Traveling as a Card Counter - Blackjack Apprenticeship

Here's a snippet of my book "The 21st Century Card Counter: The Pros’ Approach to Beating Today's Blackjack" published September 2019, by Huntington Press.

Money Security and Travel

Colin Jones Blackjack Cards Covering Face

     In the late stages of my first team, we found a promotion offered on Mondays only at a casino three hours away. Like clockwork every Monday, Sammy and I headed out in the afternoon, arrived by six p.m., played until two or three a.m., and made it home just as the sun began to rise. It was a long night, but as we’d calculated the EV at $600/hr each, it was worth a little exhaustion.

      Sammy and I weren’t the best of friends, but we made the most of the long drives, talking about blackjack, poker, and whatever else we could come up with to pass the time—mostly day trading. Sammy was not only an incredibly knowledgeable card counter, he was also a day-trader (he claimed that card counting was child’s play compared to day trading, owing to the many variables outside of your control with the stock market). We chugged along the highway with $80,000 in a canvas bag at Sammy’s feet and I asked him 1,001 questions about day trading.

     The casino was out in the middle of nowhere, so the last half-hour of the drive was a stretch of highway without any lights. In the dead of winter, that meant we were driving in pitch black by the time we got there.

     On one trip, all of a sudden, my headlights hit a white object right in front of us. It was four feet high and as wide as the lane. In recent years, I’d twice run over random objects on the freeway. Once, it was half of a car bumper. The other time it was a semi-truck tire retread. Both times, rather than swerving, I made the split-second call to just drive over the object. Both times, it had resulted in damage to my car, but at least I hadn’t had to swerve at high speed. The white object now in front of us was 10 times the size of a car bumper or tire retread. Was it a cow lying on the road? A refrigerator? I had no choice but to swerve. When I overcorrected, the car went sideways and started rolling. After a complete roll, the car came to a stop while resting on Sammy’s side.

Sammy spoke first. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s the money?” I asked him.

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