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27
March 2008
Card
Counters Gather In Las Vegas To
Share Secrets
In
the April issue of Men's Vogue,
Michael Kaplan visits the 12th
annual Blackjack Ball in Las
Vegas, where the world's most
skilled blackjack players very
discreetly convene to imbibe and
talk shop, leaving Las Vegas's
gaming tables unmolested for an
evening. All told, they have
taken north of $100 million out
of the casinos across town by
implementing techniques like card
counting, hole carding, and
shuffle tracking. Kaplan spends
some time with John Chang and
Mike Aponte, two major players
from the MIT blackjack team made
famous by the book Bringing Down
the House, now adapted into the
film 21 (with Kevin Spacey,
Laurence Fishburne and Kate
Bosworth) in theaters March
28.
Chang's
wife, Laurie, on his careless
record-keeping:
Some
years ago when she was helping
John pack for a move, she found
more than $100,000 in random
chips scattered around his house
inside glass jars and old storage
boxes. When she voiced
incredulity at the high-stakes
loose change, John simply told
her, with a shrug, "I thought I
was a little short."
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Chang
has taken so much money from
casinos that he's occasionally
resorted to dressing up as a
woman to hide his identity:
"Cross-dressing worked in the
Bahamas and in Illinois," says
Chang, who has a wrinkle-free
baby face. "But at Taj Mahal, in
Atlantic City, they were looking
at my hands. An Asian host came
over and whispered in my ear, 'We
know who you are', I had to run
around the casino in high heels
and make sure they weren't
following me."
Chang,
on why he doesn't simply abandon
gambling for a straight career:
"In MIT and in the corporate
world, being Asian is viewed as a
slight negative," he says.
"You're viewed as a nerd. There's
a social stigma. You're not
likely to be the CEO of a
company. In blackjack, it's the
opposite." Because casinos
stereotype Asians as compulsive
gamblers and because the mostly
Caucasian surveillance personnel
have a hard time distinguishing
one Asian from another - Chang's
nationality has brought him
longevity. It's given him what
those in the game call "positive
EV" (expected value) and turned
the art of beating casinos into
his life's work. "My teammates
used to tell me that I was so
lucky, that I could get away with
so much more than they could. My
act is not particularly good, but
this past weekend I watched some
Asian players who weren't
counting or anything - and they
looked more suspicious than I
did."
Aponte
would love to sit back down at
the tables again but he's just
too well-known:
Aponte
was recently counting cards in a
St. Maarten Casino.
He was a few hands in before he
spotted a familiar face in the
pit. "This guy made eye contact
and I immediately recognized him
as one of the floor people from
the $250,000 trip to Puerto Rico.
Following a quick run up to
surveillance, he came back down
and told me that I wouldn't be
able to play blackjack there.
Then he took me to lunch and
asked me to sign Bringing Down
the House for him."
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