Arrayed on the table before him were the four eights. When his second hand was dealt a two, he doubled down on that, too. He drew a 10, so the two cards he was showing totaled This was a good bet: since all face cards are worth 10, the deck holds more high cards than low.

Johnson won all four hands. As another skyscraper of chips was pushed into his skyline, he signaled for the next hand. He was just getting started. The headline in The Press of Atlantic City was enough to gladden the heart of anyone who has ever made a wager or rooted for the underdog:.

But the story was even bigger than that. Caesars had cut him off, he says, and then effectively banned him from its casinos worldwide. Fifteen million dollars in winnings from three different casinos?

Nobody gets that lucky. How did he do it? The first and most obvious suspicion was card counting. Card counters seek to gain a strong advantage by keeping a mental tally of every card dealt, and then adjusting the wager according to the value of the cards that remain in the deck.

The tactic requires both great memory and superior math skills. Made famous in books and movies, card counting is considered cheating, at least by casinos. In most states but not New Jersey , known practitioners are banned.

The wagering of card counters assumes a clearly recognizable pattern over time, and Johnson was being watched very carefully. He had beaten the casinos fair and square. It hurt. All of these gambling houses were already hurting, what with the spread of legalized gambling in surrounding states.

By April, combined monthly gaming revenue had been declining on a year-over-year basis for 32 months. For most people, though, the newspaper headline told a happy story.

An ordinary guy in a red cap and black hoodie had struck it rich, had beaten the casinos black-and-blue. It seemed a fantasy come true, the very dream that draws suckers to the gaming tables. D espite his pedestrian attire , Don Johnson is no average Joe. For one thing, he is an extraordinarily skilled blackjack player.

What gives Johnson his edge is his knowledge of the gaming industry. As good as he is at playing cards, he turns out to be even better at playing the casinos. Hard times do not favor the house. Pennsylvania is likely to supplant New Jersey this year as the second-largest gaming state in the nation.

The new Parx racetrack and casino in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, a gigantic gambling complex, is less than 80 miles away from the Atlantic City boardwalk. When you add gaming tables or slots at a fancy new venue like Revel, or like the Borgata, which opened in , the novelty may initially draw crowds, but adding gaming supply without enlarging the number of customers ultimately hurts everyone.

When revenues slump, casinos must rely more heavily on their most prized customers, the high rollers who wager huge amounts—tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a hand. High rollers are lured with free meals and drinks, free luxury suites, free rides on private jets, and … more.

The marketers present casinos as glamorous playgrounds where workaday worries and things like morality, sobriety, and prudence are on holiday. He was the only Atlantic City casino executive who agreed to talk to me about Johnson.

For the casino, the art is in telling the skilled whales from the unskilled ones, then discouraging the former and seducing the latter. The industry pays close attention to high-level players; once a player earns a reputation for winning, the courtship ends. The last thing a skilled player wants is a big reputation.

Some wear disguises when they play. But even though he has been around the gambling industry for all of his 49 years, Johnson snuck up on Atlantic City. To look at him, over six feet tall and thickly built, you would never guess that he was once a jockey. In his best years as a professional jockey, he was practically skeletal.

He stood 6 foot 1 and weighed only pounds. He worked with a physician to keep weight off, fighting his natural growth rate with thyroid medication that amped up his metabolism and subsisting on vitamin supplements.

The regimen was so demanding that he eventually had to give it up. His body quickly assumed more normal proportions, and he went to work helping manage racetracks, a career that brought him to Philadelphia when he was about He was hired to manage Philadelphia Park, the track that evolved into the Parx casino, in Bensalem, where he lives today.

Johnson was in charge of day-to-day operations, including the betting operation. He started to learn a lot about gambling. It was a growth industry. bettors in He has served as a state regulator in Oregon, Idaho, Texas, and Wyoming. About a decade ago, he founded a business that does computer-assisted wagering on horses.

The software his company employs analyzes more data than an ordinary handicapper will see in a thousand lifetimes, and defines risk to a degree that was impossible just five years ago.

Compared with horse racing, the odds in blackjack are fairly straightforward to calculate. Many casinos sell laminated charts in their guest shops that reveal the optimal strategy for any situation the game presents. More useful, for his purposes, is running a smaller number of hands and paying attention to variation.

The way averages work, the larger the sample, the narrower the range of variation. A session of, say, hands will display wider swings, with steeper winning and losing streaks, than the standard casino charts.

He does not just walk into a casino and start playing, which is what roughly 99 percent of customers do. But the vast majority of players lose, and the longer they play, the more they lose. They negotiate. Because the casino values high rollers more than the average customer, it is willing to lessen its edge for them.

Beyond the usual high-roller perks, the casino might also sweeten the deal by staking the player a significant amount up front, offering thousands of dollars in free chips, just to get the ball rolling. The player still loses. But two years ago, Johnson says, the casinos started getting desperate.

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