During one of those postcollege years when young men flounder around not knowing what to do next, Allen had a job in a laundry. This was in Los Angeles.
At the end of the day, Allen would add up long columns of figures--shirts and trousers, cleaned and pressed--and put a total at the end. The process involved multiplying the items and their prices across, and then adding them down.
He did it in his head.
A friend who worked with Allen used to watch him do the totals, and it gave the friend big ideas. It inspired the friend, in fact, to buy a book on blackjack and suggest that he and Allen take the six-hour drive to Las Vegas and strip it of money.
And that, more or less, is exactly what happened.
WHAT ALLEN DID in Las Vegas was the fulfillment of a dream cherished by every person who has ever walked up to a blackjack table. Within four weeks of his first game, he had quit his job at the laundry. Within a few months, he was part of a five-man professional blackjack team dedicated to screwing casinos every way they could think of.
From 1981 to 1987, Allen and his team lived in the seams. They were part of an underground coterie of 150 or so professional blackjack players who derive their entire income from what they make at tables all around the world. For Allen's team, that income varied from $15,000 to $85,000 a year, after the cost of travel, food and lodging.
Professional blackjack players, who are mostly men, are as invisible to the Average Joes who ring the gaming tables of Nevada as they are repugnant to casinos and their pit bosses.
Their techniques are based on card counting, which is impossible to make illegal because it happens inside the head. It involves keeping track of what's been played, and extrapolating from that what's likely to come up. Card counting, tried by thousands of people, written about in dozens of books, is hardly news. What made Allen's teammates different were the computers, hidden in their shoes and operated with their toes, with a program so esoteric even people close to the gaming business act skeptical at the mention of it. Allen played at a time that in retrospect looks like the last golden age of blackjack gambling in America. It is because of people like Allen that casinos have made computers illegal, imposed changes in the way cards are shuffled and made it almost impossible for anyone besides the casino to get an edge.
"I would love," Allen says, "the conditions that existed when I began."
During the years he was playing, Allen did an enormous amount of traveling, albeit only to locales that had legalized games. Still, this included England, Spain, the Caribbean, and South Korea. But he was embarking on a moral journey as well, and that makes his life from 1981 to 1987 more than simply a gambling story. At the very end, just before the team split up, Allen and his friends took their first and only venture into illegality. That didn't bother some of the team members, but Allen is more thoughtful than most. He is the kind of man who took up blackjack because it allowed him to work a few days a month and spend the rest of his time learning French, playing tennis and reading books like The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. He is the kind of man who, when he talks about casinos, does not relate tales of big wins, but discusses them as exemplars of capitalism. He is the kind of man who can see Darwinian selection at work in the relationship between casinos and players, and take pleasure in the beauty of blackjack's mathematics.
When Allen talks about why a man with a college degree in political science and aspirations to law school would deliberately break the law in a way that amounted to stealing, he keeps coming back to one theme: "Look what they do."
For years, Allen says, he and his teammates were harassed, threatened and barred because casinos do not like card counters. After a while, he says, it was like when your wife suspects you of cheating on her. If you're going to take the grief, maybe you ought to enjoy some of the pleasure.
"We knew we were doing nothing wrong, but the ramifications were the same as if it were illegal," Allen says. "Maybe that's where we crossed. Maybe that's where the line fuzzed out."
The line fuzzed out one night in 1986. Allen and his teammates played with what he called the ultimate edge. They knew literally what every single card would be for the first thirty cards in the deck. That is because they were photographing them with a video camera and relaying instructions to a player standing at a blackjack table, about to win a very large amount of money in a very short time. ALLEN ARRIVED in Phoenix two years ago, and is telling all this in the restaurant he owns in north Phoenix. It used to be a restaurant and social gambling establishment until legislation outlawed social gambling last year. Now, Allen says a little tensely, he's losing his ass on the place, even though the food was always better than it had to be, and there are half a dozen guys lined up at the bar, drinking and watching sports on television. Now 34, Allen is not the kind of man for whom the casinos of Nevada are a natural habitat. He had an eminently normal childhood in New York's Hudson River Valley. His father had a big retirement dinner after 38 years in a nuclear power plant. His brother owns a landscaping business. His sister is a schoolteacher in Poughkeepsie.
Allen himself graduated from the State University of New York at New Paltz. Bright, literate, sophisticated enough to refer to spaghetti as pasta, Allen is a rare combination. He can handle a deck of cards and discuss the humor of Peter De Vries with equal facility, and he can talk about the events from 1981 to 1987 with insight and even a certain detachment. "I did not gamble," Allen says. In fact, he has nothing but disdain for the vast majority of people who ring blackjack tables, people who believe in luck, or that they can influence the cards by rubbing them. Those are gamblers, and of them Allen says contemptuously, "Gambling is a very macho thing. The fact you are able to lose the money, that just shows you have a big dick." Allen, by distinction, was a player. That means he had an edge. In the normal course of events, the house has the edge. That is why casinos are rich and gamblers aren't.
Allen believes in an edge the way some people believe in God, so in this sense he is a monotheist. He has never played without one. The house edge is 2 percent. When he and the team members played, they reversed that, which meant that sooner or later they would come out ahead. The trick was waiting.
During one period, Allen's team was down by $125,000. Another time he played a single round and won $10,500. It made no difference. It wasn't even much fun. "It was a tremendous grind," he says. Playing blackjack for a living was more interesting than punching a time clock. It was less risky than the stock market. But it was a job, albeit one that occurred in a workplace usually thought to connote excitement and risk. But Allen never felt any of that, because blackjack relies on the eternal truth of mathematics, and the ultimate outcome was never in doubt. In the end, Allen and his team would win, and losses along the way were simply "negative fluctuations." To Allen, money was inventory. This point was driven home one time when he accidentally dropped two bundles of bills containing $12,000 while running into a casino. He noticed the driver of a Greyhound tour bus watching him, and saw his eyes get wide as saucers as Allen stooped down and scooped the money from the sidewalk. It hadn't occurred to Allen that some people might think $12,000 was a lot of money. He usually carried so much cash it didn't even fit in a wallet.
Allen never felt the thrill of winning a big pot. He never felt the stomach-sinking, adrenaline-rushing terror of losing the month's mortgage payment. He never felt anything more than a guy feels going to work.
"Asking me if I could give up gambling is like asking someone if they could stop being a janitor," he says.
ALLEN HAS RELATED what happened during his years as a player in a manuscript he has just completed, and for which he is searching for a publisher. It is an eminently readable work, in which he parodies Hunter S. Thompson, "Casey at the Bat," and James Thurber. Allen knows enough not to bog the story down with technical details, although in conversation, phrases such as "It's .2 percent better to have a dealer stand on a soft seventeen" fall easily from his lips. Although he admits that some of the events in the book are conflated and a few of the times shifted, his description of the computer-in-the-shoe his team used checks out with gaming expert Arnold Snyder, publisher of Blackjack Forum. "His team was using computers before they became well known," Snyder says. "He's a for-real gambler at high stakes."
Allen rose quickly to the top of his field, but his entry into the world of blackjack was somewhat less than auspicious.
The year was 1981. The casino, the Silverbird. The only other time he'd been in a casino had been to use the john. Allen walked up to an empty table to try counting for the first time.
He did everything wrong. He tried to hand the money to the dealer, rather than lay it on the table. He picked his cards up with two hands. He said, "Hit me," the term kids use when they play the game they call "21," rather than scratching the felt. The dealer tossed her eyes. Then she tossed a card at him.
In casino blackjack, a player is essentially betting against the dealer, who is often a woman so men don't feel so bad when they lose. You're dealt two cards, and more if you want them, and try to get a hand that adds up to 21, or blackjack. "Counting," which casinos discourage in what must be the closest to thought control America ever comes, assigns each card a numerical value. Big cards--tens and face cards--are assigned negative values. Little cards are assigned positive values. Cards in the middle, like sevens, eights and nines, are zero. As the cards are played and go into the discard pile, a counter adds and subtracts their assigned values and keeps a running total in his head. A low count means a bunch of small cards are left. That's bad. When the count is low, a player bets small.
A high count, on the other hand, means a lot of big cards are still out. That's good. When the count is high, a player bets big. That's because more blackjacks will be dealt, and the player gets a higher payoff for a blackjack than the dealer does. Also, the dealer's chance of busting--going over 21--increases with a higher number of big cards out. A player can stand pat, but a dealer has to hit sixteen or less. Big cards also mean, for reasons too technical to describe, a greater likelihood of winning on things called double downs and splits.
Counting sounds obvious, but it wasn't discovered until 1962, when Edward O. Thorp published Beat the Dealer. Then, in 1978, Peter Griffin published what has become the Bible of dreamers everywhere, Professional Blackjack. There are now, Allen guesses, some 200 methods of counting, and half a dozen newsletters devoted to it.
"Anybody can do it," says Allen, who once counted a deck in thirteen seconds. "The difficult thing is acting like you're not doing it."
This is where theatrics come in, and that element of character Allen and his friends referred to as "balls." You have to count while you're chatting with the dealer. You have to count while you're pretending to be drunk. You have to count while you're acting like a weekend gambler--loud, obnoxious, dumb. You have to remember that typical counters will normally feel guilty after winning a hand, and try to keep a low profile. You have to remember this is wrong.
It doesn't always work. Pit bosses know how to count, too, and they walk around, mostly to make sure the dealers aren't cheating the house, but also to watch to see if anyone's counting. It's not hard for a pit boss to notice that someone is betting big when the count's high and small when it's low.
When that happens, the pit bosses will have the dealer shuffle. If it happens enough, the player will be asked to leave. If he's relieved the casino of sufficient money, they'll take the player's picture for "the book." That's a volume compiled by a security company containing photographs of people who are too good at blackjack.
One of the first things, in fact, that Allen was asked when he encountered the guy who would invite him to join the blackjack team was, "Are you in the book?"
He didn't know what that meant, either.
Allen made contact with the people who would become his team members when he noticed a guy at his table spreading his bets. He began to watch more closely. When he saw the guy order a double Chivas and head for the men's room, Allen followed him, the novice seeking advice. He watched the guy replace the scotch with apple juice, and knew he'd found an old pro.
Lark, the guy is called in Allen's book, is one of the more colorful characters on a team that stuck together for years, with almost nothing in common except blackjack.
Lark was the human garbage can who lived on Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and could drive people away from a table by burping and farting on demand. He spent everything he won. Then there was Guppy, dyslexic and almost functionally illiterate, whose conversation consisted of quotes from old movies.
There was Tony, the Italian high roller with the flashy suits, the malapropisms ("He who hesitates can't see the forest for the trees") and the inevitable blonde on his arm. It was Tony's ill-timed come-on to a babe in a shoe-repair shop that ultimately blew the team's scheme apart, but that was later.
There was Brian, the genius behind it all, whose goal in life was to feed everything into the computer and figure the edge. It was Brian who coined the term "negative fluctuation" to describe losing. Your dog gets hit by a car. Negative fluctuation. Nuclear war breaks out. Negative fluctuation.
Brian had no social life. He looked at women, but never went after them.
"Weird," is how Allen describes them all.
When Allen met this crew, they were doing something called spooking. It was simple. When the dealer looks at her hole card, she lifts it up, shielding it from the players at the table.
But often not from someone playing at a table nearby, who can then use signals like opening and closing his mouth to transmit information to colleagues in the game.
A variation on this was front loading, catching a glimpse of the dealer's hole card as she slides it under the upcard. The team also played "tells," unconscious signals dealers send out that indicate how good their hole card is--like a widening of the pupils, or a tensing of the jaw. The team would also do things as simple as stationing themselves around a casino, counting cards as they came out of the shoe, and converging on a table where the edge was getting healthy.
But the most elaborate thing the team did required a computer program and the brain of a mathematician acquainted with the theories of randomness.
Allen noticed it first.
He was driving home after an early morning's work, when suddenly the light bulb went on. He'd been playing at the Sands, and the count had been a phenomenally high thirty when the plastic stop card told the dealer it was time to shuffle. That meant that an enormous number of high cards was clumped together behind the stop card.
Most dealers shuffle the cards fairly sloppily, because most gamblers don't play much better. Hence, when there are clumps of high cards like Allen had just seen, those clumps will tend to stay together through the shuffle.
That realization, plus the fact that the dealer offers the deck to a player for cutting, allowed for the manufacture of the shuffle-tracking computer. The way Allen and his team did it, the player would shove the plastic cut card in at a certain spot, varying with each shuffle, to ensure the clumps stayed together. Shoving it in at the wrong spot might have cut the clumps in half.
Computers had been applied to blackjack almost as soon as they were invented. But it wasn't until Keith Taft invented the David in the late Seventies that they were small enough to be slipped unobtrusively into a casino in the toes of a pair of shoes. Counters wore the power pack strapped to their legs, and input numbers with their toes. The computer sent a signal back to the player via a wire run through a jockstrap. Such devices had to be housed in oversize clodhoppers, but Las Vegas has never been a hotbed of fashion. This is the place, after all, about which Hunter Thompson wrote, "If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big." Brian had a brother-in-law in the computer business. The team gave him free rein with Tony's American Express Gold card and had him design the hardware they'd need. Brian the computer genius designed the software. Four machines cost $30,000 altogether, but it was worth it. It raised their edge from 1 to 2 percent, "which is enormous," Allen says. It allowed them to quadruple the number of big bets. And it allowed them to make big bets even bigger.
They used the machines briefly in Las Vegas, but then things got too hot, partly because of--who else?--Tony. He was having some work done on the footwear that housed the computer, and he bragged about the shoes to a woman he met in the repair store. He was trying to convince her they were a sexual aid. It turned out Tony's honey worked for a casino.
So the team took the shuffle-tracking computers on the road. They used them all over Latin America, so successfully that one casino manager thought Allen had been blessed by the Pope. They used them all over Spain, so effectively that team members were barred not only from the casino in Barcelona, but from every casino in the entire country. "What a piece of work," Allen says with admiration. "It was beautiful. They never figured it out." The shuffle-tracking system was based on observations so complex, when Canadian Customs found the computers, they didn't know what they were.
Their very success, however, ultimately spelled the computers' demise. Within a few years, Keith Taft's invention had gotten so popular it'd spawned bootleg knockoffs. Although none had the programming elegance of the shuffle-tracking system, soon even weekend gamblers were walking stiff-legged around casinos, punching buttons with their toes. A recent issue of Casino Journal, in fact, warned pit bosses about this very gait.
After the computers began to proliferate, the state of Nevada declared them illegal in 1985, which means that Allen can pride himself on having had some effect on the legislative system of the state of Nevada. He can also pride himself on forcing the casinos to shuffle more carefully, although they, of course, deny they're doing anything differently.
"Shuffling's shuffling. Got it?" a public relations flack at Caesar's Palace says defensively.
After computers were made illegal, the team went back to spooking, this time using electronic signaling. It was giving them a decent edge. Allen bought a house, settled down. This was when he learned French and got all his reading done. Life was nice.
Then Allen was beaten up. The memory of it still angers him.
LAKE TAHOE, 1986. He'd been spooking with a partner. He'd won $1,100 on half a dozen hands, but left because the dealer wasn't showing her hole card anymore. When Allen went to cash out, a goon approached him and said Mr. Franklin would like to speak to him. Allen thought he was going to be comped--big players frequently get their rooms and meals for free.
When he saw half a dozen security guards coming toward him, he knew he'd figured wrong.
"Boom! They're on me," Allen remembers. "They were using sticks--I was pissing blood later--and they pushed me into the office. They picked me up and threw me down and cuffed me behind my back."
It was a case of mistaken identity. As close as Allen can figure, they mistook him for a gambler against whom they harbored an enormous grudge. They released him, but not before he was taken to jail and charged with two counts of battery, possession of a cheating device and burglary. "Where do you think you are, California?" the goons sneered. Gambling interests are so powerful in Nevada, Allen refuses to consider it part of the United States. The incident pushed him, for the first time, over the line. Everything up to this point, while it might have been in violation of a gentleman's code of gaming ethics, and liable to get you barred from a casino, had not been against the law. Allen can cite case names to prove that. But after he was beaten up, his feelings changed.
So did the team's technology. He remembers the conversations they had. One said it was a casino's responsibility to protect itself. Another wondered if what they were about to do were legal. Guppy's only concern was getting caught. Brian worried about that, too. There was sniffing about "lowering themselves to the casino's level" by breaking the law.
Allen is pragmatic to an extreme, the kind of man who says, "I happen to think the bottom-line reason we're here is because our DNA has been successful for a little over a billion years. I have absolutely no need for a deity."
He is also the kind of man who says of people who gamble away their life savings, "The information is out there and they choose not to pay attention. It's like smoking cigarettes."
So he does not rationalize his cheating, his "crossing the line" as he calls it, in that way.
Still, he rationalizes. He says, "Look what they do." He means the casinos. He means that when a fire broke out at the MGM Grand, 84 people were killed, but the millions of dollars of highly flammable paper money emerged unscathed. He means that Las Vegas is one of the few places in the world where people who have figured out a legal way to beat the dealer can be discouraged from further play by having the shit beaten out of them in a back room. He means the "double your paycheck" wheels that encourage the workingman to cash his check at a casino rather than bring it home to his wife. He means, in a more elaborate way, what Guppy means when he says, "We do things that are illegal, but we're better human beings than they are."
Allen is a good talker. Perhaps it is not surprising that after half a dozen years around an industry that prospers by taking money away from people, the line between right and wrong would erode. ALLEN ESTIMATES that fifteen or so people on Earth know the details of what they pulled next. He calls it "the ultimate edge." It is the theme of Allen's book, and all the incidents in the narrative lead up to it.
The team spent months working on the technology, and one night during the summer of 1986, they pulled into the parking lot of the casino where Allen was beaten up. They had roughly the attitude the Visigoths had toward Rome in A.D. 476, and the outcome was the same.
The edge, Allen says, was like the temperature in Las Vegas that day--somewhere in the nineties.
It worked this way. Allen went to a table to play. He picked an empty one, as big players often do. Tony carried a cane, with one of those right-angle handles. It held a hidden camera. When the dealer pushed the cards toward Allen for cutting, he casually riffled through them, in a way that casinos have now wisely outlawed. Meanwhile, he talked to the dealer like your basic Joe Gambler.
Tony held the cane so the camera recorded the cards as Allen riffled them, and transmitted the picture to a van in the parking lot. Lark in the van slowed down the film so he could read the cards, and transmitted betting strategy back to Allen via a transmitter.
Allen bet how he was told. There was no way he could lose. Chance had been eliminated.
The hard part, for Allen, was delaying the dealer with idle chatter while he was waiting for his instructions to come back. And then following those instructions, even when the bets seemed nonsensical in light of what was visible on the table. That's what eventually prompted them to give up the scheme, after eight successful months. One day after Allen made his bets the dealer looked at him curiously. Then recognition dawned in her eyes.
"It's you!" She remembered his style of play--a few huge bets--and how lucky he'd been. Allen knew he was living on borrowed time.
Still, it was sweet while it lasted.
The first time Allen tried it, he played for two minutes, half a dozen hands. He won $9,600. He walked off, acting dopey and surprised, tasting the sweetness of revenge, and liable for jail for the first time.
WHEN HE MOVED to Phoenix two years ago, Allen supported himself for a while by dealing at the social gambling tables. Then he bought the restaurant, and made money from the large amounts of liquor social gamblers drink.
When he had his own joint, he made the allowable bet spreads too close for counting to work and had the dealers shuffle a lot. "I saw a thousand blackjack players here and never saw one basic strategy player," Allen says, shaking his head at the people who believe luck has anything to do with winning at cards.
Now, with a book and a screenplay under his belt, Allen isn't sure what to do next. He's in one of those in-between times in his life. He's been thinking of graduate school. He's been thinking of the gambling possibilities of eastern Europe. He's been working with a guy who's got a roulette system yielding an 8 percent edge.
The team has mostly broken up. Tony is in Chicago, selling real estate. Guppy is in Las Vegas, beating the slots. Every once in a while Allen hears from the fellow he used to work with in the laundry in Los Angeles ten years ago. The guy still goes to Las Vegas a few times a year, taking with him thousands of dollars and usually losing it all.
Last spring, Allen went back to New York for his father's retirement dinner. While they were talking, Allen realized that all the years he'd been playing, his father had thought what he was doing was illegal. He'd just never brought it up. So maybe Allen is right, that the line fuzzes out, and it doesn't really matter. You make your own morality. For years he and his teammates were harassed, threatened and barred from casinos.
Allen believes in an edge the way some people believe in God.
If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big.
After computers were made illegal, the team went back to spooking, this time using electronic signaling.
"We do things that are illegal, but we're better human beings than they are.
