February 4, 2022 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, One of the most successful blackjack teams in America is made up entirely of Christians. Here to tell the story are two of the winningest players, Colin Jones, founder of BlackJackApprenticeship.com. And the player dubbed “the most notorious card counter in America,” David Drury.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorite
One of the most successful blackjack teams in America is
(00:31):
made up surprisingly of Christians. Here to tell the story
or two of the winningest players, Colin Jones, founder of
Blackjack Apprenticeship dot com, and the player dubbed the most
notorious card counter in America, David Jury. Here's David. When
I was maybe eight or ten years old, my father
(00:53):
was a pastor of a church and they were doing
a big bonfire behind the church and as one of
these events where you're supposed to bring you your rock
records or your you know, anything that is causing you
to stumble, and you throw it in the fire and
give a little speech. And so I was an eight
or ten year old kid, and I said to my parents,
what are we bringing to this fire? Because I want
to throw something in it, you know, And they're like, well,
(01:15):
we're we're the pastor. We don't have anything to throw
in the fire. Like, oh, come on, so you went
all over the house and one of the things we
found in the back of a pencil drawer was a
single playing card and they said, well, okay, you can
throw this in the fire. This represents the gambling. And
at the fire, you know, it was my time, and
my dad spoke and said, you know, talked about gambling,
and I'm throwing this card in the fire. I'm calling
(01:40):
and I've been a card counter for almost twenty years.
And I'm here with my good friend David. I'm David,
and I've been a card counter for I guess about
fifteen years. And for me, card counting started when I
had just graduated from college with a math degree and
not really any ambition. And I was volunteering at a
(02:01):
Bible camp and a friend Ben was up there and
he's like, hey, call in. You're a math guy. Check
out this book I'm reading. And it was called Professional Blackjack,
written by Stanford Wong, who is a mathematician, and it
broke down the math behind card counting and blackjack, and
I thumbed through and I thought, while I'm a math guy,
I could probably do this. From there, I went to
(02:23):
substitute teaching, which is the most boring thing you can
do with a math degree. You're basically babysitting high school students.
And on the days I didn't get called to substitute teach,
I convinced my newlywed wife for me to take two
thousand dollars of our savings and try this whole card
counting thing at the local casinos. Here in Washington State,
(02:43):
we have these like bowling alley casinos and strip mall casinos,
and they don't have slot machines or anything. It's like
you're going into a seven eleven with about ten table games.
And I trained way too little. I didn't know enough
about card counting, but I went for it, and I
just got stupid lucky. Like the first two days, I
doubled my two thousand dollars to four thousand dollars and
(03:05):
I'm buying a bottle of wine for my wife, and
I saying, hey, this is easy money, this is great.
And then I started losing day after day, like slowly,
kind of back and forth, and I'm every day I'm
calling Ben and I'm like, hey, what do I do
in this situation? You know how many spots do I play?
What if someone jumps into the table but he kind
of got lonely doing the card counting thing on his own,
(03:25):
and so we combined his seven thousand dollars with my
four thousand dollars, and then all of a sudden, we
had eleven thousand dollars to be playing black jack. Layer
were eleven thousand years, Yeah, we were, yeah, five figures,
and we just started grinding, and of course, you know,
he helped fix my game. The luckiest thing that could
have happened was when he was playing at a casino.
(03:48):
This was before he and I teamed up. He was
playing at casino and he gets noticed by this guy
that was on a national blackjack team, like the most
feared card counting team in America. Spotted him and was like, hey,
this kid's not bad, but you know, there's some things
he could fix, and so they kind of exchanged phone
numbers and the guy was kind of trying to recruit
Ben to be on his team, and that resulted in
(04:11):
Ben not really joining their team. He did one trip
with them, but in getting his skills really refined, which
was what I needed because I thought I was good
and I wasn't. Ben was able to refine my skills
and so then we have this eleven thousand dollars and
we're just grinding. We're going to all our local casinos
every day, and if I didn't get called to substitute teach,
I was working, you know, kind of nine to five
(04:34):
gambling essentially, And pretty quickly we started winning, and we
added a third friend, Jeff, and the three of us
grinded and we grew that eleven thousand dollars into about
one hundred thousand dollars over three or four months. Joined
up with a fourth guy that we spotted at a
casino that when I first saw him playing, I thought
he was a drug dealer because he had this satchel
(04:56):
full of five hundred dollars chips and he's just betting
like crazy at the casino. And then we start watching
how he's betting. It was like, hey, this guy's a
card counter too. So the four of us we start playing,
and over the course of two years, we won about
five hundred thousand dollars playing. But as many small businesses,
especially with twenty something year old guys, it kind of
(05:18):
you know, the relational, the personality character issues started to
come about, and Ben and I decided to split off
and get into real estate. So we figured we're smart
enough to beat casinos. We're definitely smart enough to beat
the real estate market. Unfortunately we weren't. And what I
tell people is, we were investing at blackjack and we
(05:41):
were gambling at real estate, and we go and we
lose something like four hundred thousand dollars on three million
dollars worth of properties that we had leveraged to the
hilt right when the housing market crashed, and we didn't
know what to do. So we pulled out all the
equity we could and we went back to the only
honor thing we knew to do, which was to play blackjack.
(06:02):
We go back to the casinos and it starts working again,
and the two of us, you know, very quickly we've
got a couple hundred thousand. And that's where people like
David came in, because we're thinking, we don't want to
be in the casinos, but we know how to do
this and we can teach people. And some friends from
our churches started approaching us saying, hey, can I play
blackjack on your blackjack team? And that's where things started
(06:24):
to really get interesting. And you're listening to Colin Jones,
founder of Blackjack Apprenticeship dot com and the player dubbed
the most notorious card counter in America, David Jury. And
it seems counterintuitive to think there'd be card counting Christians.
That that's what makes the story so alluring. And I'm
a Christian and I love well. It's one of the
(06:45):
first things I tried to teach my daughter how to
throw a spiral, how to card count, and the laws
and theories of compounded interest. When we come back, more
of our American Stories and the story of the card
counting Christians here on our American Stories. Folks, if you
(07:31):
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(07:52):
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That's our American Stories dot com. And we continue with
our American Stories in the story of Colin Jones and
(08:14):
David Jury, A K. A the card counting Christians. Let's
pick up when we last left off. Here's David and Colin.
So my story, I came across this idea of card
counting on my own. I think it was around the
time that Bringing Down the House, the book that became
the movie twenty one, that had come out, and I
had read some things online about this is a beatable game.
(08:37):
I was working as an editor at a trade publication
and I would sort of sneak off of work early
to go try this thing out at the casinos with
my own money. But it's true, this this whole beginner's
luck thing because I won and I thought, oh well
this is really really easy. And I had a friend
I owed some money too, so I paid him with
(08:58):
one hundred dollar bill, and of course one hundred dollar
bill is a conversation starter. Why are you paying me
with one hundred dollar bill? Like, oh, well, I'm glad
you asked. I've been counting cards and beating black check.
And he's like, oh, well you must have met Ben
And I said Ben, and he said, yeah, I think
he's been doing that. He just bought a house. So
(09:20):
I was like, well, I need to meet this Ben guy.
It sounds like he's doing it the right way. So
I met Ben. He took me out to a casino
and showed me how he played, and then he loaned
me a book by Stanford Wong, one of the early
heroes of card counting, and I read the book and
I did all the math, and I figured out that
(09:40):
the way I was playing, I could look to a
lifetime of earning five cents an hour if I was
playing correctly. So I'd been just lucky for these first
few sessions, and sure enough I started losing, and I
gave up on the idea entirely. But a year later
I found out that Ben and Colin were forming a team.
I had just gotten laid off, so I was like,
(10:02):
this sounds like the perfect job. And quickly I learned
that I needed to forget everything that I had taught
myself about card counting and start again from scratch. I
had just passed the test out for the team, and
Ben it was announced, you know, okay, you made it,
you did it, and we were we were debriefing after
(10:25):
the test in a casino, and we were in the bathroom,
of course, because that's one of the places you can
you can talk and there are no cameras in the
bathroom in a casino. So he's in one stall and
I'm in the other stall, and he's telling me that
I passed the test, and in this hand emerges underneath
the stall with like thirty thousand dollars in cash. He's like, okay,
you're you're all set, start playing, you know, uh. And
(10:47):
so that was, of course, it freaked me out because
I'd never dealt with money like that. It's definitely an
occupational hazard that you don't have in most most other jobs.
You know, you can get really desensitized to it, but
you know, over time that happens. At first, it's a
thousand dollars, I'm freaking out, and then it's five thousand
dollars that I have in my pocket and I'm freaking out.
And then it takes you know, twenty thousand dollars for
(11:10):
me to be freaking out, and then I've got one
hundred thousand dollars and it's like kind of normal. I
was in Philadelphia and I'm just, you know, just in
jeans and a hoodie and I had I had one
and for whatever reason, I was traveling with ninety thousand
dollars and went through security just fine. They were like,
what are all these envelopes? And I explained it like
(11:32):
always and they let me go on. And as I'm
walking to the gate, there's like a voice over my
shoulder and he's like, I hear you have a lot
of money on you. I'm with the DA and he
steers me to the side as this whole team of
guys in suits and they start asking me questions, where
were you, what did you drive, Where did you get gas?
Do you have receipts? Where did you stay? What's your
(11:53):
wife's name, what's your boss's name? How much cash do
you have on you? Where did you eat? You know,
just like all the questions you would ask if you
were in the d EA and worried. Somebody was like,
you know, a drug runner or something like that. So
he went and called my bosses and came back and
eventually said, you know what, we have the right to
seize this money because of homeland security. But you're a
(12:16):
good dude, and this is a you got a good
thing going on here, so you know, have a good day,
and I made it. You know, you spend so much
time as a card counter in a casino where you're
not telling the casino people what you're doing. But when
those situations come, when we're you know, talking to police
or DA, I personally get excited. I'm like, finally I
(12:37):
can tell someone all about what I do this career
that I'm really excited about that I don't get to
talk to people. So when the DA was questioning me,
I could, you know, hear my logs, here's every hour
I've worked, and here's the money, here's where it came from,
and I'm sort of I probably was a little bit
too enthusiastic, and he's like, this guy's not a criminal,
he's just a geek. So I said, there a team
(13:00):
at four people and one of the guys we'll call
him Sammy. He doesn't want me to give his real name,
but Sammy, when he saw that we were starting this team,
he's like, what is this the church team? Because it
was all people we knew from church and we thought
that was hilarious, and so, you know, the name kind
of stuck. But what we would do is there's two
ways to form a blackjack team. You find people that
are interested already in beating casinos, and you try to
(13:23):
build trust with them, and team up. But we thought
the other way is you take people that you already
trust and know that there's some relational equity, and we
felt like we could teach them blackjack, so that it
started with one guy and then turned to two, which
turned into four, and David was probably number three or
four on that team. But we would take him from
scratch and we'd say, hey, blackjack is a very unique
(13:44):
game in that it's one of the only things in
a casino where future events are dependent on past events.
If you're playing blackjack and a queen of diamonds is dealt,
you will not see that queen of diamonds again until
they shuffle. And so that's how it was created. There's
a guy doctor ed Thorpe, and in the early sixties
he saw that someone had used computers to figure out
(14:07):
the optimal way of playing blackjack, and then he just hypothesized, Hey,
what if an ace comes out of the deck of
cards that they're dealing. How does that change the odds?
And he realized, oh, it makes it worse for the player,
and so he said, well, what's the other extreme. He said,
what if a two comes out? And he realized that
actually gave players the advantage because that two won't be
seen again. The game is different now with that two gone.
(14:29):
And so card counting was born with his book Beat
the Dealer, and you know, it just evolved where casinos,
this cat and mouse game kept evolving. Casinos are then
increasing the number of decks and changing the rules, and
card counters are also adapting. But it's this weird symbiotic
relationship because blackchack became popular simply because it can be beaten.
(14:51):
It wasn't the most popular casino game, but once a
book came out that said this game can be beaten,
of course everybody with you any money in their pocket
wants to go and try to beat the this game.
And ninety nine point nine percent of them don't actually
have the skills to do it. But the point one
percent we actually do have that advantage. So we would
teach people card counting isn't gambling in a sense, it's
(15:12):
more investing. Yeah, when anybody sits down at a blackjack table,
generally they're going to win forty eight out of the
next hundred hands, and the casino is going to win
fifty two out of the next hundred hands. And we
are able to turn that around so we're winning fifty
two hands out of a hundred, but you can understand
that at any point we could lose that the forty
(15:35):
eight hands in a row and that would still be
well within the realm of possibility. And the reason we
went with a team is there are several things that
make a team more valuable. One is you get to
pull your resources, and so we had anywhere between five
hundred thousand and a million dollars to playoff of which
meant we could beat a lot of money. We could
keep our risk really low. But the other advantages are
(15:56):
this game, you wouldn't believe the amount of variance there is.
Like the swings, it is not uncommon for a card
country to go on a two or three or four
hundred hour losing streak. Well, four hundred might be uncommon,
but it happens. And when you're on this losing streak,
if you've got other teammates that are also playing, it's
like you're getting to the law of large numbers faster.
(16:18):
And I know that from reading the history of some
of these teams that had gotten together, like the MIT
team and other teams. Personality conflicts come into play, especially
when you're dealing with large amounts of cash and the
rule of honesty, you know, because you can go into
a casino and win a thousand dollars and go back
(16:40):
to your team and say, oh, I lost a thousand
dollars and pocket two thousand dollars. Then there's no way
for a team to keep up on that kind of thing.
The only way you would know is over the long
half there are winning or losing player. So there's a
lot of honesty that comes into play and the camaraderie
and it just it really sort of glued us together.
And you've been thing to David Jury and Colin Jones
(17:03):
tell the story of their card counting empire. They're a
small empire, but a growing one and well a recreational
one that turned into a livelihood. When we come back
more of the story of Colin Jones and David Jury,
the card counting Christian here on our American story. Yeah,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories and with the
story of Colin Jones, founder or Blackjack Apprenticeship dot Com
and the player dubbed the most notorious card counter in America,
David Jury. Here's Colin and David to continue with their stories.
Some people think because we were a group of people
(18:29):
that had met at church, that that made us all
more more ethical or something. I don't. I don't know
if that's if that's necessarily true. I do know two
people have admitted over the years that they pocketed money
and later felt guilty and shared, and they were both Christians.
And I know some people that are incredibly like I
would trust them with my life savings that are not
(18:50):
church people. But I think the fact that it was
more that we had a similar circle relationally, there was
a huge cost if it came out the someone was
stealing from the team, they wouldn't just lose their job.
It was like it would hurt the relationship. So it's
almost like if a group of friends and family teamed up,
you know, there's more at stake than just getting fired.
(19:11):
I think that was a big part of why it worked. Yeah. Absolutely.
My particular situation was that I was married with young kids,
so I was motivated to get these hours and do
this stuff. I think a lot of the other people
on the team were younger, tended to be, you know,
maybe single, and so they would fly out to a
(19:35):
resort and we're like, wow, look at this great pool. Wow,
this bed is really comfortable. So I was just working, working, working,
So I ended up doing a lot more playing than
resort living. I'll step back a little bit. As a
(19:55):
twenty three year old, you know, just graduated from a
Christian college, Bible camp, Christian school. Guy, it was not
the easiest thing to tell my family that I was
gambling for a living. I remember when I told my parents.
They were missionaries at the time in Guatemala, and my
mom basically went on a hunger strike. She would you know,
she was like terrified that I was just gonna end
(20:17):
up a degenerate gambler, homeless, and my dad was afraid
I was going to be buried in a shallow grave
in the desert by the mob. My father in law,
when I told him, he said he wouldn't speak to
me again until I spoke to three older, wise, godly men.
And so, you know, the consensus I got was like, look, Colin,
what you're doing. Whether I would want my son to
(20:37):
do it or not, there's nothing inherently wrong. You know,
it's not illegal to count cards. You're using your brain.
It's not illegal to use your brain in casinos. But
you know there's there's this whole view of casinos or
even like gambling, you know, like the love of money
is the rid of all kinds of evil. And this
thought to like, well, if you're getting paid it well
as a lawyer, that's okay, or a doctor, but if
(20:59):
you beating casinos or something really nefarious about it. But
it was really this odd double life doing this because
the days I wasn't playing Blackcheck, I was volunteering at
church or playing on a worship band, or you know,
leading a community group at our church, or just being
a normal you know, twenty something or something. You know, eventually, dad,
(21:23):
but then we're flying out and I'm getting picked up
by a limousine and driven to the strip and they're
offering me free drinks and all this stuff. And I
don't drink what I play Black check or whatever. But
you know, you're this this high roller in these casinos
and then you just fly home and you've got your
normal responsibilities and I'm mowing the lawn and all that stuff. Yeah,
(21:45):
that dichotomy. I remember one Sunday I needed to get
a transfer of like thirty thousand dollars from someone who
was on the team went to the same church and
I was going to fly out after church, and so
so I went through the commun union line and then
I sat down back in my pew, and then I
saw this guy in the communion line and he had
(22:07):
had a little paper bag with him. Went through the
communion line and then slapped this paper bag in my
stomach of like thirty grand. It wasn't uncommon for me
to go straight from worship band practice to a casino.
I remember one time I played bass in a worship
band and a guy's like, oh, Colin, what what is
that in your pocket? It was like, oh, it's ten straps.
And I'm pulling out ten thousand dollars, you know, out
(22:29):
of each pocket, and another ten thousand out of each
coat pocket because I needed forty thousand for the limits
I was gonna be playing. And they started calling me
ten Straps. I was like my nickname, and to me
it wasn't I mean, I knew it was odd, but
it wasn't that odd. And one of the weird things
is people assume, you know, because the amount of money
we're playing with, that it's this short cut that's really easy.
(22:52):
But it's not easy. One way a friend put it
is it's a hard way to make easy money. I mean,
it takes two hundred to learn, minimum two hundred hours,
so it's not something you learn in a weekend. But
even that's not the hard part. The hard part is
the emotional part that getting thrown out of casinos or
the winning and losing streaks, the Okay, it's two am.
(23:13):
I just got thrown out. I don't know where I'm
staying tonight. I got to figure it out. Is the
casino scanning my license plate? So they're going to know
who I am before even show up up in the casino. Yeah,
getting run out of a casino, or where they walk
you to your hotel room to watch you pack your
bag so that they can kick you out of the
hotel room that they had camped you, you know, an
(23:35):
hour and a half earlier. There's two kinds of people generally,
when you tell someone about this. There's the people that
are too excited. They're like, no, that's amazing, Like so
you just go in there and then you walk out
with the casino's money, and you know, it's like, well
it's it's don't don't be that excited, like you're gonna
go lose a lot of money. Of the casino if
you're that optimistic. And then there are of the people
(23:58):
that I think are more our background, like the church people,
that they're not even curious about it. They've just instantly
put it in this category of that sounds bad, that
sounds wrong. I don't want to ask any follow up questions.
I just don't like that you're doing it. And that's
really like frustrating and disappointing. I was this personality before
card counting, you know. I was a guy kind of
(24:19):
like not doing anything wrong, but also not willing to
do the things I was told to do just just
because I was supposed to do them. Like I went
to a Christian school. We had to wear a tie
for chapel day every week, and so I had a
wooden tie, I had like a sequin tie. I had
a like infants clip on tie, Like Okay, I'll follow
your rule, but I'm not gonna play this part that
(24:40):
your time. I'm gonna at least question it or be
curious about it. And I wish there was a little
bit a little bit more of that from our culture.
There's these people in the Bible called the Pharisees, and
there are these people that are obsessed with their cultural
political identity. They're super defensive. They're they're terrified that the
way that they think think they're supposed to be doing
(25:00):
things is going to be changed or question they're going
to lose their identity. And it feels like a lot
of the background do we come from. It's that same
thing of like just play the part, act a certain way,
and they're not even willing to question if that certain
way of doing things is right. It's just like protect
that identity. Yeah, I was in Palm Springs at a
(25:22):
casino and the circumstances were such that I had been
at that casino before and I had lost a lot
of money. They probably just thought I was a bad player,
and they were happy to bring me back and camp
me of a top floor suite and all this stuff.
So I stroll out onto the casino floor the next morning,
and for whatever reason, I sat down and the first
(25:44):
shoe that I played was just one of these glorious
things that happened so rarely. But I just want all
the money in one shoe, like thirty thousand dollars. And
immediately it all clicked for them and they realized, like, oh,
this guy's actually a card counter and he's to now
was taking all our money. So they backed me off
and I was waiting to cash out at the cage,
(26:07):
and this is particular to tribal casinos. They were like,
this is illegal, you are card cheating. And I was
almost entertained by this. So that's why I said, oh, well,
where should I wait to meet the police and fill
out the report. And of course there they hadn't called
the police. They were just they were just trying to
run me out of the casino. And you've been listening
(26:31):
to Colin Jones and David Jury and they were telling
the story of how they became card counters, what that
life was like. As one of the men said, it
was an odd kind of double life. By day I
was playing blackjack, but soon thereafter we'll be leading a
small group or a worship service and then leaving those
things to hit the tables again. And oddly enough, there
(26:55):
are many Christians who do this and that is not
guard count but play poker or play the horses and
try to find an advantage in the numbers and try
to find out a winning strategy. When we come back
the story of the card counting Christians and we're talking
about David Jury and Colin Jones here on our American story,
(27:33):
and we continue with our American stories and the stories
of Colin Jones and David Jury, the card counting Christians.
Let's pick up where we last left off. That's one
of the big misconceptions, a couple of them. One of
them is that it's illegal, and like I said, it's
(27:55):
perfectly legal to use your brain. But the other is
that casinos are are gonna hit your hand with a
ballpin hammer in the back of the casino or the
you know you're gonna end up hospitalized or or even worse,
no one will ever see you again. And there's movies
where that happens, and there are some pretty crazy stories
(28:15):
from the sixties in early seventies. But now these most
of these casinos are owned by megacorporations. And I know
people that if a casino just detained them against their will,
they end up with a six figure settlement. But that
doesn't mean I haven't been in the back room of
a casino. One time, we were playing in Arizona, and
this was on the earlier team, and it was four
(28:36):
of us and we were just crushing the casinos and
after by the end of our trip, we had one
hundred and forty thousand dollars in chips for the casino.
We all end up in the back of a casino
explaining them. They're saying, we know you cheated us. Explained
to us how you cheated us, and we're like, we
didn't cheat. Were counting cards. So they're like, well, how
does that work? And so we're explaining card getting to
them and they said, well, how do you know it
(28:57):
to bet? It is one of my favorite lines ever
was Sammy on the team. He says, I'll tell you
for a fee. He was trying to get the casino
to pay up a consultation fee. Eventually, they cash out
our hundred forty thousand dollars and walk us to our
cars and send us something to the mail saying we'll
be arrested if we ever come back. But the whole
(29:18):
thing of getting roughed up by casinos hasn't happened. I
had one interaction with police, but it was kind of
a mistake. Similar long story short, I'm cuffed. He takes
everything out of my pockets. He looks me up. He's like,
do you have a criminal record. I'm like, well, I
have a speeding ticket from three years ago. And by
the end of it, he's walking me out to my
car and he's like, hey, do you teach other people
(29:39):
how to count cards? And I said, well, matter a fact,
we have a website we just started and told him
about Black Check Apprenticeship, the website that we'd just begun.
And of course the casinos all their advertising is like, hey,
come win, we want winners. Look how many winners we have.
And then they find someone that actually has the ability
to win, and they're like, hey, you're not well, Like
(29:59):
what do you think think you're doing trying to win?
You know, they have the winner's wall at a casino
with the like all the old ladies with holding up
their oversized check for fifteen thousand. I would love to
sneak into a casino and put my picture up on
the wall above the time I took them for whatever
I took them for. So the fact that it is
beatable is what makes the casino so much money. So
(30:22):
we're just proving the fact that it is beatable. So
they shouldn't hate us too much. We're part of the
reason why they're making so much money. But when we
started the church, team. It was working, We're winning like crazy.
We actually ended up winning, you know, for the duration
of this team, we won three point two million dollars.
(30:42):
But the way that we played it wasn't really sustainable.
So people started kind of burning out. Either they having
a hard time getting hours in a casino, or the
travel is getting to them, or like me, want to
start a family. And it's one thing when I'm like
out odd hours and gone five days at a time
when I had no kids. It's different when I've got
one kid in two and three and four kids. I
(31:05):
did a road trip with my wife and four kids.
We drove down to San Diego and back, and I
played forty hours of high limit blackjack. But it would
be something like we show up at the casino, my
wife sits in the minivan with an iPad watching Monsters Inc.
Or something on the iPad while I'm playing trying to
get a comped room. I finally get the comped room,
I get the family checked in, get them tucked in bed,
(31:26):
and then I played blackjack till I can't keep my
eyes open, sleep for like three hours, and then my
kids are jumping on my bed and it's like this
isn't really the life I want for the next thirty years. Yeah,
that is the reason I never brought my family on trips. Yeah,
but there are some diminishing returns. So I remember at
(31:47):
the beginning of my career, I could go out to
Vegas and play, you know, ten to twelve hours a
day and come home with thousands that I'd earned or whatever.
And then as time went by, I was noticing like, oh,
I can only get in and you know, six or
seven hours a day. They're kicking me out. They know
my face, and in the end, I'm having to either
(32:07):
bet lower to stay under the radar, or I'm winning
less because I'm doing all this ducking and dodging. I
was at one casino in Las Vegas and got kicked
out really quick, and I was standing in line to
cash out the few chips that I had, and I
hear someone yelling my name, you know, David, David. And
I've trained myself to not turn because sometimes they'll try
(32:28):
and test, like is this that guy. Let Goltz call
his name and see if he responds, and if I
don't respond, and maybe they think, don't think it's me.
So this guy's yelling my name, and finally everybody in
the line is looking at behind me, and so I
had to turn around and there's this guy with one
arm long zz top beard and he comes up to
me enthusiastically and he's like, I'm buying you a drink.
(32:51):
And I thought, okay, so I've got a crazy fan
in this casino. Must have been watching the way I
was playing or something. Well, it turns out he was
the head of all surveillance for a string of casinos,
and sure enough, he sat me down, brought me drink,
and he just wanted to know everything. He was a
super fan, but he was on the other side, and
he ended up giving me, you know, tips to how
(33:12):
to evade his own security because he was such a
super fan. But from that, he told me that I
had become known as the most notorious card counter in America.
So that was my claim to fame from that short
time period. But it also meant that I had sort
of worked myself out and everybody knew my face. Well,
that's how you became a master of disguises, right, Yeah,
(33:35):
So then I tried to do the disguised route. Nobody
had disguises as as good as David's. I don't think
anyone tried his heart and no one pulled it off
as well. Tell him a couple of your looks. Well, yeah,
I had a knack for looking a lot younger than
I was or a lot older than I was. And
so in a casino, there are shift changes. So basically
(33:57):
everybody who's working there works there for eight hours and
then a whole new team comes in, and so we
would come back on shift changes because you know, you're
not being seen by all the same people that were
there eight hours ago. So I'd come in on my
first shift at the casino with whatever I could grow
beard wise before the trip, you know, wearing a worn
leather and a Harley Davidson T shirt. And so I was,
(34:19):
you know, sort of like Harley guy. And then I
go and I'd shave it all off and put on
my fubou jersey and be sort of like this young
punk who's throwing money around in the casino. And then
I'd go and change again, and I'd put on my
promise keeper hat and my fleece vest and my flooded
khakis and come across like I was sort of a
(34:42):
middle aged accountant. David was able to pull that off.
But over the last couple years of the team, a
few things happened. One is, you know, we had half
a billion dollars of mine and my friends money invested
in this thing, and people like David are continuing to
grind out hours here and there at casinos, and my
stomach's hurting. I'm not sleeping well. I had I never
(35:04):
lost a night's sleep losing my own money. I had
nights where my net worth would would drop, maybe as
much as six figures, and it would suck. But it
was like, well, whatever, easy, easy go, and we trust
the math. But it's different when you have to tell
you know, your father in law or or a friend
like hey, how's the team doing, and say not good.
You know, it always turns around. But when it's down,
(35:24):
all the investors are freaking out. So I'm not sleeping well,
and my mind is I'm thinking about these internet businesses
more than I'm thinking about our black check came. I thought,
this is scary. We got half a million dollars of
money that I'm responsible for and my head's not in
the game. This is a recipe for something really to
go bad. And so I, you know, called all of
the investors and I said, hey, I think I want
(35:46):
to pull the plug on this, and they were all
okay with it, and so I had to call all
the players and say, hey, I'm done. The church team
officially ended there. But then, I mean part of that
also was that someone made a movie about us, which
we signed on for, but you know, it put up
more of our identity out there, so the casinos can nottally. Yeah. Yeah.
(36:07):
It was all these things kind of converge to where
it was like, let's let's pull the plug. When all
that started happening, and you know, I focused all my
time on black Shack apprenticeship, David decided to work on
his memoirs, writing the entire story of the weird intersection
of spiritual, personal and card counting. You know, I got
(36:30):
a degree in creative writing, so before I was ever
a card gown or a math creative writing was my
favorite thing to do. And so now it's time I'm
gonna I'm gonna look at these stories and write them
down and see if we can put together a book.
So at the end of the day, I feel like
my story was able to come full circle where I
started as a teacher and I get to teach right
(36:53):
and a great job is always by Greg and a
special thanks to Colin Jones, founder of Blackshack Apprenticeship dot
com and also the man dubbed the most notorious card
counter in America, David Jury, and it is so true
he did get it, or both men got at the
misconceptions about card county a. It's perfectly legal. By the way,
(37:15):
if you're ever sitting at a blackjack table and you'd
notice somebody on a twenty five dollars table suddenly moving
their bet from twenty five to two hundred and fifty,
they're probably card counters. And then if they bring that
bet back down to twenty five and then they randomly
go back and forth between those two bets, well they're
card counters and they've found that there's an advantage in
the count in the deck. It is the rare game,
(37:36):
but for poker, where it's up to the player and
the player's skills to win. And also the horse racing
in paramutual windows where skilled horse players can also win.
And by the way, we're not endorsing gambling here either way,
but Americans love to gamble, and by the way, Christians
love to gamble, it's when you have a problem that
you shouldn't do it. The story of the card counting Christians,
(37:58):
and we're talking about day Vijorie and Colin Jones here
on our American story
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorite
One of the most successful blackjack teams in America is
(00:31):
made up surprisingly of Christians. Here to tell the story
or two of the winningest players, Colin Jones, founder of
Blackjack Apprenticeship dot com, and the player dubbed the most
notorious card counter in America, David Jury. Here's David. When
I was maybe eight or ten years old, my father
(00:53):
was a pastor of a church and they were doing
a big bonfire behind the church and as one of
these events where you're supposed to bring you your rock
records or your you know, anything that is causing you
to stumble, and you throw it in the fire and
give a little speech. And so I was an eight
or ten year old kid, and I said to my parents,
what are we bringing to this fire? Because I want
to throw something in it, you know, And they're like, well,
(01:15):
we're we're the pastor. We don't have anything to throw
in the fire. Like, oh, come on, so you went
all over the house and one of the things we
found in the back of a pencil drawer was a
single playing card and they said, well, okay, you can
throw this in the fire. This represents the gambling. And
at the fire, you know, it was my time, and
my dad spoke and said, you know, talked about gambling,
and I'm throwing this card in the fire. I'm calling
(01:40):
and I've been a card counter for almost twenty years.
And I'm here with my good friend David. I'm David,
and I've been a card counter for I guess about
fifteen years. And for me, card counting started when I
had just graduated from college with a math degree and
not really any ambition. And I was volunteering at a
(02:01):
Bible camp and a friend Ben was up there and
he's like, hey, call in. You're a math guy. Check
out this book I'm reading. And it was called Professional Blackjack,
written by Stanford Wong, who is a mathematician, and it
broke down the math behind card counting and blackjack, and
I thumbed through and I thought, while I'm a math guy,
I could probably do this. From there, I went to
(02:23):
substitute teaching, which is the most boring thing you can
do with a math degree. You're basically babysitting high school students.
And on the days I didn't get called to substitute teach,
I convinced my newlywed wife for me to take two
thousand dollars of our savings and try this whole card
counting thing at the local casinos. Here in Washington State,
(02:43):
we have these like bowling alley casinos and strip mall casinos,
and they don't have slot machines or anything. It's like
you're going into a seven eleven with about ten table games.
And I trained way too little. I didn't know enough
about card counting, but I went for it, and I
just got stupid lucky. Like the first two days, I
doubled my two thousand dollars to four thousand dollars and
(03:05):
I'm buying a bottle of wine for my wife, and
I saying, hey, this is easy money, this is great.
And then I started losing day after day, like slowly,
kind of back and forth, and I'm every day I'm
calling Ben and I'm like, hey, what do I do
in this situation? You know how many spots do I play?
What if someone jumps into the table but he kind
of got lonely doing the card counting thing on his own,
(03:25):
and so we combined his seven thousand dollars with my
four thousand dollars, and then all of a sudden, we
had eleven thousand dollars to be playing black jack. Layer
were eleven thousand years, Yeah, we were, yeah, five figures,
and we just started grinding, and of course, you know,
he helped fix my game. The luckiest thing that could
have happened was when he was playing at a casino.
(03:48):
This was before he and I teamed up. He was
playing at casino and he gets noticed by this guy
that was on a national blackjack team, like the most
feared card counting team in America. Spotted him and was like, hey,
this kid's not bad, but you know, there's some things
he could fix, and so they kind of exchanged phone
numbers and the guy was kind of trying to recruit
Ben to be on his team, and that resulted in
(04:11):
Ben not really joining their team. He did one trip
with them, but in getting his skills really refined, which
was what I needed because I thought I was good
and I wasn't. Ben was able to refine my skills
and so then we have this eleven thousand dollars and
we're just grinding. We're going to all our local casinos
every day, and if I didn't get called to substitute teach,
I was working, you know, kind of nine to five
(04:34):
gambling essentially, And pretty quickly we started winning, and we
added a third friend, Jeff, and the three of us
grinded and we grew that eleven thousand dollars into about
one hundred thousand dollars over three or four months. Joined
up with a fourth guy that we spotted at a
casino that when I first saw him playing, I thought
he was a drug dealer because he had this satchel
(04:56):
full of five hundred dollars chips and he's just betting
like crazy at the casino. And then we start watching
how he's betting. It was like, hey, this guy's a
card counter too. So the four of us we start playing,
and over the course of two years, we won about
five hundred thousand dollars playing. But as many small businesses,
especially with twenty something year old guys, it kind of
(05:18):
you know, the relational, the personality character issues started to
come about, and Ben and I decided to split off
and get into real estate. So we figured we're smart
enough to beat casinos. We're definitely smart enough to beat
the real estate market. Unfortunately we weren't. And what I
tell people is, we were investing at blackjack and we
(05:41):
were gambling at real estate, and we go and we
lose something like four hundred thousand dollars on three million
dollars worth of properties that we had leveraged to the
hilt right when the housing market crashed, and we didn't
know what to do. So we pulled out all the
equity we could and we went back to the only
honor thing we knew to do, which was to play blackjack.
(06:02):
We go back to the casinos and it starts working again,
and the two of us, you know, very quickly we've
got a couple hundred thousand. And that's where people like
David came in, because we're thinking, we don't want to
be in the casinos, but we know how to do
this and we can teach people. And some friends from
our churches started approaching us saying, hey, can I play
blackjack on your blackjack team? And that's where things started
(06:24):
to really get interesting. And you're listening to Colin Jones,
founder of Blackjack Apprenticeship dot com and the player dubbed
the most notorious card counter in America, David Jury. And
it seems counterintuitive to think there'd be card counting Christians.
That that's what makes the story so alluring. And I'm
a Christian and I love well. It's one of the
(06:45):
first things I tried to teach my daughter how to
throw a spiral, how to card count, and the laws
and theories of compounded interest. When we come back, more
of our American Stories and the story of the card
counting Christians here on our American Stories. Folks, if you
(07:31):
love the great American stories we tell and love America
like we do, we're asking you to become a part
of the our American Stories family. If you agree that
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A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy six cents
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(07:52):
donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot com. And we continue with
our American Stories in the story of Colin Jones and
(08:14):
David Jury, A K. A the card counting Christians. Let's
pick up when we last left off. Here's David and Colin.
So my story, I came across this idea of card
counting on my own. I think it was around the
time that Bringing Down the House, the book that became
the movie twenty one, that had come out, and I
had read some things online about this is a beatable game.
(08:37):
I was working as an editor at a trade publication
and I would sort of sneak off of work early
to go try this thing out at the casinos with
my own money. But it's true, this this whole beginner's
luck thing because I won and I thought, oh well
this is really really easy. And I had a friend
I owed some money too, so I paid him with
(08:58):
one hundred dollar bill, and of course one hundred dollar
bill is a conversation starter. Why are you paying me
with one hundred dollar bill? Like, oh, well, I'm glad
you asked. I've been counting cards and beating black check.
And he's like, oh, well you must have met Ben
And I said Ben, and he said, yeah, I think
he's been doing that. He just bought a house. So
(09:20):
I was like, well, I need to meet this Ben guy.
It sounds like he's doing it the right way. So
I met Ben. He took me out to a casino
and showed me how he played, and then he loaned
me a book by Stanford Wong, one of the early
heroes of card counting, and I read the book and
I did all the math, and I figured out that
(09:40):
the way I was playing, I could look to a
lifetime of earning five cents an hour if I was
playing correctly. So I'd been just lucky for these first
few sessions, and sure enough I started losing, and I
gave up on the idea entirely. But a year later
I found out that Ben and Colin were forming a team.
I had just gotten laid off, so I was like,
(10:02):
this sounds like the perfect job. And quickly I learned
that I needed to forget everything that I had taught
myself about card counting and start again from scratch. I
had just passed the test out for the team, and
Ben it was announced, you know, okay, you made it,
you did it, and we were we were debriefing after
(10:25):
the test in a casino, and we were in the bathroom,
of course, because that's one of the places you can
you can talk and there are no cameras in the
bathroom in a casino. So he's in one stall and
I'm in the other stall, and he's telling me that
I passed the test, and in this hand emerges underneath
the stall with like thirty thousand dollars in cash. He's like, okay,
you're you're all set, start playing, you know, uh. And
(10:47):
so that was, of course, it freaked me out because
I'd never dealt with money like that. It's definitely an
occupational hazard that you don't have in most most other jobs.
You know, you can get really desensitized to it, but
you know, over time that happens. At first, it's a
thousand dollars, I'm freaking out, and then it's five thousand
dollars that I have in my pocket and I'm freaking out.
And then it takes you know, twenty thousand dollars for
(11:10):
me to be freaking out, and then I've got one
hundred thousand dollars and it's like kind of normal. I
was in Philadelphia and I'm just, you know, just in
jeans and a hoodie and I had I had one
and for whatever reason, I was traveling with ninety thousand
dollars and went through security just fine. They were like,
what are all these envelopes? And I explained it like
(11:32):
always and they let me go on. And as I'm
walking to the gate, there's like a voice over my
shoulder and he's like, I hear you have a lot
of money on you. I'm with the DA and he
steers me to the side as this whole team of
guys in suits and they start asking me questions, where
were you, what did you drive, Where did you get gas?
Do you have receipts? Where did you stay? What's your
(11:53):
wife's name, what's your boss's name? How much cash do
you have on you? Where did you eat? You know,
just like all the questions you would ask if you
were in the d EA and worried. Somebody was like,
you know, a drug runner or something like that. So
he went and called my bosses and came back and
eventually said, you know what, we have the right to
seize this money because of homeland security. But you're a
(12:16):
good dude, and this is a you got a good
thing going on here, so you know, have a good day,
and I made it. You know, you spend so much
time as a card counter in a casino where you're
not telling the casino people what you're doing. But when
those situations come, when we're you know, talking to police
or DA, I personally get excited. I'm like, finally I
(12:37):
can tell someone all about what I do this career
that I'm really excited about that I don't get to
talk to people. So when the DA was questioning me,
I could, you know, hear my logs, here's every hour
I've worked, and here's the money, here's where it came from,
and I'm sort of I probably was a little bit
too enthusiastic, and he's like, this guy's not a criminal,
he's just a geek. So I said, there a team
(13:00):
at four people and one of the guys we'll call
him Sammy. He doesn't want me to give his real name,
but Sammy, when he saw that we were starting this team,
he's like, what is this the church team? Because it
was all people we knew from church and we thought
that was hilarious, and so, you know, the name kind
of stuck. But what we would do is there's two
ways to form a blackjack team. You find people that
are interested already in beating casinos, and you try to
(13:23):
build trust with them, and team up. But we thought
the other way is you take people that you already
trust and know that there's some relational equity, and we
felt like we could teach them blackjack, so that it
started with one guy and then turned to two, which
turned into four, and David was probably number three or
four on that team. But we would take him from
scratch and we'd say, hey, blackjack is a very unique
(13:44):
game in that it's one of the only things in
a casino where future events are dependent on past events.
If you're playing blackjack and a queen of diamonds is dealt,
you will not see that queen of diamonds again until
they shuffle. And so that's how it was created. There's
a guy doctor ed Thorpe, and in the early sixties
he saw that someone had used computers to figure out
(14:07):
the optimal way of playing blackjack, and then he just hypothesized, Hey,
what if an ace comes out of the deck of
cards that they're dealing. How does that change the odds?
And he realized, oh, it makes it worse for the player,
and so he said, well, what's the other extreme. He said,
what if a two comes out? And he realized that
actually gave players the advantage because that two won't be
seen again. The game is different now with that two gone.
(14:29):
And so card counting was born with his book Beat
the Dealer, and you know, it just evolved where casinos,
this cat and mouse game kept evolving. Casinos are then
increasing the number of decks and changing the rules, and
card counters are also adapting. But it's this weird symbiotic
relationship because blackchack became popular simply because it can be beaten.
(14:51):
It wasn't the most popular casino game, but once a
book came out that said this game can be beaten,
of course everybody with you any money in their pocket
wants to go and try to beat the this game.
And ninety nine point nine percent of them don't actually
have the skills to do it. But the point one
percent we actually do have that advantage. So we would
teach people card counting isn't gambling in a sense, it's
(15:12):
more investing. Yeah, when anybody sits down at a blackjack table,
generally they're going to win forty eight out of the
next hundred hands, and the casino is going to win
fifty two out of the next hundred hands. And we
are able to turn that around so we're winning fifty
two hands out of a hundred, but you can understand
that at any point we could lose that the forty
(15:35):
eight hands in a row and that would still be
well within the realm of possibility. And the reason we
went with a team is there are several things that
make a team more valuable. One is you get to
pull your resources, and so we had anywhere between five
hundred thousand and a million dollars to playoff of which
meant we could beat a lot of money. We could
keep our risk really low. But the other advantages are
(15:56):
this game, you wouldn't believe the amount of variance there is.
Like the swings, it is not uncommon for a card
country to go on a two or three or four
hundred hour losing streak. Well, four hundred might be uncommon,
but it happens. And when you're on this losing streak,
if you've got other teammates that are also playing, it's
like you're getting to the law of large numbers faster.
(16:18):
And I know that from reading the history of some
of these teams that had gotten together, like the MIT
team and other teams. Personality conflicts come into play, especially
when you're dealing with large amounts of cash and the
rule of honesty, you know, because you can go into
a casino and win a thousand dollars and go back
(16:40):
to your team and say, oh, I lost a thousand
dollars and pocket two thousand dollars. Then there's no way
for a team to keep up on that kind of thing.
The only way you would know is over the long
half there are winning or losing player. So there's a
lot of honesty that comes into play and the camaraderie
and it just it really sort of glued us together.
And you've been thing to David Jury and Colin Jones
(17:03):
tell the story of their card counting empire. They're a
small empire, but a growing one and well a recreational
one that turned into a livelihood. When we come back
more of the story of Colin Jones and David Jury,
the card counting Christian here on our American story. Yeah,
(18:08):
and we continue with our American stories and with the
story of Colin Jones, founder or Blackjack Apprenticeship dot Com
and the player dubbed the most notorious card counter in America,
David Jury. Here's Colin and David to continue with their stories.
Some people think because we were a group of people
(18:29):
that had met at church, that that made us all
more more ethical or something. I don't. I don't know
if that's if that's necessarily true. I do know two
people have admitted over the years that they pocketed money
and later felt guilty and shared, and they were both Christians.
And I know some people that are incredibly like I
would trust them with my life savings that are not
(18:50):
church people. But I think the fact that it was
more that we had a similar circle relationally, there was
a huge cost if it came out the someone was
stealing from the team, they wouldn't just lose their job.
It was like it would hurt the relationship. So it's
almost like if a group of friends and family teamed up,
you know, there's more at stake than just getting fired.
(19:11):
I think that was a big part of why it worked. Yeah. Absolutely.
My particular situation was that I was married with young kids,
so I was motivated to get these hours and do
this stuff. I think a lot of the other people
on the team were younger, tended to be, you know,
maybe single, and so they would fly out to a
(19:35):
resort and we're like, wow, look at this great pool. Wow,
this bed is really comfortable. So I was just working, working, working,
So I ended up doing a lot more playing than
resort living. I'll step back a little bit. As a
(19:55):
twenty three year old, you know, just graduated from a
Christian college, Bible camp, Christian school. Guy, it was not
the easiest thing to tell my family that I was
gambling for a living. I remember when I told my parents.
They were missionaries at the time in Guatemala, and my
mom basically went on a hunger strike. She would you know,
she was like terrified that I was just gonna end
(20:17):
up a degenerate gambler, homeless, and my dad was afraid
I was going to be buried in a shallow grave
in the desert by the mob. My father in law,
when I told him, he said he wouldn't speak to
me again until I spoke to three older, wise, godly men.
And so, you know, the consensus I got was like, look, Colin,
what you're doing. Whether I would want my son to
(20:37):
do it or not, there's nothing inherently wrong. You know,
it's not illegal to count cards. You're using your brain.
It's not illegal to use your brain in casinos. But
you know there's there's this whole view of casinos or
even like gambling, you know, like the love of money
is the rid of all kinds of evil. And this
thought to like, well, if you're getting paid it well
as a lawyer, that's okay, or a doctor, but if
(20:59):
you beating casinos or something really nefarious about it. But
it was really this odd double life doing this because
the days I wasn't playing Blackcheck, I was volunteering at
church or playing on a worship band, or you know,
leading a community group at our church, or just being
a normal you know, twenty something or something. You know, eventually, dad,
(21:23):
but then we're flying out and I'm getting picked up
by a limousine and driven to the strip and they're
offering me free drinks and all this stuff. And I
don't drink what I play Black check or whatever. But
you know, you're this this high roller in these casinos
and then you just fly home and you've got your
normal responsibilities and I'm mowing the lawn and all that stuff. Yeah,
(21:45):
that dichotomy. I remember one Sunday I needed to get
a transfer of like thirty thousand dollars from someone who
was on the team went to the same church and
I was going to fly out after church, and so
so I went through the commun union line and then
I sat down back in my pew, and then I
saw this guy in the communion line and he had
(22:07):
had a little paper bag with him. Went through the
communion line and then slapped this paper bag in my
stomach of like thirty grand. It wasn't uncommon for me
to go straight from worship band practice to a casino.
I remember one time I played bass in a worship
band and a guy's like, oh, Colin, what what is
that in your pocket? It was like, oh, it's ten straps.
And I'm pulling out ten thousand dollars, you know, out
(22:29):
of each pocket, and another ten thousand out of each
coat pocket because I needed forty thousand for the limits
I was gonna be playing. And they started calling me
ten Straps. I was like my nickname, and to me
it wasn't I mean, I knew it was odd, but
it wasn't that odd. And one of the weird things
is people assume, you know, because the amount of money
we're playing with, that it's this short cut that's really easy.
(22:52):
But it's not easy. One way a friend put it
is it's a hard way to make easy money. I mean,
it takes two hundred to learn, minimum two hundred hours,
so it's not something you learn in a weekend. But
even that's not the hard part. The hard part is
the emotional part that getting thrown out of casinos or
the winning and losing streaks, the Okay, it's two am.
(23:13):
I just got thrown out. I don't know where I'm
staying tonight. I got to figure it out. Is the
casino scanning my license plate? So they're going to know
who I am before even show up up in the casino. Yeah,
getting run out of a casino, or where they walk
you to your hotel room to watch you pack your
bag so that they can kick you out of the
hotel room that they had camped you, you know, an
(23:35):
hour and a half earlier. There's two kinds of people generally,
when you tell someone about this. There's the people that
are too excited. They're like, no, that's amazing, Like so
you just go in there and then you walk out
with the casino's money, and you know, it's like, well
it's it's don't don't be that excited, like you're gonna
go lose a lot of money. Of the casino if
you're that optimistic. And then there are of the people
(23:58):
that I think are more our background, like the church people,
that they're not even curious about it. They've just instantly
put it in this category of that sounds bad, that
sounds wrong. I don't want to ask any follow up questions.
I just don't like that you're doing it. And that's
really like frustrating and disappointing. I was this personality before
card counting, you know. I was a guy kind of
(24:19):
like not doing anything wrong, but also not willing to
do the things I was told to do just just
because I was supposed to do them. Like I went
to a Christian school. We had to wear a tie
for chapel day every week, and so I had a
wooden tie, I had like a sequin tie. I had
a like infants clip on tie, Like Okay, I'll follow
your rule, but I'm not gonna play this part that
(24:40):
your time. I'm gonna at least question it or be
curious about it. And I wish there was a little
bit a little bit more of that from our culture.
There's these people in the Bible called the Pharisees, and
there are these people that are obsessed with their cultural
political identity. They're super defensive. They're they're terrified that the
way that they think think they're supposed to be doing
(25:00):
things is going to be changed or question they're going
to lose their identity. And it feels like a lot
of the background do we come from. It's that same
thing of like just play the part, act a certain way,
and they're not even willing to question if that certain
way of doing things is right. It's just like protect
that identity. Yeah, I was in Palm Springs at a
(25:22):
casino and the circumstances were such that I had been
at that casino before and I had lost a lot
of money. They probably just thought I was a bad player,
and they were happy to bring me back and camp
me of a top floor suite and all this stuff.
So I stroll out onto the casino floor the next morning,
and for whatever reason, I sat down and the first
(25:44):
shoe that I played was just one of these glorious
things that happened so rarely. But I just want all
the money in one shoe, like thirty thousand dollars. And
immediately it all clicked for them and they realized, like, oh,
this guy's actually a card counter and he's to now
was taking all our money. So they backed me off
and I was waiting to cash out at the cage,
(26:07):
and this is particular to tribal casinos. They were like,
this is illegal, you are card cheating. And I was
almost entertained by this. So that's why I said, oh, well,
where should I wait to meet the police and fill
out the report. And of course there they hadn't called
the police. They were just they were just trying to
run me out of the casino. And you've been listening
(26:31):
to Colin Jones and David Jury and they were telling
the story of how they became card counters, what that
life was like. As one of the men said, it
was an odd kind of double life. By day I
was playing blackjack, but soon thereafter we'll be leading a
small group or a worship service and then leaving those
things to hit the tables again. And oddly enough, there
(26:55):
are many Christians who do this and that is not
guard count but play poker or play the horses and
try to find an advantage in the numbers and try
to find out a winning strategy. When we come back
the story of the card counting Christians and we're talking
about David Jury and Colin Jones here on our American story,
(27:33):
and we continue with our American stories and the stories
of Colin Jones and David Jury, the card counting Christians.
Let's pick up where we last left off. That's one
of the big misconceptions, a couple of them. One of
them is that it's illegal, and like I said, it's
(27:55):
perfectly legal to use your brain. But the other is
that casinos are are gonna hit your hand with a
ballpin hammer in the back of the casino or the
you know you're gonna end up hospitalized or or even worse,
no one will ever see you again. And there's movies
where that happens, and there are some pretty crazy stories
(28:15):
from the sixties in early seventies. But now these most
of these casinos are owned by megacorporations. And I know
people that if a casino just detained them against their will,
they end up with a six figure settlement. But that
doesn't mean I haven't been in the back room of
a casino. One time, we were playing in Arizona, and
this was on the earlier team, and it was four
(28:36):
of us and we were just crushing the casinos and
after by the end of our trip, we had one
hundred and forty thousand dollars in chips for the casino.
We all end up in the back of a casino
explaining them. They're saying, we know you cheated us. Explained
to us how you cheated us, and we're like, we
didn't cheat. Were counting cards. So they're like, well, how
does that work? And so we're explaining card getting to
them and they said, well, how do you know it
(28:57):
to bet? It is one of my favorite lines ever
was Sammy on the team. He says, I'll tell you
for a fee. He was trying to get the casino
to pay up a consultation fee. Eventually, they cash out
our hundred forty thousand dollars and walk us to our
cars and send us something to the mail saying we'll
be arrested if we ever come back. But the whole
(29:18):
thing of getting roughed up by casinos hasn't happened. I
had one interaction with police, but it was kind of
a mistake. Similar long story short, I'm cuffed. He takes
everything out of my pockets. He looks me up. He's like,
do you have a criminal record. I'm like, well, I
have a speeding ticket from three years ago. And by
the end of it, he's walking me out to my
car and he's like, hey, do you teach other people
(29:39):
how to count cards? And I said, well, matter a fact,
we have a website we just started and told him
about Black Check Apprenticeship, the website that we'd just begun.
And of course the casinos all their advertising is like, hey,
come win, we want winners. Look how many winners we have.
And then they find someone that actually has the ability
to win, and they're like, hey, you're not well, Like
(29:59):
what do you think think you're doing trying to win?
You know, they have the winner's wall at a casino
with the like all the old ladies with holding up
their oversized check for fifteen thousand. I would love to
sneak into a casino and put my picture up on
the wall above the time I took them for whatever
I took them for. So the fact that it is
beatable is what makes the casino so much money. So
(30:22):
we're just proving the fact that it is beatable. So
they shouldn't hate us too much. We're part of the
reason why they're making so much money. But when we
started the church, team. It was working, We're winning like crazy.
We actually ended up winning, you know, for the duration
of this team, we won three point two million dollars.
(30:42):
But the way that we played it wasn't really sustainable.
So people started kind of burning out. Either they having
a hard time getting hours in a casino, or the
travel is getting to them, or like me, want to
start a family. And it's one thing when I'm like
out odd hours and gone five days at a time
when I had no kids. It's different when I've got
one kid in two and three and four kids. I
(31:05):
did a road trip with my wife and four kids.
We drove down to San Diego and back, and I
played forty hours of high limit blackjack. But it would
be something like we show up at the casino, my
wife sits in the minivan with an iPad watching Monsters Inc.
Or something on the iPad while I'm playing trying to
get a comped room. I finally get the comped room,
I get the family checked in, get them tucked in bed,
(31:26):
and then I played blackjack till I can't keep my
eyes open, sleep for like three hours, and then my
kids are jumping on my bed and it's like this
isn't really the life I want for the next thirty years. Yeah,
that is the reason I never brought my family on trips. Yeah,
but there are some diminishing returns. So I remember at
(31:47):
the beginning of my career, I could go out to
Vegas and play, you know, ten to twelve hours a
day and come home with thousands that I'd earned or whatever.
And then as time went by, I was noticing like, oh,
I can only get in and you know, six or
seven hours a day. They're kicking me out. They know
my face, and in the end, I'm having to either
(32:07):
bet lower to stay under the radar, or I'm winning
less because I'm doing all this ducking and dodging. I
was at one casino in Las Vegas and got kicked
out really quick, and I was standing in line to
cash out the few chips that I had, and I
hear someone yelling my name, you know, David, David. And
I've trained myself to not turn because sometimes they'll try
(32:28):
and test, like is this that guy. Let Goltz call
his name and see if he responds, and if I
don't respond, and maybe they think, don't think it's me.
So this guy's yelling my name, and finally everybody in
the line is looking at behind me, and so I
had to turn around and there's this guy with one
arm long zz top beard and he comes up to
me enthusiastically and he's like, I'm buying you a drink.
(32:51):
And I thought, okay, so I've got a crazy fan
in this casino. Must have been watching the way I
was playing or something. Well, it turns out he was
the head of all surveillance for a string of casinos,
and sure enough, he sat me down, brought me drink,
and he just wanted to know everything. He was a
super fan, but he was on the other side, and
he ended up giving me, you know, tips to how
(33:12):
to evade his own security because he was such a
super fan. But from that, he told me that I
had become known as the most notorious card counter in America.
So that was my claim to fame from that short
time period. But it also meant that I had sort
of worked myself out and everybody knew my face. Well,
that's how you became a master of disguises, right, Yeah,
(33:35):
So then I tried to do the disguised route. Nobody
had disguises as as good as David's. I don't think
anyone tried his heart and no one pulled it off
as well. Tell him a couple of your looks. Well, yeah,
I had a knack for looking a lot younger than
I was or a lot older than I was. And
so in a casino, there are shift changes. So basically
(33:57):
everybody who's working there works there for eight hours and
then a whole new team comes in, and so we
would come back on shift changes because you know, you're
not being seen by all the same people that were
there eight hours ago. So I'd come in on my
first shift at the casino with whatever I could grow
beard wise before the trip, you know, wearing a worn
leather and a Harley Davidson T shirt. And so I was,
(34:19):
you know, sort of like Harley guy. And then I
go and I'd shave it all off and put on
my fubou jersey and be sort of like this young
punk who's throwing money around in the casino. And then
I'd go and change again, and I'd put on my
promise keeper hat and my fleece vest and my flooded
khakis and come across like I was sort of a
(34:42):
middle aged accountant. David was able to pull that off.
But over the last couple years of the team, a
few things happened. One is, you know, we had half
a billion dollars of mine and my friends money invested
in this thing, and people like David are continuing to
grind out hours here and there at casinos, and my
stomach's hurting. I'm not sleeping well. I had I never
(35:04):
lost a night's sleep losing my own money. I had
nights where my net worth would would drop, maybe as
much as six figures, and it would suck. But it
was like, well, whatever, easy, easy go, and we trust
the math. But it's different when you have to tell
you know, your father in law or or a friend
like hey, how's the team doing, and say not good.
You know, it always turns around. But when it's down,
(35:24):
all the investors are freaking out. So I'm not sleeping well,
and my mind is I'm thinking about these internet businesses
more than I'm thinking about our black check came. I thought,
this is scary. We got half a million dollars of
money that I'm responsible for and my head's not in
the game. This is a recipe for something really to
go bad. And so I, you know, called all of
the investors and I said, hey, I think I want
(35:46):
to pull the plug on this, and they were all
okay with it, and so I had to call all
the players and say, hey, I'm done. The church team
officially ended there. But then, I mean part of that
also was that someone made a movie about us, which
we signed on for, but you know, it put up
more of our identity out there, so the casinos can nottally. Yeah. Yeah.
(36:07):
It was all these things kind of converge to where
it was like, let's let's pull the plug. When all
that started happening, and you know, I focused all my
time on black Shack apprenticeship, David decided to work on
his memoirs, writing the entire story of the weird intersection
of spiritual, personal and card counting. You know, I got
(36:30):
a degree in creative writing, so before I was ever
a card gown or a math creative writing was my
favorite thing to do. And so now it's time I'm
gonna I'm gonna look at these stories and write them
down and see if we can put together a book.
So at the end of the day, I feel like
my story was able to come full circle where I
started as a teacher and I get to teach right
(36:53):
and a great job is always by Greg and a
special thanks to Colin Jones, founder of Blackshack Apprenticeship dot
com and also the man dubbed the most notorious card
counter in America, David Jury, and it is so true
he did get it, or both men got at the
misconceptions about card county a. It's perfectly legal. By the way,
(37:15):
if you're ever sitting at a blackjack table and you'd
notice somebody on a twenty five dollars table suddenly moving
their bet from twenty five to two hundred and fifty,
they're probably card counters. And then if they bring that
bet back down to twenty five and then they randomly
go back and forth between those two bets, well they're
card counters and they've found that there's an advantage in
the count in the deck. It is the rare game,
(37:36):
but for poker, where it's up to the player and
the player's skills to win. And also the horse racing
in paramutual windows where skilled horse players can also win.
And by the way, we're not endorsing gambling here either way,
but Americans love to gamble, and by the way, Christians
love to gamble, it's when you have a problem that
you shouldn't do it. The story of the card counting Christians,
(37:58):
and we're talking about day Vijorie and Colin Jones here
on our American story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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