BJA How I Went From Waiting Tables to Professional Blackjack

This story is free and does not contain affiliate links. Fight Casinos by passing it on (under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License) © 2009 www.blackjackapprenticeship.com Layout by Jason Dooley

Special Thanks: Mom and Dad. Ryan S. Jeff Verde. “Andy” B. Joe G. Eklesia Team. JP. Mark & H. Chuck K (for teaching me that “Money Magazine” doesn’t care if you get rich. Jon C. Arnold S. “Murphy”. Stanford W. Max R. Ian S. Stephen M. Rainbow R. Jason Dooley. And All the Investors who believed in us. Thanks.

This story is dedicated to: Colin who has made me successful in ways no one else has..... and who has kept me from ever having to look at a spreadsheet And To Kami who trusted me with our last $800.

Table of Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 It all began in a restaurant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Bike Trip...and car accident (Accident #1) . . . . . . . . . . 21 Looking for a partner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Accident #3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Along with money comes friends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Getting Recruited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 All Good things must come to an end . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Going Corporate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Life After Blackjack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 The End . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60

7 This is my story. It’s not a “how-to” manual, just a story. My story is about how I went from waiting tables to becoming one of the most famous blackjack players and educators in the world....on accident. Well, so maybe it’s not just a story. Because hopefully at the end you’ll be forced to make a decision. If you haven’t already, you’ll have to decide if you’re just going to take the boring options that life has to offer or if you’re going to tell The Man that you want MORE. You see, although I am not going to fudge one fact or exaggerate one tale (which, if you ask me, is a very unnatural way to tell stories), my story may as well be fiction to you, at least compared to your own autobiography. But to the degree that you are able to celebrate in my joys, mourn with my failures, and, especially, to learn from my victories and many mistakes, I invite you to come along and make my story a part of yours. After all, if you are reading this, your story is not done yet. And the best part is, that there’s a really good chance

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8 that the most exciting part of your story is yet to come. So use my story for inspiration or entertainment. But above all, it is a call to action. This goes way beyond playing blackjack. Accidents happen. You can commiserate, or you can capitalize on the opportunities they provide. Some day you may write your own story about your own accidents and you should want to be writing a story that you are proud about. A story that will inspire and entertain. A story that is awesome. But I’m going to stick with what I know. Here’s my story. It all began in a restaurant...


10 Well, not really. I was born and stuff. I got married at a pretty early age to the girl that I had a crush on since junior high. She was the only girl that ever told me that she would never marry me. I’m glad that she was wrong and most days she is too. Within three months of being married we were expecting our first child. This was a little crazy considering the fact that my wife was two years away from completing her nursing degree, we were determined to graduate without one cent of debt, and I was making minimum wage. I don’t have much to say about the restaurant except two things. The first is that for the year that I worked there I mostly sustained myself on the unlimited fries that they offered, since we were so broke. And the second thing is that although singing “Happy Birthday” to teenagers was getting old, the restaurant seemed like a paradise compared to my previous job of lugging trash back and forth at a construction site.


11 At the restaurant people said “hi” and many of them even had high school degrees. Which was about as much as I could say for myself. You see, I actually did pretty well in school. In the 5th grade I was in a program for gifted students with all sorts of other kids doing advanced math but who had trouble tying their shoes. High school was pretty easy for me. I was in all honors classes and even managed to graduate six months early. To me it was just a matter of how late I would stay up each night. I may not have been the smartest kid but I did decide at a very early age that I would turn in every assignment on time. And I did. Now this seemed like the all time slam dunk to the American Dream. Both mine and my wife’s parents seemed pretty excited about my goals to finish college and take on a 9-5 as a doctor, lawyer, or the spiritual equivalent...a pastor. So, I started going to school in Portland, OR. I had an amazing year, living on my own and learning from some amazing professors. But that’s when the trouble started. I started asking some blackjackapprenticeship.com

12 questions. At first it started out small. What happens when education gets in the way of learning? What if I don’t want my life and marriage plans to be based upon my education, but vice versa? What if I won’t want to start working at 9 and clock out at 5? Ok, I’m getting off track here a bit. This chapter title is about a restaurant so I should probably get back to that. So, I was waiting tables. The problem is, remember the questions that I mentioned earlier? Well, they never went away. Most of the people that I knew who had the most money and the best jobs were the most busy and had the least amount of time for their families. Around this time I had started to get bored with waiting tables. The code seemed too easy to crack. Be organized, be nice, and tell the customers if they need ANYthing to let you know--and then do it. I remember once there was this promotion running at the restaurant where they were selling some buffalo burger and they had a contest to see who could sell the most. Well, I decided to win it. So, I told every


13 table that I had about it. I explained to them that the buffalo burger was pretty good and if they didn’t like it, I would buy it for them. As it turned out, I sold more than anyone at my restaurant, more than anyone in the region, and more than anyone in the world. Now, I tell this story for a couple of reasons. The first is that I think it’s funny. The second is because I think that it is an important reflection of why I am where I am now. But like every good tale, we’ll save the moral of the story for the end.


15 After my one year anniversary of working for the restaurant I was convinced that it was time for an adventure. My wife and I had a child and we wanted to see the country, so we decided to bike across it. Actually, to tell you the truth, it was way more me than her, but either way we were in it together. Me, her, and our 11 month-old daughter. The plan was simple. A little ridiculous considering neither of us owned bikes nor really enjoyed biking, but still simple. Pack up our bags, rent out our apartment, fly to the Atlantic Ocean and bike to our home on the Pacific Ocean. As long as we got back by September she wouldn’t miss a day of school and although I was definitely absent, I certainly wouldn’t miss a day of work, although the fries had started to become a regular part of my diet. When my request for a three-month vacation was denied, I told my work that if they were interested in hiring me when I got back I would be willing. After all, if their goal was to sell buffalo burgers, this seemed to be in their best interest. As it turned out, that day I clocked out at the restaurant would be the last


16 day that I had a normal job. Since then I have not had a boss, clocked in, or requested vacation. Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve spent every day since then rolling in the dough. In fact many days, weeks, and months have been the exact opposite. Our bike trip was a good example of this. We landed in the very strange and far away state of Virginia, picked up our bikes from the Fed Ex Station, and started biking. A couple of things about our trip: the route spanned 13 states and was more than 4,000 miles long. With an infant in tow, I calculated that we should be able to complete the trip in just around three months. Remember, my wife was in nursing school, we had just had a child 11 months earlier, and were determined to stay out of debt. That meant no credit cards and no student loans. That also meant that our food budget was $10/day--for three people. So while we weren’t living in luxury by most people’s standards, we had discovered a new luxury. We woke up when we wanted to. We ate when we wanted to. blackjackapprenticeship.com

17 And we saw some of the most amazing scenery and met some of the most amazing people to date. No one was telling us what to do and I was spending time with the people I cared about the most. But, all good things must come to an end and our trip came to an end two and a half months earlier than it was supposed to when all three of us got hit by a car. There were a lot of details involving ambulance rides, an 88 year-old man charged with negligent driving, and being stuck in the middle of the Appalachian mountains with no money, identification, transportation, or belongings (they were all left in the middle of the road when the ambulance picked us up) but I don’t want to get to get too far off topic. The bottom line is that we ended up back home without jobs, without a place to live, and no ambitions to try and spend the rest of the summer working. [This is where the part about blackjack begins].


18 About three months earlier I had bought a book called how to make $100,000.00 a year gambling. It was written by a famous poker author and I bought it to fine tune my strategy for poker tournaments. You see, back in my restaurant days, we had a pretty regular Friday night $5 buy-in poker night. I remember after our first two nights of losing having some serious talks with my wife about whether or not we could afford to play. After all, at this time $5 represented a night of eating out for us. So losing was not an option financially or emotionally. Very quickly my goal became to learn the optimal strategy of beating the game. Now this book in particular had a chapter on how to win at blackjack. Had I not come across this chapter I doubt that the thought of playing blackjack would have ever crossed my mind. I never gambled and had never really been in a casino. I think the chapter on blackjack was no more than five pages long. I was instantly captivated by the simplicity of it all. Poker was complicated and involved. Psychology, tons of variables, and really complicated math. From what I could gather, beating blackjack involved memorizing a chart and blackjackapprenticeship.com

19 adding and subtracting the number 1 a bunch of times. All I remember was that my first response was, “I could do that.” So, I did. And the rest is history. Just kidding. I wish it was that simple, but it is not. You see, back in the day we didn’t have any fancy websites to just go to and from which we could learn how to count. Wikipedia wasn’t even around and the few books that were around cost money and were saturated with what appeared to be retired mathematicians discussing theories using terms that could have been used to explain the existence of black holes. One thing you can bet on is there were certainly no websites with free video. That is why when we started this site it was based upon that very missing element. We felt like providing the best video training in the world on how to count cards was our way to give back to a community that had a very dire need. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though. Back to 2001. I thought I had everything I needed to know about blackjack except for one thing: a partner. blackjackapprenticeship.com

21 I’m a bit of an extrovert so every time I get a “good” idea I like to share it. It’s in my nature. Unfortunately for the people around me, not all of my “good ideas” are actually good. Since this idea involved casinos and gambling there was one person in particular who came to mind. My friend from the restaurant who had a gambling problem. I don’t entirely recall what I was thinking but lucky for you it makes for an entertaining story. I don’t want to overstep my bounds as a story teller by giving you life advice but here’s one tip: When you are making life choices, one that is going to be entertaining to a non-existent group of future readers may not always be the best course of action. But in this case it worked out. I remember telling my friend about this chart called basic strategy that told you exactly what to do. He seemed skeptical but to a gambler any excuse to get to the casino is a good excuse. By this time I had photocopied a basic strategy chart into a credit card sized piece of paper that I could keep in my wallet. I remember sitting at a table with my friend staring at a hand and asking


22 “Do you remember what the book says to do?” and getting a blank stare back. After the hand was over I would run to the bathroom and whip out my card to see if I had made the correct move. Every once in a while I had. One other moment that comes to mind is when we put our first bankroll together. We each put up $200 for a grand total of $400. The first night we lost almost all of it. It’s a funny thing with gamblers. For how much they claim they don’t like to lose they sure spend a lot of time doing exactly that. I remember telling my friend that we needed to re-group and figure out what we were doing next but he was pretty convinced that a trip to the ATM machine and another five hours in the casino was going to fix our problem. In the end I won--but that night taught me that although card counting is simple it is not easy.


24 I guess I didn’t really spell it out, but accident #1 was that I ended up getting the answer on how to count cards when I wasn’t even asking the question. Accident #2 was quite literal and involved a moving vehicle. Accident #3 was twice the accident #1 or #2 was. Before I knew it, the craziest thing that could possibly happen started to happen: I actually started to make money playing blackjack. In order to understand how big of an accident this really was, I need to explain my mindset throughout this time. When I got back from the bike trip debacle, I wondered how to spend the rest of my summer. Ultimately, I decided that I was going to take card counting seriously and try and learn it by the end of the summer--not because I thought I could actually make money at it, and certainly not because I ever planned on doing it as a job, but more so because I thought that I might be able to have an enjoyable hobby that might pay for itself. At the time, I thought this was a best case scenario. After my friend and I lost our original $400 investment I decided blackjackapprenticeship.com

25 to reach deep and use half of my savings. Not long after, I hopped into bed after being out at the casino all night, and had to explain to my wife that I had lost all of it--$800--in one night. We now had $800 left in our bank account. We knew we had a decision to make. At least it felt that way, but in my experience as a card counter and entrepreneur I have realized a few things about my type. There are a lot of reasons to count cards or try any number of hair brained business ideas. But there are an equal number of reasons NOT to try these things. In fact there must be more reasons to not try them, because for every card counter you will find 1000 people in a casino not counting cards and probably 10,000 people who don’t even go to the casino at all. I think it boils down to one question. The question is not “Can you do it?” The question is “Can you not do it?” Most of the people who I have trained are doing it because they answered “no” to that question. It doesn’t always make sense financially or practically. Whether you like it or not, you’ve blackjackapprenticeship.com

26 already taken a step into the rabbit hole and you need to take two more steps to see what’s around the corner because if you don’t you’re always going to wonder what you missed. Hence I ended up at the casino with our last $800. Not really wanting to know what was around the next corner, but also not being able to live with not knowing. As it turns out, it’s a good thing that I looked because lying around that next corner was a bunch of money. Well, at least it seemed like a bunch. From getting paid six dollars an hour and making one hundred dollars from tips (on the best of nights), I will never forget the amazement that I experienced the first time I made $1,000 in one hour. I didn’t really know what was going on but I did know that I had never seen money move this quickly. As is the nature of things, I got accustomed to winning and losing $1,000 on any given night. And, before I knew it, $5,000 became the new $1,000. Before I start sounding all cocky, I want to explain what I mean and what I don’t mean. Just because you lose or win money in blackjackapprenticeship.com

27 the thousands of dollars on a daily basis shouldn’t mean that you don’t care about the wins and losses. To this day, it doesn’t matter how much I bet, I enjoy winning and hate losing at any game, but especially at the blackjack table. One thousand dollars represents a lot of things: a vacation, presents for the kids, a piece of a new house, but ultimately, the beginning of financial freedom. But there are two main changes that occurs for every professional gambler. One of these changes is that you start to see the value of money expand beyond just what you can buy. The money takes on a strange utilitarian structure as a card counter. Money becomes a tool you use for your trade similar to the way a carpenter owns and uses a hammer. As an example, when I went to the casino with that last eight-hundred dollars, I turned it into $2,000 pretty quickly. The thought never occurred to me to go and spend the $1,200 profit. My only thought was re-investing it to have less risk and more profit potential. Pretty boring, but I’m sure if there are any professional card-counters reading blackjackapprenticeship.com

28 this, they can relate. Another one of these changes that takes place with professional gamblers, is that each win and loss becomes slightly less surprising. There are certain losses that I will never forget, but there are many more that I will never remember. The same thing goes for the wins. While the money has remained very real to me in one sense, there has also been a major emotional disconnection from what I categorize as my “blackjack money.” It’s funny, there have been times where I’ve freaked out from winning or losing less than $100 and other times I experience virtually zero emotion for wins and losses in the six-figure range.


30 By now I was having trouble classifying myself. It’s so easy when you are enrolled in a school, because if some old family friend or your aunt or grandma ask you can just say, “I’m going to school.” You sound responsible and professional. Well, I was at a place where it was hard to sound like either. Either I was spending way to much time on my hobby to be a normal person or I needed to start calling what I was doing a job. It sure didn’t feel like a job. At least not like any job I had ever heard about. It didn’t feel like work, that’s for sure. I was out late every night, learning tons, and loving every minute of it. I’m not quite sure at what point I started calling myself “professional” but it was probably about a year after I had quit my job at the restaurant and I realized that I had no other source of income. Calling yourself a professional can be an emotionally risky proposition. Before, I could say that I was just checking it out and if I lost money at it, big deal, it was just a hobby. Now it was my profession. I had to make money at it. And I was making money at it. I think right around the time I


31 realized that, some of my friends came to the same realization. Of course there were skeptics. Heck, if my friend came to me and told me he was going to be making money playing blackjack I would have thought he was crazy. But a year into it some other people and myself started to realize that this was no joke. It was not a scam. It was not a get rich quick scheme, although it seemed to have all of the benefits of one. So, of course the question was, could they get in on it too? Seriously, if you saw one of your friends playing a game ten hours a week and making a living at it, wouldn’t you want in? It wasn’t simply a one way street, however. Since I had first partnered with my friend the gambling addict, I had always wanted companionship. Card counting is a very lonely endeavor. In a casino, you are surrounded by a lot of people, but there are few you can relate too. There are the gamblers who are there for fun, and the employees who are usually trying to chase you out. Having some friends for the long car rides, and to share stories with was a dream come true. This is before we even


32 knew about the benefits of being on a team. My friend Colin was one of these first few people. Although every bone in his body was adverse to risk and the excitement that came along with gambling, the stories that I was bringing back about using math to stick it to the casino machine and having a proven track record was more than he could resist. Lucky for both of us, he was living in my living room, trying to save money for his upcoming wedding. Thus began the training. I taught him everything I knew. It took about 10 minutes. One of the funniest things about the “good ol’ days” was how little we all knew about blackjack. I’m not sure at what point I really mastered basic strategy but it was way after I should have ever put my first dollar on the table. The only way we could learn anything was one book at a time. There was no one to ask questions to, no one to discuss theory with, no one to train or test. I remember once I was so starved for cardcounting camaraderie that I posted a note on a popular blackjack website. I got a response. I arranged to meet the guy at a blackjackapprenticeship.com

33 local casino. I was so crushed when I found out that he bent basic strategy on a soft 18 based upon “his gut.” Just another sucker. I focused all of my energy on buying every book I could get my hands on. It wasn’t much but it was all I had, and somehow, reading about people who had done the same thing or at least thought the same way made me feel like I wasn’t alone. By this time, two friends of mine had completed all the training that I had to offer and together we were hitting the casino circuit. I don’t remember much of the details, but I do remember lots of free food and setting my alarm to wake up at 2pm. I think my favorite thoughts were about how exciting it was that I was running a quarter-million dollar business with my best friends, doing my dream job, and I was still only 23. We broke a million dollars. Nothing compared to the excitement of the unknown and freedom that I felt. With the changes came new levels of responsibility and appreciation. I love the industry and job as much as ever, but for many different and, in some ways deeper, reasons. blackjackapprenticeship.com

35 Probably the single most monumental event in my card counting career came on a night when I ran into a legitimate professional member of a very prominent team. I could tell from across the casino that he was a card counter by the way he was shuffling his chips. Evidently he spotted me too, because he found me in the parking lot as I was walking out and started asking me all kinds of questions. What size bet unit do you use? What’s your risk of ruin? Do you use full kelly or half kelly betting? All of a sudden I felt like a complete outsider to this whole card counting thing. We exchanged phone numbers and he told me his name was John. I remember going back to the other two guys I was playing with and telling them how I had actually met a real professional. A guy on a team like we had read about in all the books. It was probably more exciting than a basketball fan meeting Michael Jordan because card counters are so secretive and don’t exactly advertise. When I left the parking lot I was 50% convinced that he had given me an actual phone number and 25% convinced that he had given me his real name. blackjackapprenticeship.com

36 By the next day we had set up a meet and greet. This was probably the closest thing to a job interview that I’ve had in the last eight years. There were a lot of strange questions and every other statement was qualified with a privacy clause. It seemed like every question I asked was met with an answer like “I can’t tell you that” or “I’m not allowed to say.” But, in the end, there existed a hope that I may be able to join this elite group of heroes who I had never met. To this day, I’m not exactly sure why John reached out to me in that casino parking lot. After you are in the advantaged play industry, you gain a general distrust of casinos and anyone and anything that you may come across inside of one. He told me at the time, and I believe him, that his team had never considered anyone they had met in a casino for a position on the team. Maybe he thought I was awesome. Maybe he was lonely and bored. Maybe he wanted to show off a bit. My guess is that there is some combination of the latter two. Me being awesome is pretty easy to rule out, especially considering my first experience with a “test out.” blackjackapprenticeship.com

38 If you combine the nightmares of being involved in a trainwreck and being caught naked in public, you will have a pretty good idea of my test-out. I was completely out of my element. It would be like if you grew up playing ping pong in your grandparents basement and thought you were good, then show up to some Olympic training facility and were thrown into a game with people who all brought their own paddles in padded cases, played by “real” rules, and wore ping-pong brand name dry-wik shirts. Standing there in your baggy jeans you may start to re-think the expertise you thought you had five minutes earlier. By the way, this whole ping pong scenario happened to me as well. When I had “learned” to play there was no test. When I trained my friends there was no test. We all just looked at the chart and went out. It was casual. It was easy. A little too easy, I found out. These guys on the team had methods. They had equipment. They had codes, signals, and a language. Come to find out, I had been playing basement level blackjack all this blackjackapprenticeship.com

39 time. This was frustrating. Among my peers I was the authority on card counting. With these guys I was a nobody. There was no respect, no admiration, and none of the status that I was used to. I felt like I had been treating this as a hobby the whole time, which wasn’t entirely false. On the other hand, having my eyes opened to a whole new world of experts and proven methods was the most valuable thing I had ever experienced. There were no books written about the types of things these guys were doing. This was the legit stuff from the underground. To this day the training that I use and the standards we employ were heavily influenced by what I learned in my time with this team. Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on how you look at it) the majority of my time with the team was training. My entire play with the team amounted to one long weekend trip. Team members flew in from all parts of the country and converged on Atlantic City, New Jersey. This was my first time to Atlantic City and my first time meeting any of these team blackjackapprenticeship.com

40 members, besides John. It ended up being a pretty crazy weekend. How casually these players talked about circumventing surveillance, sessions with tens of thousands of dollars in wins or losses and meeting card counters who were lawyers, students, programmers, male and female. I ended up not making any money for the trip because I couldn’t even pass their basic test in the hotel room before the sessions. But I did walk away with two things. The first is that you don’t learn blackjack on accident. I had never even had the possibility of having someone mentor, train, or apprentice me, so it’s hard to say that I underestimated it, but I had no idea how valuable it was to see what other people had spent years developing and learning. To apply the proverbial phrase, my blackjack “world had expanded”. 2 months ago I was an expert. Now I viewed myself as a beginner. This made me an incredible asset to my original partners back home who were waiting to hear where my blackjack loyalties lied.


41 This leads me to the second lesson I took away. I care about my friends. In fact, I care about my friends so much that I would much rather take a friend who has never been in a casino and train them over the course of six months than team up with some random card counter from Vegas at the top of his field. Although, it was a valuable experience in Atlantic City something never felt 100 percent to me. Blackjack is a tough sport. You are being challenged mentally, emotionally and financially. Putting your life savings on the line everyday and getting chased out of casinos by law enforcement can take a toll on a person. This can all be accelerated when you have spent 72 hours in a casino-infested town. I decided that if I was going to play blackjack with people, I want to have more than blackjack in common with them. Since that time I have found partners in the most unlikely of places. Friends, family, friends of friends, even churches. Our criteria for partners has changed throughout the years, save one thing. I have never played blackjack with someone blackjackapprenticeship.com

42 who I did not trust* 100 percent. As a result, I have had some of the most amazing experiences. Six years ago I remember thinking, “Who gets to travel around the world with their best friends taking money from casinos?” I graduated from a fairly prestigious and competitive high school, from a class that mostly went on to high-level legal and medical fields. I do not envy them. I don’t like to brag about this, but my guess is that I make as much an hour as any of them. This hasn’t made me rich but it does mean that I have been able to work as few as five days a month and spend the rest of the time with my family. * Although we have always trusted our teammates and partners 100 percent, my definition of what it means to trust someone has changed dramatically. In the last eight years I have become a much more shrewd businessman as well as a more accurate and conservative judge of character.


44 Tolerance and adaptation are amazing human traits. It’s amazing how you can be living the most exciting job to everyone around you and even to yourself but by simply adding the variable of time it is a guarantee that it will cease to be exciting. While it took longer, this did eventually happen. One thing that I have learned about myself is that when I hit the ceiling of growth, perceived or real, my motivation will cease to exist. This means that if I am not being challenged, if I am not creating and exploring, if I am not risking the possibilities of growth and failure, I am no longer happy. About five years ago I arrived to that point in my blackjack career. It started to feel like work. My wife had graduated from nursing school and we were expecting our third child (by the way, I’m not really sure how she did it, but she graduated with honors, on time, having birthed and raised two children). We had bought two homes and I had saved up enough money from playing blackjack that paying bills wasn’t a problem. And now it was time to decide what to do with my time and money. From some very


45 rudimentary research I concluded that property investment would probably be my best option. I decided that for two main reasons. It seemed somewhat formulaic. If we could crack the code, we could make money, similar to blackjack. And most importantly, there was no ceiling. Unlike blackjack where you could run out of casinos and bet only as much as the table limit allowed, with real estate the game was not over until you owned the entire world. Kind of like RISK. And I liked playing RISK. So I announced to the other three guys that I had been playing with for the last two years that I was retiring from blackjack. I invited one of the three guys, Colin, who had moved out from my living room by this time, to join me on my real estate experiential. He said yes and within two weeks we had registered “Maverick Property” as an investment company.


47 Being an entrepreneur is tough. I read somewhere that 95 percent of businesses fail within their first year. For those of you who have tried starting a business, the size of how high this percentage is, should not be a mystery. There are a lot of things working against starting a business. You can have the greatest of ideas but not understand how taxes work and there goes your plan, your investment, and your future. Maverick became one of these types of businesses very quickly. Educational and exciting? Yes. Profitable? No. Very quickly, Colin and I realized that if we were going to be able to buy more property we needed more money. There was only one honest and dependable way we know how to do that. Take it from the casinos. Since we weren’t the Oceans 11 types, it meant more card counting. So this was the plan: win $250,000. Get in, get out. Now even us card counters don’t win $100k overnight. At least not usually. I’m not sure exactly, (I’m sure it’s written down somewhere) but I think it took us about four months. But during those four blackjackapprenticeship.com

48 months something interesting happened. A friend of mine heard that Colin and I had gotten back into blackjack and he asked if he could play for us. I told him that it was a temporary gig, but he seemed pretty excited about it. Colin and I couldn’t think of a reason not to take him, so he was on board. Then he told his friend about it. Soon his friend was on board. $250,000 later we had a decision to make. We could go buy another property, but the problem was that we were generating so much capital from our team that it didn’t make financial sense. We literally could not afford NOT to play. I use the term “play” pretty loosely because then another interesting thing started to happen. Colin and I started to become more valuable as trainers and managers than we were as players. This was a very strange but remarkably natural transition into our fourth and final accident. One could argue my definition of the word “accident.” That is fine. I will let them win. When I say “accident” I am merely referring to the fact that learning blackjack, playing blackjackapprenticeship.com

49 professionally, and running what came to be a pretty sizable team was always unplanned and unintentional. In fact, I remember the day that I shared with Colin about a thought that had crossed my mind the night before. Briefly, very briefly the thought occurred that we may be onto a ten-year business plan. That may be normal for any other business, but keep in mind we never planned on running a business. I was just trying to learn a hobby that would pay for itself for the rest of summer so I didn’t have to think about how much we wished we hadn’t of gotten hit by the 88 year-old man in the Pinto. Of course, there were some things that were not an accident. For instance, the business partnership that Colin and I had formed was very intentional. I started to refine my traits of setting a vision for the team while managing all of the interpersonal and subjective issues that came along with managing a group of counters. This left Colin to run many of the everyday operations, from deciding how much to bet, how much to pay, and keep track of every minute we spend in a casino and blackjackapprenticeship.com

50 every cent that moved. For a while we would joke about how I was kind of like CEO and he was like the COO. At some point, I’m not exactly sure when, this stopped being a joke. The other thing that was not an accident was the network of relationships that most of this entire blackjack endeavor was built upon. Investing in relationships has always been one of my top priorities (this is somewhat of a ridiculous understatement) and when it came time to finding people that we trusted, or when we looked for our first $500,00 in capital it was not a coincidence that neither of these thing were more than a dozen phone calls away. A few other things that I brought to the business, which increased both my enjoyment and it’s value, was the high emphasis on fairness. There are many things that we didn’t have. Some of these things were a proven business model and track record, any promises for the future, experience, and certainly a guaranteed product would all fall into this category. There were also many times when we left lawyers in the rear view and operated off of a handshake. blackjackapprenticeship.com

51 In the end this has worked because everyone who knew us knew that we cared about one thing. Being fair. This value was reinforced by our general management and team policy of full disclosure. What this meant was that anyone on the team was allowed to know anything about the team at any time. There were no secrets ever and as a result we had trust. I’ve gotten a little excited here and have rambled off on some details. Getting back to our main story, one of the things that made this season of my blackjack career great was that the ceiling was lifted. I was dealing with new issues, new people, and new business model after new business model. I was constantly being challenged and life was, once again, anything but boring. There’s a lot of things that happened during this time that I could write about. Like the time we had $110,000 confiscated by the US government while trying to cross an international border. It was my full time job for two months trying to get it back. There was the airplane laser tag that we got comped by the casino. blackjackapprenticeship.com

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There was the time we made $10,000 off of blackjack coupons found in some casino’s swimsuit calendar. There was one of our favorite players who brought us a new recruit. It was his mom. There were also much more serious times of having to hire and fire some of my closest friends. It all amounts to stacks and stack of stories that are all worth telling in their own regard. So please do not take this here as a record of what took place but simply as my story. And part of telling my story is thinking through the things that come to mind when I consider the last ten years. These are a few of them.


54 Not so long ago, I once again lost interest and motivation to count cards and even managing the team was starting to feel routine. In an effort to reduce my workload I thought about recording an intro to a card counting lecture that I had probably given a hundred times just so I could hand someone a DVD instead of explaining basic strategy for the thousandth time. I started to think that if I was to make that DVD I’ll bet it would sell copies to other people interested in learning how to count. The net result was Blackjackapprenticeship.com. It really started off with pretty narrow and pathetic plans. Over time, though, I started to realize that this has the potential to be the most valuable resource to card counters that exists. After all, it’s taking the books that I read, the lessons that I learned, the conversations I learned from, and condensing it into one place all while adding a bunch of professionals that I have met along the way. Sometimes I feel like an old man when I jokingly tell players from our team that they don’t know how easy they have it. Back when I learned, if I had a question, I didn’t


55 have someone I could just call up and ask. I’m not trying to make this a giant advertisement for our site but it is interesting that, for me, life after blackjack, once again, involves more blackjack. It would take something pretty amazing to keep me stuck in that world that I am unable to escape, and this site is it. From micro-managing every element of the design to recording the videos this site is a project that I believe in and am excited about. Will it last forever? No. I’m sure sooner or later I’ll be ready for another change of pace but until then I’m going to continue to take it on as a challenge of how can I take the combined card counting experience of me and every contact that I ever had and condense it into the most awesome blackjack site on the internet. This last year I thought about going back to school to get my college degree. This was the first time that I had thought about college in a long time. I think it would make my parents happy. At times, it has been pretty scary to imagine what life after blackjack looks like without having anything to fall back blackjackapprenticeship.com

56 on. It makes me wonder if I could end up back at the restaurant waiting tables. It’s kind of funny, when I was first getting into blackjack I remember a friend telling me that I should go get a college degree so I have something to fall back on. In most people’s minds this was a positive thing. I remember thinking 2 things then. I never want to have the type of job that depended upon a piece of paper to prove your qualifications. And I don’t want anything to fall back upon. Sometimes I think that not having anything to fall back upon is what makes me, and others like me, succeed. On the flip side, I have seen many friends with plenty to fall back upon never succeed because of that. Being an entrepreneur is a tricky thing. It’s almost a job description in itself and there are many days where I have wanted to quit. The lure of a steady income, not having your entire life savings in play on the sequence of four cards, and the air of legitimacy have all been aspects of the 9-5 that I


57 have missed more than once. But when it’s all said and done, I look back, and I wouldn’t have done anything differently. That’s not to say I didn’t make mistakes but I would have made mistakes either way. The result is that I have spent the last ten years working with some of the best friends I could ever ask for. As you can imagine, playing blackjack for a living attracts a pretty interesting crowd. Many of the people I have partnered with are some of the brightest minds and most innovate thinkers that I have ever known. That has lead to business partnerships and idea collaboration of all kinds. Well, all kinds but one. The 9-5 kind. Sometimes I wonder what I might put on a resume if I ever needed one. I’m not really sure what’s going to impress the masses but on a reflective note I know there are things that I am proud of accomplishing. I am a better business man than I was ten years ago. I am a better business partner than I was ten years ago. I know more about hiring the right people. I have learned how to fire people because they were wrong for the job but still be able to give


58 them dignity and respect as a human and a friend. I’ve learned how to manage my time better. I am more aware of how to acknowledge and compensate for my weaknesses. I am better at delivering bad news. None of these things have anything to do with blackjack and I have the feeling that when I am old it won’t be the blackjack that ever really mattered.


60 There you have it. That’s my story. 8,000 words of it, at least. I’m not quite sure how to wrap this up but one thing I offer is this: If you are asking yourself if you could start a business, travel the world, or learn how to count cards don’t just take into account the cost of doing it. Take into account the cost of not doing it. There are a few people out there that feel sorry for me but there are many more that have looked at me and envy the position I am in. I have been told this by poor students and executives with six figure earnings. What these people do not realize is that living my dream life did not begin when I started making hundreds of thousands of dollars at the blackjack table. It started when I decided that the cost of quitting my job and biking across the country did not come close to the cost of always wondering what would have happened had I decided not to step out and take a risk. So hopefully this story will make you think bigger than the status quo. Watch out though, because when you start to do that you may find yourself “accidentally” landing in some places you never thought were possible. blackjackapprenticeship.com

BJA How I Went From Waiting Tables to Professional Blackjack

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