About two years ago Gordito was in Laughlin with his family and late one night won $300 in a couple of hours of play at a $5 table. He knew that this win was due to good fortune rather than skill, but he began to wonder… could an expert player beat the house in the 90s? Could a man approaching middle age with a stressful job, three kids, two dogs and two mortgages make blackjack into a profitable hobby? (He claims that he took a green chip and placed it on the pillow beside each of his sleeping children and asked for help from above.) marked cards
Did he have the discipline? Did he have the time? Did he have the money? He picked up a couple of the newer blackjack books (especially Arnold Snyder's Blackbelt in Blackjack), bought a few decks of cards, and spent the next three months playing 11,000 hands of double-deck blackjack on the breakfast bar. He played four hands against the dealer, naming three of the players after his children and the fourth after one of his dogs. He kept meticulous records.
A little over a year later Gordito owned 30 books on blackjack and related subjects, six blackjack software programs and had spent at least 100 hours programming a blackjack database. He had made 22 trips to Las Vegas and Laughlin. Gordito would never be the same. Following are some of the results of his first year as a card counter.
As you can see from the chart below, Gordito did not “clean up” at the blackjack tables, but he did make more than enough to pay for his trips. His expenses were modest. For most of the year he had a company car with free gas, and he got a few free rooms at the Frontier. He did not make enough to cover the blackjack books, subscriptions and software, or the gifts for his children (they got tired of slot cups after a while).
So far blackjack has been a positive experience for Gordito, although the game has become something of an obsession. He practices every day and, no matter how dreary things may be at work or in life in general, he always has the next trip to prepare for and look forward to.
He has increased his efficiency at day-to-day chores. He gets them done quickly so that he can find time for blackjack. He still never misses a little league game or a school program, but he attends these events with his pockets full of flash cards and charts (he can often be seen standing in some lighted area passing pieces of paper between his hands and mumbling to himself).
His family is also generally enjoying his experience. They’ve gone along with him on four of his trips. The children argue about whether the buffet is better at Palace Station or the Mirage. They anxiously await his telephone reports when he’s away by himself. If no one is at home when he calls, he leaves messages on the answer machine such as “I just got my throat ripped out at Alladin’s but I’m still up three dollars. Be in Barstow at about seven and home by 9:30.”
The family plays blackjack together with Gordito as dealer. He tries to analyze the personalities of his children by how they handle doubling and splitting. infrared marked cards
He has a kitchen cupboard full of stacks of cards glued together at different thickness with the correct number of cards in each stack written on the bottom. He likes to strew these throughout the house so that he can walk into any room, see a stack of cards, and call out something like “12 cards! Multiply by .7, 1 ace” and then turn over the stack to see if he’s right.