This computer communicated its decisions to the player with buzzes and taps on the sole of the player’s foot. It was not easy to use one of these devices. Even once you had memorized the codes, inputting them via the toe switches was a chore. It took weeks or even months of practice to get to the point where you could use the device at casino-dealing speed without foot cramps stopping you.

In the toe of each shoe there were two “switches”, or buttons - one above each big toe and one beneath - for a total of four switches. Each switch conveyed a different code to the computer, which was a small epoxy-encased device that was strapped to the calf beneath the trousers. By using a series of toe taps, kind of like Morse code, the player could relay to the computer everything it needed to know in order to make a decision in a blackjack game: which cards had already been dealt, what cards the player held, and the dealer’s upcard.

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A team of blackjack players whose founders were from Czechoslovakia that had been playing in Las Vegas flew all of their members to Atlantic City to take advantage of this new surrender rule. This team, which later became known in the casino industry as simply the Czech Team, found the Resorts’ game to their liking and stayed for months.

A New Jersey college student named Tommy Hyland, who had just turned twenty-one, started going to Atlantic City in 1978 when he heard about the favorable black-jack game at Resorts. Within a year, he had organized about twenty of his college and golfing buddies into a team of blackjack players. Hyland’s team continues to this day as one of the most successful casino gambling operations in history.

It was also in 1978 that the first MIT blackjack team was started. This team actually consisted of students from MIT, Harvard, and other East Coast colleges. Johnny C.j now a legendary player who joined the team in 1981, plays high-stakes blackjack to this day and continues organizing teams of professional players. The Czechs, the Hyland teams, and the MIT teams would be the scourge of the casino industry for decades to come. Many believe these teams owe their existence to the Resorts’ game with its early surrender rule that made the game so easy to beat. College kids found that they could pool their money, play blackjack with a modicum of intelligence, and get rich quick.

In fact, it was a combination of that easy-to-beat early surrender game and Ken Uston’s The Big Player that had just been published in 1977 that worked together to create an environment where new teams of smart young kids could make millions playing blackjack.

In the Spring 2003 Blackjack Forum, Richard W. Munchkin, author of Gambling Wizards, interviewed “RC,” one of the most successful hole-carders of modem times. In introducing us to RC, Munchkin writes, “For every one hour spent on the table playing, the hole-card player may spend ten hours scouting… Most players, even if shown a dealer who is flashing, would not be able to spot the hole card anyway. Holecarders spend hundreds of hours training their eyes to see something that flashes by in a fraction of a second, often cast in shadow.”

James Grosjean’s Beyond Counting (now out of print, though a second edition has been announced) is widely regarded as the hole-carder’s bible. A meticulous mathematician, Grosjean was the first person to accurately figure out the hole-carder’s edge at blackjack with perfect reads and perfect play (just over 13 percent), and in addition to his work on blackjack, he provided some of the first detailed hole-card analyses of games like Three-Card Poker, Let It Ride, and Caribbean Stud Poker.

Hole-card players speak their own language and have their own heroes. Most consider card counting too weak to be worth the trouble. Many quickly attain notoriety in the casinos and a degree of fame among other pros that appreciate the rare skills they have developed. But let’s look at some of the forerunners of today’s players, describe some of the most common hole-card strategies, and get a historical overview of this type of legal strategy.

In 1980, Stanford Wong published a book, Winning Without Counting (now out of print), with an initial price tag of $200. To pros, the book was well worth it. Wong discussed many methods of hole-card play for the first time and provided the only detailed description and analysis of “warp” play ever in print.

What is warp play? In the old days, dealers used to manually peek under their tens and aces to see if they had a blackjack before satisfying the players’ hands. This constant bending up of the corners on the tens and aces tended to put a warp into these cards if the casino did not change its decks frequently. An observant player could see the arc in a dealer’s hole card created by hours of bending the corners of the tens and aces. Warp play was simply using this information to make strategy decisions.

Then, Ken Uston’s Million Dollar Blackjack was published by SRS Publishing in 1981. In addition to everything Uston wrote about card counting and team play, Uston went into more detail about two of the hole-card techniques Wong had revealed the year before in Winning lnthout Counting: “spooking” and “front-loading.” Uston, in fact, had become quite adept as a hole-card player after his first book, The Big Player, was published in 1977.

What is front-loading? A front loader is simply a sloppy dealer who flashes his hole card as he is placing it beneath his upcard. It’s actually a pretty descriptive term, since one common way that such a dealer inadvertently flashes the hole card is by tipping the face of the card up toward the “front” of the table as he is “loading” it. A player who sits in a seat that provides him a view of this card is said to be “front-loading.”

Spooking is something else again. It used to be standard procedure for dealers to manually peek under any 10 or ace to see if they had a blackjack, in which case they would immediately turn up the card and collect all bets without playing the hands. Some dealers, in peeking, angled the card in such a way that a person standing behind them, or sitting at another table on the other side of the same pit, could glimpse the card also. It wasn’t long before players started working in teams to take advantage of such dealers. The guy behind the dealer was called the spook. He would signal his buddies playing at the table with whatever information he could get on the hole card. Dealers don’t peek this way anymore, and this is one of the reasons why.

Although lawrence Revere died in 1977. his book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, is still in print. Remarkably, Revere’s card-counting systems are still as powerful as any counting systems ever developed. Revere was probably more responsible than any other author for the number of professional players that plagued the casinos in the early 1970S. His book is a classic “how-to” text. He spends very little ink describing the theory of card counting or telling personal anecdotes. He simply presents the material that must be learned and the ways to. practice what you need to win. No fluff, no filler. I believe any card counter could benefit from Revere’s book, if for no other reason than to acquire more of his no-nonsense approach to getting the edge.

Needless to say I didn’t return to that house for years. But eventually I did, and can even get a game dealt to me there today, on certain shifts. Which brings to mind an interesting note to close this section on. And that is: no matter how bad any casino games countermeasure turns out to be, time - as it always seems to - really does become the great equalizer, given the turnover rate prevalent in today’s casino industry. Of course, that’s not always the case, especially if you’ve made a really lasting impression. But more often than not, if you handle a barring correctly and let enough water pass under the bridge, after a good amount of time it may be possible to play again under that very same roof. And the odds of that happening increase dramatically if you limit yourself to playing on another shift, or if the members of the barring team are no longer em-ployed by that casino.

3. Limit the advantage player to one betting spot. To institute this restriction, the floorperson might instruct the dealer that “the person sitting at third base casino blackjack rules
is only allowed to play one hand.” This countermeasure is often made in conjunction with other limitations, such as capping a player’s maximum to much less than what the table maximum allows other players to wager.

If any of the above ever happens to you, including being backed off or barred, expect some unusual reactions from other players at the table. So you wanna be Rain Man, you say? Well, unfortunately, for those 3.3 minutes that any or all of this takes to go down, you are. It’s not every day that the normal casino-goer gets his game stopped in the middle of the shoe so that the casino can escort blackjack bonus offers another player to the door - a fellow player who from his perspective has done nothing wrong.

One more relevant point: countermeasures vary in terms of how detrimental a specific incident may become. A worst-case scenario is for your picture to be faxed or sent to other casinos in the same city, with a warning that you’re an advantage player currently “in town.” When that happens, your face might end up in a stack of papers on that podium you see in the middle of every blackjack pit.

This is an interesting one, and provides for a little bit of comedy just in so far as what it means. When you’re backed off, the casino will advise that you are no longer welcome to play special blackjack, but you can (and, in fact, are welcome to) stay and play any other game offered by the casino. “If you continue to play blackjack, you will be asked to leave, and if you then refuse or return to the premises at some later time, you will be arrested for trespassing.”

In other words, play any of our other games where obtaining an advantage is impossible, but don’t play blackjack.

If you weren’t smiling over the “private club” ruse, I’m sure you’re smiling now.

Rule or Procedural Changes

This is an interesting one, too, because this is what happens in a jurisdiction in which barring or backing off an advantage player isn’t allowed by law.

As mentioned earlier, several rule or procedural changes can be made that essentially eliminate the possibility of obtaining an advantage over the house. The pit boss or floor person will come over to the table and instruct the dealer to do one or more of the following:

l. Place the cut card in the middle of a freshly shuffled pack of cards, forcing a reshuffle after dealing out only about half of the shoe. (In some cases the cut card is placed only a deck or two from the front - even more absurd.) Since such a limited number of cards is dealt before a reshuffle becomes necessary, the likelihood of a positive true count high enough to invoke a large bet becomes virtually nonexistent. If there are a lot of players at the table, the cut card, at worst, will likely be placed in the middle rather than towards the front, with the hope that the other players won’t notice, and therefore won’t complain about short deals or a dealer seemingly always shuffling. But a six-deck shoe in which three decks are cut off reduces penetration so much that a proficient counter will likely leave the game in search of greener pastures.

Once, many years ago, a pit boss came over to a table I was playing at (with one other player) and instructed the dealer to shuffle after every hand. This wouldn’t have been memorable except that I was playing a four-deck shoe. I sat there for a short time just to absorb the absurdity of it all: Shuffle four decks of cards. Decks extended for player cut. Cards placed in shoe. Shoe made ready to deal. First card burned. Deal one hand. Pay off or take wagers. Remove cards from shoe. Locate cut card and distribute. Place all cards in discard tray and then shuffle all over again.

To be continued…
I hung around for two complete cycles, then left the casino and the city.

To be continued

When a player is identified as a card counter, the first step is for man-agement to decide what course of action, if any, to take. More often than not what they decide depends on the laws governing the state or the grounds on which the casino is located. That’s why, for example, in Las Vegas a card counter can be barred from play whereas in Atlantic City he can’t. But that’s not to say a casino remains defenseless in those locales where barring a person from play isn’t allowed. When casinos can’t bar or back off an advantage player, they resort to any one of several rule procedural changes that negate the counter’s advantage over the house - thereby accomplishing essentially the same thing as legally removing him or her from the premises.

Countermeasures imposed against advantage players come in several forms. Let’s examine each one in detail, so you’ll know exactly what you’re up against or what to expect in the event you’re identified as a card counter. Let’s start with the most severe.

Being Barred

If this is allowed by the authority having jurisdiction, it means that you are no longer allowed on the premises, and must leave at once. Picking up where we left off above, the dealer will step aside and the floorperson or pit boss will read you a legal statement that essentially advises, “you are no longer welcome in this casino.” Behind the scenes what is really going on is that the casino you are sitting in has decided to exercise its rights as a private club (which it is) and by doing so is able to pick and choose its members. The statement you’ll hear will further ad-vise that “if you refuse to leave or return to the premises after being barred, you may be arrested for trespassing.”

If you’re sitting at a blackjack table, this means picking up your chips and proceeding immediately to the cashier’s cage, where your chips will be converted to cash, and then leaving through the nearest door possible. The whole time you’ll be escorted (like a criminal) by sev-eral members of the casino’s security force.

Trespassing? You’ve got to be kidding me, right?

Wrong, unfortunately.

You’re not being barred because you’re too good of a card player. (Well, you are, but that’s not the official ruling.) You’re being barred be-cause the casino becomes a private club that all of sudden no longer wants your action. That’s some really fancy footwork relating to the law, isn’t it? But, unfortunately, that’s the reality of the situation if you’re playing in a state like Nevada, for instance, where the casino industry and the government hold hands in the night.

To be continued…