using Asians in the teams was to take advantage of the innate racism of many white Americans, who think – or used at least to say, in an earlier time – that “they all look alike to me.”

“So what do you think?” Arun asked.

“I don’t know anything about card counting,” I said. “I still don’t know how you won the other night.”

“Good,” said Henry, pleased.

“You do know about counting, though,” said Arun. “And Alice and Dan say you have the patience for it.”

“Isn’t it illegal?”

Arun ordered another coffee. “No, Alex. It’s not even gambling.”

I must have looked perplexed.

“A lot of people think card counting is gambling, or that it’s somehow cheating at cards,” Arun said. “It’s neither. It’s the simple application of mathematics to a popular game, and it’s perfectly legal.”

“I’m not sure I believe you, but go on.”

“The first thing you need to know, in order to understand why blackjack can be managed with card counting, is that blackjack, unlike poker, is a game in which each new hand dealt is affected by the hands that were dealt before it. As cards are dealt from a deck – “

“ – Those cards can not show up again until the deck is reshuffled,” I nodded. What he was saying was easy to understand. “And the value of cards remaining influences the odds of the game.”

“So you get it.” He looked pleased. “This makes the game different from other casino games such as roulette, where the chance of the number 20 coming up on any spin of the wheel never changes, or to poker, where the deck is shuffled between hands.”

“And the skill of your opponent is often a bigger factor than the cards you have in your hand.” I said. “I get it. It’s still gambling.”

“Technically, yes, but it’s so easy to work out that there’s very little risk involved. Look, crossing the road has risk involved. But you don’t think of it as gambling, do you?” He paused for effect. I could see Alice and Henry had heard this spiel before, but they were intent on my reactions.

Arun continued. “For example, if you see three tens come up in one round of blackjack in a single deck game, you know there is only one ten left, and so the probability of someone being dealt a ten in the remaining hands before the shuffle is lower. If you are good at counting, you can remember this.” His eyes flicked to Alice before coming back to me. “You’re good at counting.”

He bent closer across the table, probably sensing he was winning me over. “The other key thing to understand about Blackjack is – and this is where most amateur players, especially those trained on other card games like poker, come unstuck – you don’t have to have a good hand in order to win. You simply have to have a better hand than the dealer. You can sit on any combination of cards that adds up to more than 12, and if the dealer busts, you will win.” He smiled. “In your favor is the fact that the dealer can’t sit on less than 16.”

Arun produced a deck of cards from his pocket and began to shuffle the cards while he talked. “Of course the casinos are not run by dummies. They don’t run 6 or 8 decks of cards together for convenience sake. They do it to make it hard to count how many tens, or aces, or nines, or whatever, are left in the deck.” He held up the deck he was using. “They use multiple decks. It makes counting that much harder. Even Stephen Hawking would find it hard to keep track of 24 aces, 24 tens, 24 nines, 24 eights, 24 sevens and 72 face cards, let alone the low cards, amid all the distractions, and there are many, in a casino.”

“So? I sure won’t be able to.” I said. “I tried it when I was playing the other night. How do you?”

That was what interested me. Not the idea of winning. I’ve never been particularly drawn to competition. What drew me in was the mechanism of the system. I loathed Arun, and although I liked Henry and Dan, and was infatuated with Alice, I didn’t much enjoy the thought of being on his team. What intrigued me wasn't Arun — I wanted to understand how the system worked.

“Card counting isn’t about counting the number of twos or aces. Instead, it involves keeping track of how many high cards or low cards are in the deck. In the simplest system, called ‘Hi-Lo,’ cards are assigned very simple numerical values instead. Cards from 2 to 6 are scored minus 1. Cards 7 to 9 don’t count at all. Cards 10 and above, including aces, are scored plus 1.” He sat back and smiled. “What does that mean?”

I had followed his logic. “It means a single deck of 52 cards has a total count of zero, because all of the high and low cards cancel each other out.”

“Exactly,” Arun said. “Exactly.”

As I later found out, the ‘Hi-Lo’ system was originally invented at MIT by a lecturer named Edward O. Thorpe, who subsequently wrote a book on it. If you’re really bored, you can go look up his Wikipedia entry. The methods used in the 1990s – the ones Arun described – are no longer possible, because the casinos changed one rule, and that made it much harder to beat the house. But in 1995 the system was beatable.

As Arun described it, in its simplest forms what card counting is really about is keeping track of the relative weighting of the remainder of the deck. A counter subtracts for the low cards, and adds for the high cards. The count goes up and down, card by card, until the deck leans one way or another, as either high or low cards come out early. If the count indicates a lot of low cards have already been dealt then – by simple math – the remaining cards must be high value cards. The more high cards within the deck, the better the player’s chance of hitting blackjack, or at least of beating the dealer, who will likely bust out because – unlike the player – they can’t sit on 16 or less.

“It’s all just math,” Arun said. “Provided you never lose track of the count. Since most casinos use 6 or 8 decks at a time, it’s a lot of counting. But the entire system is based upon probabilities, and if you can maintain the count over time, then you have a chance of beating the house. It’s not gambling. It’s math.”

“Again, casinos aren’t run by dummies,” Arun said. “If they so much as suspect you are counting cards, they’ll bar you. Contrary to popular belief, card counting isn’t illegal, unless you use some form of aid, mechanical, electronic or whatever. But obviously the casinos don’t want that widely known.” He shrugged his shoulders. “In any case casinos are private property, so they can bar effective counters from playing simply by refusing them access to the premises.”

“If it’s so easy, why doesn’t everyone do it?” I asked.

“Unfortunately,” Arun said, “even if you’re an expert counter, the most you can hope to gain from counting is about a 2 percent advantage over the house. In order to count, you have to be in the game, and in the early hands after a shuffle, before the count can be meaningful, you’re likely to lose, because you have no way of calculating what cards are likely to come next.”

“So … There’s something I’m not getting. How did you do it?”

“If you’re a solo player, you have to have a big bankroll, and be prepared for a small return on your risk, relative to the money you’re staking. For a 2 percent return per night, you’re probably better off playing the short term money market, or stocks. Making only one mistake per hour eliminates your statistical advantage, and making two in an hour puts you further behind than not counting at all, so it requires discipline and nerve.”

“It’s why most card counters are lonely single white men,” Alice said, smiling, “With delusions about their abilities and lots of free time.”

“I saw what you won at the Mohegan Sun. That had to be better than 2 percent.”

“You have no idea how much better.” Arun leant back, obviously pleased with himself. “That,” he beamed, “is where our scheme comes in. Come for a walk. We’ll talk about how you can fit into all this. That is, if you’re interested.”

I looked at Alice. Of course I was interested. I didn’t like Arun, but I was three quarters in love with Alice, and I was beginning to understand how they did it. It was the use of a team, and the way that Henry had been able to come to the table at the right time, instead of losing in those early hands.

Apart from being able to hang out with Alice, the thoroughness of Arun’s argument appealed to me. It was elegant.

“Okay, I’m interested.”

Arun smiled at Alice as if to congratulate her. “Thought you would be.”

“But why me?”

“Pardon?”

“Why me? It’s not like we’ve ever been friends.”

Arun hesitated before responding, and dropped his eyes briefly, and I reflected that it was the first time he’d acknowledged any bad blood between us. “Alice speaks well of you,” he said. “So do Henry, and Dan. And I never let personal feelings get in the way of business.” He looked me directly in the eye, as though he was waiting for me to dredge up the past. Coward that I am, I looked away and said nothing.

“But let’s not discuss the details here,” he continued, turning back to a more positive tone. “If you’re going to be in, we have a lot of training to do.”

Of course, before we walked, he made me swear to secrecy.

So we walked back to Henry’s apartment on Highland Avenue. Henry opened a bottle of Bordeaux and Arun outlined the way the system could be beaten. He hadn’t invented the plan to use a team. It had been developed by Ken Uston, a Harvard grad, more than twenty years earlier. His idea was to use teams of players, with different roles, who always appeared to be independent of one another. Various teams from MIT and Harvard had been playing in teams ever since, refining their techniques.

In Arun’s team, the grunt work was done by the smurfs, whose job was to place table minimum bets all night while maintaining the count at their table. Alice had been a smurf that night at the Mohegan Sun. Smurfs play, count, and try to attract as little attention as possible. In Arun’s team, they were supplemented by the elves (these guys were geeks, okay?), who were erratic in their play, making random bets and flitting from table to table, to provide distraction to the dealers and the pit bosses. Elves talked a lot, made sure to lose enough never to seem like a threat, and kept watch for security guards, pit bosses, and anyone else who might be a threat to the team. They never counted. Never. Their job was simply to come and go in the same way the real key players in the scheme did, but winning and losing so randomly they wouldn’t pose a threat to the casino. Acting like tourists or even honeymooners, they paid very little attention to the actual gambling. They never gave any intimation that they even knew the smurfs.

Each team also had one or two wizards, whose role was to bet big, coming to a table only when surreptitiously signaled by a smurf that the count was favorable and the dealer was at a disadvantage. Like the elves, their job involved no counting. Wizards would often act as though they were drunk to disguise their extravagant bets, and they dressed in a manner that was designed to attract attention. The look wizards usually went for was ‘spoiled child of foreign business mogul’. Even though they were the big winners, their flamboyance, couple with the comings and goings of the elves, meant that the smurfs, who did the hard work of maintaining the count, were almost never noticed. But it was wizards who could bet five or even ten thousand on a hand, without seeming out of character, and make up for any of the losses by smurfs and elves in just one or two seemingly lucky hands. In six or seven hands, they could make tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, before the team relocated, in ones and twos, to another casino to play for a few more hours.

Our team didn’t just play straight hi-lo. We also used an algorithm that tracked where the count was in the six-shoe deck. If it went positive very early, it was still good for play, but there was more risk. But since all of us were good with numbers – it was pretty much the reason we were involved – it wasn’t too hard to do some division and multiplication on top of counting. It was still, when all was said and done, counting. And a bit of math.

In a good night, at a big casino where they could spread a lot of money around a lot of tables, Arun claimed the team could clear $150,000. In 1995, that was about the price of a good apartment in the inner Cambridge/Boston area. And that was, give or take a thousand, what they had taken from the tables at the Mohegan Sun on a single night on the Casino’s second weekend of operations.

The training process, as Arun called it, consisted of practicing endlessly with decks of cards, multiple decks, until I was familiar with the idea of adding or subtracting 1 for each appropriately high or low card, and could apply our algorithm on top of the count. Counting is surprisingly difficult to do, when there are hundreds of cards involved. If you miss even a single card your count can be off. The trick is to be so practiced that the casinos can’t tell you’re counting, and that means never being seen to pay that much attention. But if you’re not paying attention, you can be distracted.

In addition to the card counting, I had to learn the signals the team used, and the peculiar language to describe the state of the deck at any time:

“Revolution” meant 9, from the Beatles song
“Dime” meant 10, for obvious reasons.
“Goals” meant 11 — two sticks standing up.
“Monkeys” meant 12, from Twelve Monkeys, a movie the team had all seen and liked.
“Bush” meant 13 — the number of the Vannevar Bush building at MIT.

There were a bunch more, including the signals to come in to a hot hand, the signals the hand was cooling, or cold, the emergency signals, and the signal to call it a night. It took me a while to get the codes right, but the actual card counting was easy. Hiding the fact I was counting was even easier.

Fortunately, I’ve always been good at multi-tasking. My sister Susan used to joke, before the joke wasn’t funny any more, that I must have been bathed in the wrong hormones in the womb, because I was the only guy she knew who could do several different things at the same time.

At that time – the time I started with Arun’s team – Susan was the person I was closest to in the whole world. She’s a year older than I am and probably smarter than me. As our lives have proven, she has a heck of a lot more common sense. She was valedictorian when she graduated from Brown, and she has a job she likes at the Museum of Fine Arts, something to do with art restoration. It was a total coincidence we both wound up living in Boston.

We shared most things, our foibles, failures, fears, triumphs and joys, but since I had graduated I had seen her less, even though I had more time. We were both busy with work, and we lived on opposite sides of town, and I knew she had met a guy she really liked, Tom, a lawyer, who seemed to be taking up all her free time. I hadn’t met him yet.

I decided I needed to see Susan to share the details of Arun’s scheme – secrecy be damned. I’d never successfully kept anything from Susan and I knew if I didn’t at least consult her up front I’d do irreparable damage to our relationship later.

Coincidentally, Susan phoned me, the day after the meeting with Arun, to ask me whether I wanted to come to dinner at her place. “A chance to meet Tom,” she said, and how could I refuse that?

Tom wasn’t what I expected. I’m not sure exactly what it was that I expected, but I remember thinking as I first saw Tom, ‘you’re not what I expected’. Maybe I’d expected a lawyer to look more refined, or more buttoned-down, or at least more Ivy League, but Tom was none of those things. He was very tall and solid, probably big enough to have been a pro footballer if he’d had any speed, but he had a severely receding hairline that made him look a lot older than he actually was, and a lot older than Susan. That, with the moustache he sported and the scarring from acne he’d obviously had as a teenager, made him look a little like one of the bad guys in a crime thriller. Maybe like a younger, heftier, James Gandolfini. He certainly looked more like a mobster than a lawyer, and while I could see the chemistry between he and Susan as I watched them together he just didn’t look like the kind of guy who would snare my sister. Obviously I wasn’t a good judge of character.

Dinner was pleasant all the same. Tom looked like the kind of guy who would kill me as soon as shake my hand, but when he smiled it was obviously genuine, and it turned out he had a wicked sense of humor. And I could tell, just from the body language between them that he and Susan had definitely clicked.

While dinner was good, the fact that Tom was there made me reluctant to approach Susan for her advice about the team, and Arun’s proposal. Despite Arun’s assertions that there was nothing illegal in what the team was doing, I definitely didn’t want to discuss something like that in front of a lawyer. When I called her the next day to ask whether we could have coffee, she was pleased, but suspicious. “What is it you want to discuss?”

Because I had to try twice to explain it to her, it was a hard sell. She wasn’t buying several aspects of Arun’s proposal: that it wasn’t cheating; that it wasn’t dangerous; and that it was in any way necessary.

“You have enough money,” she said. “You’re not rich, but you’re certainly not poor.”

I had never gone against Susan’s advice before. But I hadn’t told her the whole truth this time. The ingredient in the proposal I had left out was the chance to get closer to Alice Kim. For some reason I couldn’t tell Susan that. But it was a powerful ingredient. Well, that, and the money. The money was attractive. And so was the idea of winning with math, after years of being tormented for being good at it. It was all attractive. So long as it didn’t turn dangerous, what was there to lose?

Two weeks after we had met for coffee, I accepted Arun’s offer. He once again stressed the need for secrecy – everything the team did had to stay with the team.

“One other thing,” he said after I agreed to join. “You think you could get contacts? Your glasses are distinctive. We try to make sure smurfs are not distinctive if we can help it.”

At first I was pissed at him. Typical of him to be a dick. But on reflection it didn’t seem like a big deal. I’d been half thinking about it anyway over the preceding year. Only memories of some unpleasant incidents from my high school years had held me back. I said I’d consider it.

Arun told me I would be working with the team the following weekend. We were going to Vegas, on the 4pm flight on Friday. I had to make excuses at work, but I managed to swing it. Arun even offered to pick me up from work and take me to the airport.

Arun had sprung for a car service. In the back of the car on the way to the airport he handed me a plastic shopping bag. I opened it, and saw it was full of hundred dollar bills, neatly bundled. I almost said something, but mindful of the driver I simply raised my eyebrows.

“You have some, I have some, Henry and Alice and James and Dan have some,” Arun said. “It minimizes risk.”

“Risk?”

He looked at me like I was an idiot, then looked at the driver before deciding to speak anyway. “If you were manning an X-Ray machine at the airport and saw that, say five times that, in someone’s hand luggage, wouldn’t you say something about it?”

“Won’t they say something about it anyway?”

“Yeah, but small amounts are not unprecedented for one person on the way to Vegas. This is unusual for someone your age, but it’s not going to be a problem.”

It turned out not to be a problem at all. In those pre-911 days, airport security was still very lax. I stuffed most of the money in my carryon, and put a few bundles in my jacket and pants. Nobody at security gave me a second thought. I did think, as we boarded the flight and all sat in separate rows, that Arun was mighty trusting giving me what looked like a hundred thousand dollars in cash. He didn’t even like me.

Once we were in Vegas, we met at the MGM Grand. We were going to be playing a range of casinos over the weekend. The Grand was where we’d be holing up, which meant we wouldn’t be playing there.

In addition to the team I’d met that night at the Mohegan Sun, there were a number of other members. Ziyen Cai and Bob Kwak were both MIT students, recruited by Arun recently. Eliza Hong was a friend of Lucy’s from Radcliffe, and the third woman on the team after Alice and Lucy. Apart from Ziyen, who would be doing security, all of them had been assigned to smurf rank like me. Since the team was expanding so much, it meant we didn’t all need to work every single weekend. It also meant Dan could move up to elf rank.

Looking back on all this now, I think I always had more than one objective when I signed up with Arun. At the time, I rationalized to myself that I was accepting because of the challenge, and because of the lure of getting closer to Alice Kim. In retrospect, I think that's not it, entirely. Even then I didn't really believe I had a chance with Alice, but like the moth and the flame I liked the proximity to her brightness, even though I distrusted it and knew it might be my undoing. And sure, there was the math challenge — it’s not often you get to foreground calculations on Expected Value in daily life.

The main thing, though, was what had driven me mad that sophomore year. The truth was, I didn't like myself much. I had been handed a great life on a plate, but it didn't feel in the slightest bit authentic. Every day, in countless little ways, I somehow felt like an impostor. Maybe it was the Asian-American thing. Maybe I was making excuses.

While the evidence suggested otherwise, I felt like I hadn't really deserved to go to Harvard. I thought I hadn't really deserved the friends I had. I believed I didn't really deserve the life I was leading. There was no obvious reason for any of these feelings, other than a feeling of disconnection from the world, and a solipsistic worldview that came from being wrapped up too much in my own mind and not enough in the cares of others.

I had tried other things to overcome this: volunteering at the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter throughout my senior year and then continuing on after I had graduated. But while I felt better about 'giving back', I still didn't feel like I was part of the Shelter Team. That was no reflection on them — the volunteers were all lovely people. It was something wrong with me.

When I joined the Blackjack team, I distrusted Arun but I got to feel like part of a team in a more meaningful way than I had ever felt before. I had never played team sports, apart from cross country which doesn't really count as a collaborative team sport, and I never felt completely accepted at the record hospital or any of the other campus groups. But I could do Math, like few people could. Through Alice, and Arun, I got to feel like a part of something.

I was looking for acceptance. I was looking, although I didn't know it at the time, for an authentic, real existence. It’s more than a trifle ironic that I found it by pretending to be someone else.

The first time I entered a casino as a full member of the team, I was really nervous. The first time at the Mohegan Sun, I’d had no idea what we were doing, so it had all seemed like fun, especially with Alice leading the way. But Arun’s pre-game briefing had been brusque and to the point. He had especially stressed the need for our lookout team of Lucy and Ziyen to ensure we were warned if security looked like they were about to approach one of our players. In the remote chance that one of us was accosted, we were to leave immediately. Under no circumstances, Arun said, should we agree to “talk somewhere private,” which was casino code for back office treatment, usually including a physical work over. Ziyen and Lucy would be circulating within eyesight of each of the teams, and if they folded their arms at any point, we were to get up, take our chips, and head for the exits without cashing in. Arun stressed again we were to leave immediately.

I understood that Arun’s briefing was just part of the discipline of running the team, but I’d begun to worry exactly what it was that I was getting into. I still didn’t trust him.

Fortunately Arun had assigned Dan as an elf to take care of me that first night. Dan was really the oddest choice for a card counter. Huge, he made an impression wherever he went. While he’d done time as a smurf, he was so recognizable it made a lot more sense for him to work as an elf, since only by betting wildly, without any pattern, could he hope to escape suspicion. He would never make a wizard, since he lacked the ‘glam’ factor necessary to pose as one of the rich and famous, but his skill and knowledge of casino operations made him perfect as a lookout. Just having him around made me feel safer. Even if he wasn’t willing to hit anyone, his sheer bulk would be enough to block any security guard and give me time to get away.

I liked Dan enormously. We had a shared interest in computing, although I was better at chess and he was better at coding. He got into trouble while we were at Harvard for hacking into an administration server “just for fun.” It was a mark of Dan's integrity that he didn't actually change his own grades while he had access. At least I assumed that was why he wasn't actually expelled from Harvard.

Mostly, he was just a big, calm, soothing presence whenever I was with him. He once told me, when we were both drunk one night after seeing Pixies play, that he thought of the two of us as the elephant and the mouse. “You scare me, dude,“ he had said. “I always want to, like, feed you or something.“

As we entered the Luxor I smiled. It was so over-the-top. It had only been open for a few years, and was still quite the draw for tourists, but since the old Hacienda next door had lain dormant there was still a lot of traffic that didn’t make it to this end of the strip. We had taken rooms at the MGM Grand further down the strip, and as we entered in ones and twos we each had the time to measure up our surrounds. The atrium was huge, but the faux-Egyptian theme made the whole building seem very silly. Disneyland for grownups who hadn’t really grown up.

As I made my way to the high-stakes section I easily spotted Alice and Ziyen at one table, and Henry and Bob at another. I couldn’t see Lucy and Eliza but they were around somewhere. I made my way over to a table with a few vacant seats and purchased some chips. The table minimum was $50, and the maximum was $10,000 per hand.

After a couple of hands Dan came to join me, but I showed no sign that I knew him. After only 40 minutes I was beginning to think it was going to be a long night. The dealer was inexperienced, and was cutting near the bottom of the deck, but the count still wasn’t going much over +4 at any time – nowhere near high enough to call one of the wizards in. I tried not to think of the team and just play. Sure enough, in the second hour of my play, after I’d had a drink of lime and soda, the count started to rise. When it hit 11 I yawned and stretched my hands over my head – the prearranged signal. Within moments Henry had settled at the table in the number 2 position and had placed what looked like $40,000 in chips on the felt.

“How’s it going?” Henry asked the table in general.

Dan grunted, with a look of disgust, and stepped back from the table to watch rather than play. The thin guy with the string tie next to me muttered, and I said, as casually as I could, “This dealer is making a monkey out of me, but otherwise it’s all good.”

If I’d done my work correctly, the count was +12. That was a big 'if'. Even if my count was correct, there was still the possibility the cards could come out badly for Henry, or at least worse for him than the dealer.

Fortunately, over the next dozen or so hands, Henry cleaned the table like he was using a dustbuster. He drew two aces which he split, and got blackjack on one and twenty on the other, for $12,500 on a single hand. By the time he’d walked away he was at least $45,000 up, and the table was getting cold, with a +5 count. From the corner of my eye I saw Bob signal him, and Henry meandered over to his table, getting a drink along the way.

The rest of the night went quickly. We moved down the strip, to Ceasars Palace, before calling it a night just after dawn and retreating back to the Grand. As Arun and Henry assessed the totals – up $210,000 for the night – I felt elated. We’d worked as a team, as a well-drilled and efficient unit, without ego. Each of us had done their job – and how hard had it been for any of us?

$210,000 profit!

I slept like a baby.