Largely as a result of Johnson’s streak, the Trop’s table-game revenues for April 2011 were the second-lowest among the 11 casinos in Atlantic City. He had beaten the casinos fair and square. The verdict: card counting was not Don Johnson’s game. The wagering of card counters assumes a clearly recognizable pattern over time, and Johnson was being watched very carefully. In most states (but not New Jersey), known practitioners are banned. (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. 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 first and most obvious suspicion was card counting. Caesars had cut him off, he says, and then effectively banned him from its casinos worldwide.įifteen million dollars in winnings from three different casinos? Nobody gets that lucky. In the four previous months, he’d taken $5 million from the Borgata casino and another $4 million from Caesars.
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Johnson’s assault on the Tropicana was merely the latest in a series of blitzes he’d made on Atlantic City’s gambling establishments. 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:īLACKJACK PLAYER TAKES TROPICANA FOR NEARLY $6 MILLION, SINGLE-HANDEDLY RUINS CASINO’S MONTHīut the story was even bigger than that. As another skyscraper of chips was pushed into his skyline, he signaled for the next hand. When the dealer turned over the house’s down card, it was a 10, busting him. This was a good bet: since all face cards are worth 10, the deck holds more high cards than low. Johnson called the game-in essence, betting that the dealer’s down card was a seven or higher, which would push his hand over 21. He drew a 10, so the two cards he was showing totaled 15. When he was dealt a three and a two on the next two hands, he says, he doubled down on those, for a total wager of $800,000. When his second hand was dealt a two, he doubled down on that, too. He was allowed to double down-to double his bet-on any hand, so when he was dealt a three on the first of his hands, he doubled his bet on that one, to $200,000. Arrayed on the table before him were the four eights. The house’s hand showed an upturned five.
Whenever the racily clad cocktail waitress wandered in with a fresh whiskey and Diet Coke, he took it from the tray. With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold. Little interferes with his concentration. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. Since the house’s hand has one card facedown, the player can’t know exactly what the hand is, which is what makes this a game.Īs Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. Scanning the cards on the table before him, the player can either stand or keep taking cards in an effort to approach 21. The goal is to get to 21, or as close to it as possible without going over.
A card’s suit doesn’t matter, only its numerical value-each face card is worth 10, and an ace can be either a one or an 11. Two cards are placed faceup before the player, and two more cards, one down, one up, before the dealer. Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid Jonathan Haidt
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