“ ‘Whoa, Dennis! Hold it right there. First, how the hell do you guess the number of decks left?’
“ ‘You just look at the shoe holding the dealer’s cards. It’s not theoretical physics. Don’t be afraid of it. Does the shoe look half empty, three-quarters empty? You look and you guess. You will have been there from the beginning when the dealer had a full shoe, if you’re playing your cards right.’
“ ‘And even if I could correctly guess the number of decks left to come—’
“ ‘Oh, Angelique, it’s easy—’
“ ‘Even if I could guess that and I remember what you called the actual count and divide the actual count by the number of decks to come and I get . . . whatever . . . “plus two”—so what? What the hell does that mean?’
“ ‘It means you’ve got a true count of “plus two.” This is the basis for raising or lowering your bet. For each true count of “plus one,” the odds shift in favor of the player by about two and a bit percent. The starting point, the player’s chance of winning any particular hand, without counting but using the standard system of playing, is about forty-eight percent. At “plus one” you get to about even, so there’s no need to increase your bet. When you’re at “plus two” you’ve got about a fifty-two percent chance of winning your hand. When you’re at “plus eight” you’ve got about a sixty-six percent chance of winning your hand, and that’s worth backing heavily.’
“ ‘So you’re saying the higher your true count, the higher your chances of winning the hand and, therefore, the more money you should bet on that hand?’
“ ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
“ ‘But why don’t we just bet on the good hands? Don’t put anything on a hand where the true count is too low.’
“ ‘Well, first, they only let you play if you bet at least the table minimum per hand and, second, you have to be careful the way you vary your bets. Erratic betting behavior will alert the casino to the fact that you’re counting.’
“ ‘Is it illegal to count?’
“ ‘No, it’s not illegal, but it may as well be. If the casino catches you counting they’ll ask you to leave, ban you, or worse, because you’re lessening the odds in their favor and they hate that.’
“ ‘Is it cheating? Are we stealing from them?’
“ ‘It’s not, but they act as though it is. We’re just playing their game by their rules better than most people do. Better than they expected us to. They normally have everything, absolutely everything you could think of and more, stacked against you in their favor and then here we are, using nothing but our minds, to take a tiny fraction of their money from them and they find it unbearable.’
“ ‘Dennis, I love the sound of it, but I’ve got to be realistic. I could never do it. I don’t even know the rules, what you called the standard way of playing. I don’t even know that.’
“ ‘Not yet. I could teach you. No one step is too hard. Listen and stop me only if you don’t understand something or I’m going too fast.’
“ ‘Can I stop you now?’
“ ‘Listen! All cards have numerical values. An ace is worth one or eleven. Whoever comes closest to a twenty-one without going over twenty-one wins unless the dealer has an ace and a ten. An ace and a ten is called blackjack, and it’s unbeatable. If the dealer has blackjack after they deal their second card and you have twenty-one, then you get a standoff, that is, your original bet is returned to you.
“ ‘When a dealer deals you a card, there are only four things you can do. You can hit, which means you take another card. You can stay, which means you don’t take another card, you can split, and you can double-down.’ ”
17. “Dennis, I have to stop you there because there’s something I don’t understand. You seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to teach Angelique everything you know about this. If you don’t mind my asking, why didn’t you just offer to do it yourself? For all the clarity of your explanation of the basic rules and counting, wouldn’t it have been easier for you to do it on her behalf?”
“Yes, it would’ve been, and that’s what she said. But there was a problem doing that. I used to do it fairly well and not infrequently. They knew me as a counter, and I’d been banned. It is the highest form of flattery they can pay you. They don’t want to have to pay you anything else.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“The casino—”
“Yes, but—”
“Alex, what part of this are you having trouble understanding?”
“Well, in everything you’ve told me you have never mentioned this, not in detail.”
“I mentioned blackjack, but I’ve never been addicted to it so there was nothing really to say about it till now. It hasn’t been relevant until now. I hadn’t been to the casino for more than a year prior to going with Angelique.”
“You’ve tried to play since being banned? . . . Dennis?”
“Yes . . . Jesus, Alex! That isn’t the point. With all your facile speculations you’re missing the point.”
“So, what’s the point?”
“She is. She . . . Angelique . . . She thought that I was able but just unwilling to play for her. I tried to assure her that this wasn’t the case, because it wasn’t. Alex, I would have done anything to help her. If she wanted the money for her boyfriend . . . I didn’t care. I didn’t ever even ask her what he was charged with. But she said I was just like all the rest of them.”
“The rest of them?”
“Bookings. Men, I suppose. You.”
“What did you say?”
“Well, I finally managed to convince her that the casino has records of me, photographs of my face stored digitally. I’d been escorted out of there before, you know. She suggested I disguise myself.”
“You’d really impressed her with your counting.”
“Is that what she said?”
“No, I’m surmising. It impressed me.”
“Anyway, we were stuck. She needed the money faster than she could earn it. She thought counting was a good idea, but she felt incapable of doing it herself. I thought . . .”
“What?”
“She was annoyed with me. I thought I would lose her.”
“Lose her?”
“I’ve told you. She wasn’t a whore to me. I didn’t touch her, and she liked me . . . I wanted to help her . . . still do.”
“So what did you do?”
“I didn’t want to let her down so I came up with a compromise which in itself took weeks of practice. And in those weeks I wasn’t paying her, even though she visited me often when she would otherwise have been working. But I suppose she . . . we were working.”
“What was the compromise?”
“We were to go to the casino as a couple. She would play at a table and I would sit behind her, barely speaking. I would sit behind her with my hand on her and by signaling with my fingers, I would play through her.”
“But wouldn’t you be recognized?”
“I knew that sooner or later I would be, but the idea was to delay it as long as possible.”
“How?”
“Well, first, I wouldn’t be seen to be playing, she would be, so provided I didn’t say too much while she was raising her bets, she’d be more the object of attention than me. Second, she was to wear something eye-catching, something revealing. Most of the dealers and the pit bosses were men, and you could bet your bottom dollar that the monkeys they’ve got upstairs watching the video monitors were men. They’d still be enjoying her cleavage before they realized someone was counting. There are no Einsteins up there working out who the master criminals are. They’re no more sophisticated than your average nightclub bouncer.”
“Yes, but still . . . You said they had your face stored digitally.”
“Sure, but they’d have to connect her winnings with my face and that
could take some time or might not even happen at all, especially if I hadn’t shaved for a few days and was wearing glasses, which I was. Y
ou see, Alex, for all their technology, the greatest likelihood of being picked up as a card counter is by someone you know, a dealer you’ve spent hours sitting in front of. Remember that I hadn’t been there in over a year. When I put it to her she thought it was worth a try. Neither of us really had much to lose by trying.
“For almost three weeks she came to my place in between her bookings. If she had just finished one, she would take a shower while I’d make her something to eat. Then, once she’d eaten, we’d get down to work. I was to be sitting close behind her with my hand just resting on her neck or partway down her back. It doesn’t take much pressure for her to feel the signal on her bare skin. Through a system involving the thumb and two fingers of one hand I would be telling her when to hit, when to stay, when to double-down, and when to split.”
“And you were to be basing your decisions as to what to do on your own counting.”
“That’s right. We tried using the fingers to signal when to raise the bet because the rest is useless if you don’t know how to bet strategically—but it became a bit confusing. I decided to use verbal signals that would sound innocuous to any interested onlooker.”
“What were they?”
“I liked the idea of referring to luck because, while luck’s got nothing to do with it, you’ll find that practically everyone sitting at the table will prattle on mindlessly at some time or other about their luck, everybody except the serious card counter. He’ll sit there as inconspicuously as possible, trying to raise or lower his bet as surreptitiously as possible, in moderate increments. We were going to bet like him but we’d also be prattling on about luck, like everybody else. There’s always someone doing badly. If I wanted her to decrease the bet I’d say something about that guy’s bad luck, something like, ‘I think his luck has run out.’ This meant she should take some money off. Alternatively, if I said something like ‘He’s the lucky one,’ or, ‘That guy should feel lucky,’ it meant she should up the bet. It was always to be incremented gradually in order not to attract attention. Moving from two hundred dollars to a thousand is always going to attract suspicion. Even if there had been an extraordinary run of cards that justified increasing the bet from two hundred to a thousand, it was to go up by only two-hundred-dollar increments. I had even prepared her for the possibility that we might have to deliberately lose money, strategically.”
“Clever. So it can be advantageous to lose money sometimes.”
“Sure, if the dealer or, more particularly, the pit boss was paying particular attention to her it might be advantageous. You see, if she keeps winning, sooner or later they’ll start watching more than just her cleavage. That’s when we would want to throw a few hands. I told her to be ready, for instance, to take another card against the six when she’s on fourteen, thirteen, or even twelve, because no rational player, no counter, would do this. As it turned out, she proved to be the perfect actress.
“We’d been winning well on one occasion and I thought we were attracting too much attention. I said quite audibly, ‘This is no time to lose,’ which meant I wanted her to take a foolish risk. We had five hundred dollars out there on our fourteen against the dealer’s six. She started on cue with ‘I can feel this. I can feel this. I know it’s going to be a seven.’ I moved just slightly to her side and saw that she fixed a long, hard stare into the dealer’s eyes. Then she said to the young man who was by now himself being watched by the pit boss at least as much as she was, ‘Please, a seven.’ Well, at that stage it didn’t matter what card we drew. The pressure was off. The dealer and the pit boss were instantly convinced they were dealing with an amateur, and a stupid one at that, and they went back to her cleavage. Nobody does that with five hundred dollars.”
“What did you get?”
“We got a nine and busted. But we’d bought some more time. That was one of the occasions when things went according to plan. They did not always go according to plan.”
18. “We needed to be as inconspicuous as possible. The idea was to choose a night when the casino was overflowing with people, with the usual suspects, men in flight from financial reality, housewives in flight from their husbands, teenage girls from the outer suburbs dressed up for an occasion more special than any they could name, visiting relatives from Southeast Asia, and troublemakers freshly spilled out of their souped-up cars. The football season was over, so we chose Melbourne Cup night. It was the warmest Cup day for years. First taste of summer. You might remember.
“It was just the night we wanted. Her dress was perfect for the part when she came to pick me up—revealing, provocative. She looked beautiful and utterly distracting. She had five thousand dollars, and she was going to leave as soon as she had thirty thousand. She said she really had no idea what her boyfriend’s legal costs would come to, but this was an amount he’d needed once before. Figuring on the average table playing somewhere between sixty to a hundred hands an hour—on Cup night, say, sixty to eighty—I thought that, without anything out of the ordinary happening, we could, by strategically increasing our base bets, be out of there in under six hours’ playing time.
“I wanted to spend the first half hour or hour sitting in one of the restaurants where I could observe everything for a while and try to look out for any dealers who might recognize me. I wanted to give her a chance to acclimatize, let her get her bearings. She was to be the performer and she had to be able to play the role convincingly, particularly when her winnings started to earn her a lot of attention. I’d told her that she should expect to attract a crowd once she started winning serious money. People love to watch winners even though the real drama is with the losers. Winners are the more spectacular. You can see the pile of chips growing in front of them, and the less fortunate or cautious people standing around watching can imagine themselves being that winner. They love that.”
“A sort of empathy with the fortunate.”
“Yes, I suppose you could say that. This only made her more nervous, and she was already worried about the effect of the crowd on her and also about needing to pee. She kept predicting that she was going to ruin everything by needing to pee all the time. Come to think of it, she was always talking about that. I remember as we were walking in, she commented on how much a casino and a brothel had in common with respect to their interior architecture. She said they were both designed to eliminate context. Once you were inside, there was nothing there to remind you of your outside life. The garish lights and the absence of clocks served to eliminate even space and time themselves, at least for people without a bladder problem.”
“She said that?”
“Something like that.”
“She has a point . . .”
“Yes, but it didn’t apply to us. For one thing, I don’t gamble, I count. I led her to a table where the minimum bet was a hundred dollars but ranged up to ten thousand. The range was right for us yet it wasn’t too exclusive. It still had a big crowd around it. I waited for the first deck in a new shoe before we took up our positions. I had her sit in the seat farthest to the dealer’s right. From there it’s easier to see over the table as the cards are coming out, easier to keep track and to keep count. It’s also a key position in terms of influencing other players in the game. I sat right behind her with my hand on her back and we started.
“Her nervousness was actually good for us. She looked glamorous and nervous, which was totally acceptable to anyone around her, anyone who cared to pay her any serious attention. We were able to do quite well for a while before anyone did. The table had the usual array of characters. The guy next to us had dark hair, kind of short around the sides and slightly slicked back. Thirtyish, his chiseled face seemed in danger of cracking under the solid workout his gum chewing was giving his jaw muscles. His grimness wasn’t matched by his ability. Nor was it mollified by the occasional win.
“Another guy, at the far end of the table, was busy convincing himself how friendly and fun loving he was. Heavy-set, this man sat there in a T-shirt losing money, making
quips and disc-jockey-standard gags chiefly against himself but always looking to someone, usually the dealer, for a response, especially when the dealer was a woman. There were times when the beating he was taking was simply brutal. I’d look at him between hands. You had to feel sick about it. He was hurting, and you didn’t want him to be. He was a likeable guy. Sometimes he seemed to be finding it hard to breathe. He was dropping thousands. God knows where it came from, but the stayers at the table wanted him there. I used his poor luck to signal Angelique to increase the bet. We were doing well.
“We were up by about forty-five hundred when she whispered something to me. I didn’t catch it immediately and, concentrating on the game, I didn’t ask her to repeat it. But she did anyway.
“ ‘I need to pee.’
“ ‘Just hold on,’ I muttered.
“ ‘Can’t.’
“ ‘You have to,’ I told her. She was still in the middle of a hand, but she didn’t want to wait. She just stood up at the table with a twelve in front of her, brushed past me, and left. I wasn’t the only one to watch her as she ran through the crowd. This was trouble.”
“Why?”
“Well, first, it was distracting. It made it hard to keep focused on the count. Second, it attracted more attention to us than we needed and it left me sitting there in full view of everybody, including the ‘eye in the sky,’ the video camera in the ceiling. I had to decide whether to play for her until she came back or to drop out, take our chips, and wait for her. If I played in her stead there was a greater chance someone would recognize me. If I dropped out and we left the game, we’d have a long wait for circumstances to be right at another table.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we’d have to wait for a new shoe so I could start my counting again and, ideally, I’d have liked us to have the same position at the table, to the far right of the dealer. Who knew how long it would be before we found a table with all that? In the meantime, even without playing we could attract attention.”