Holy Rollers: America’s “Most Notorious” Card Counters Were… Christians?

00:00:11 Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. There’s some of our favorite. One of the most successful blackjack teams in America is made up, surprisingly, of Christians. Here to tell the story are two of the winningest players: Colin Jones, founder of BlackjackApprenticeship.com, and the player dubbed the most notorious card counter in America, David Drewry. Here’s David.

00:00:49 Speaker 2: When I was maybe eight or ten years old, my father was a pastor of a church, and they were doing a big bonfire behind the church. And as one of these events where you’re supposed to bring your rock records or your, you know, anything that is causing you to stumble, and you throw it in the fire and give a little speech. And so I was an eight-or-ten-year-old kid, and I said to my parents, “What are we bringing to this fire?” “Because I want to throw something in it, you know?” And they’re like, “Well, we’re the pastor? We don’t have anything to throw in the fire.” Like, “Oh, come on!” So we went all over the house, and one of the things we found in the back of a pencil drawer was a single playing card, and they said, “Well, okay, you can throw this in the fire. This represents gambling.” And at the fire, you know, it was my time, and my dad spoke and said, you know, talked about gambling, and “I’m throwing this card in the fire.”

00:01:39 Speaker 3: I’m Colin, and I’ve been a card counter for almost twenty years. And I’m here with my good friend David.

00:01:46 Speaker 2: I’m David, and I’ve been a card counter for, I guess, about fifteen years.

00:01:51 Speaker 3: And for me, card counting started when I had just graduated from college with a math degree and not really any ambition. And I was volunteering at a Bible camp, and a friend, Ben, was up there, and he’s like, “Hey, Colin, you’re a math guy! Check out this book I’m reading.” And it was called Professional Blackjack, written by Stanford Wong, who is a mathematician, and it broke down the math behind card counting and blackjack, and I thumbed through and I thought, “While I’m a math guy, I could probably do this.”

00:02:21 Speaker 3: From there, I went to substitute teaching, which is the most boring thing you can do with a math degree; you’re basically babysitting high school students. And on the days I didn’t get called to substitute teach, I convinced my newlywed wife for me to take two thousand dollars of our savings and try this whole card-counting thing at the local casinos. Here in Washington State, we have these like bowling-alley casinos and strip-mall casinos, and they don’t have slot machines or anything. It’s like you’re going into a Seven-Eleven with about ten table games. And I trained way too little. I didn’t know enough about card counting, but I went for it, and I got stupid lucky.

00:03:01 Speaker 3: Like the first two days, I doubled my two thousand dollars to four thousand dollars, and I’m buying a bottle of wine for my wife, and I, saying, “Hey, this is easy money! This is great!” And then I started losing day after day, like slowly, kind of back and forth, and every day I’m calling Ben, and I’m like, “Hey, what do I do in this situation? You know, how many spots do I play? What if someone jumps into the table?” But he kind of got lonely doing the card-counting thing on his own, and so we combined his seven thousand dollars with my four thousand dollars, and then, all of a sudden, we had eleven thousand dollars to be playing blackjack.

00:03:33 Speaker 2: Wait, you’re eleven thousand dollars?

00:03:35 Speaker 3: Yeah, we were. Yeah, five figures, and we just started grinding, and, of course, you know, he helped fix my game. The luckiest thing that could have happened was when he was playing at a casino. This was before he and I teamed up. He was playing at a casino, and he gets noticed by this guy that was on a national blackjack team, like the most feared card-counting team in America. Spotted him and was like, “Hey, this kid’s not bad, but, you know, there’s some things he could fix,” and so they kind of exchanged phone numbers, and the guy was kind of trying to recruit Ben to be on his team, and that resulted in Ben not really joining their team. He did one trip with them, but in getting his skills really refined, which was what I needed because I thought I was good, and I wasn’t. Ben was able to refine my skills, and so then we have this eleven thousand dollars, and we’re just grinding. We’re going to all our local casinos every day, and if I didn’t get called to substitute teach, I was working, you know, kind of nine-to-five gambling, essentially. And pretty quickly we started winning, and we added a third friend, Jeff, and the three of us grinded, and we grew that eleven thousand dollars into about one hundred thousand dollars over three or four months. Joined up with a fourth guy that we spotted at a casino that, when I first saw him playing, I thought he was a drug dealer because he had this satchel full of five hundred dollars chips, and he’s just betting like crazy at the casino. And then we start watching how he’s betting. It was like, “Hey, this guy’s a card counter, too!”

00:05:04 Speaker 3: So the four of us, we start playing, and over the course of two years, we won about five hundred thousand dollars playing. But, as many small businesses, especially with twenty-something-year-old guys, it kind of, you know, the relational, the personality character issues, started to come about, and Ben and I decided to split off and get into real estate. So we figured we’re smart enough to beat casinos. We’re definitely smart enough to beat the real estate market. Unfortunately, we weren’t. And what I tell people is: we were investing at blackjack, and we were gambling at real estate, and we go and we lose something like four hundred thousand dollars on three million dollars worth of properties that we had leveraged to the hilt right when the housing market crashed, and we didn’t know what to do. So we pulled out all the equity we could, and we went back to the only honest thing we knew to do, which was to play blackjack. We go back to the casinos, and it starts working again, and the two of us, you know, very quickly, we’ve got a couple hundred thousand. And that’s where people like David came in, because we’re thinking, “We don’t want to be in the casinos, but we know how to do this, and we can teach people.” And some friends from our churches started approaching us, saying, “Hey, can I play blackjack on your blackjack team?” And that’s where things started to really get interesting.

00:06:26 Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to David Drury and Colin Jones tell the story of their card-counting empire. They’re a small empire, but a growing one, and, well, a recreational one that turned into a livelihood. When we come back, more of Our American Stories and the story of the card-counting Christians here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Colin Jones and David Drury, aka the card-counting Christians. Let’s pick up where we last left off. Here’s David and Colin.

00:08:22 Speaker 2: So, my story: I came across this idea of card counting on my own. I think it was around the time that Bringing Down the House, the book that became the movie 21, that had come out, and I had read some things online about, “This is a beatable game.” I was working as an editor at a trade publication, and I would sort of sneak off of work early to go try this thing out at the casinos with my own money. But it’s true, this whole beginner’s luck thing, because I won and I thought, “Oh, well, this is really, really easy!” And I had a friend I owed some money to, so I paid him with a one-hundred-dollar bill, and, of course, a one-hundred-dollar bill is a conversation starter. “Why are you paying me with a one-hundred-dollar bill?” Like, “Oh, well, I’m glad you asked! I’ve been counting cards and beating blackjack!” And he’s like, “Oh, well, you must have met Ben!” And I said, “Ben?” And he said, “Yeah, I think he’s been doing that. He just bought a house.” So I was like, “Well, I need to meet this Ben guy; it sounds like he’s doing it the right way.” So I met Ben. He took me out to a casino and showed me how he played, and then he loaned me a book by Stanford Wong, one of the early heroes of card counting, and I read the book, and I did all the math, and I figured out that the way I was playing, I could look to a lifetime of earning five cents an hour if I was playing correctly. So I’d been just lucky for these first few sessions, and sure enough, I started losing, and I gave up on the idea entirely. But a year later, I found out that Ben and Colin were forming a team. I had just gotten laid off, so I was like, “This sounds like the perfect job!” And quickly I learned that I needed to forget everything that I had taught myself about card counting and start again from scratch. I had just passed the test out for the team, and Ben, it was announced, “You know, okay, you made it, you did it!” And we were debriefing after the test in a casino, and we were in the bathroom, be course, because that’s one of the places you can talk, and there’s no cameras in the bathroom in a casino. So he’s in one stall, and I’m in the other stall, and he’s telling me that I passed the test, and in this hand emerges underneath the stall with like thirty thousand dollars in cash. He’s like, “Okay, you’re all set! Start playing, you know!” And so that was, of course, it freaked me out because I’d never dealt with money like that.

00:10:51 Speaker 3: It’s definitely an occupational hazard that you don’t have in most other jobs. You know, you can get really desensitized to it, but, you know, over time that happens. At first, it’s a thousand dollars, and I’m freaking out; and then it’s five thousand dollars that I have in my pocket, and I’m freaking out. And then it takes, you know, twenty thousand dollars for me to be freaking out, and then I’ve got one hundred thousand dollars, and it’s like kind of normal.

00:11:15 Speaker 2: I was in Philadelphia, and I’m just, you know, just in jeans and a hoodie, and I had, I had won, and for whatever reason, I was traveling with ninety thousand dollars and went through security just fine. They were like, “What are all these envelopes?” And I explained it like always, and they let me go on. And as I’m walking to the gate, there’s like a voice over my shoulder, and he’s like, “I hear you have a lot of money on you. I’m with the DEA,” and he steers me to the side. It’s this whole team of guys in suits, and they start asking me questions: “Where were you? What did you drive? Where did you get gassed? Do you have receipts? Where’d you stay? What’s your wife’s name? What’s your boss’s name? How much cash do you have on you? Where did you eat?” You know, just like all the questions you would ask if you were in the DEA and worried somebody was, you know, a drug runner or something like that. So he went and called my bosses and came back and eventually said, “You know what? We have the right to seize this money because of Homeland Security. But you’re a good dude, and this is a, you got a good thing going on here, so, you know, have a good day,” and I made it. You know, you spend so much time as a card counter in a casino where you’re not telling the casino people what you’re doing. But when those situations come, when we’re, you know, talking to police or DEA, I personally get excited. I’m like, “Finally, I can tell someone all about what I do—this career that I’m really excited about that I don’t get to talk to people!” So when the DEA was questioning me, I could, you know, hear my logs, here’s every hour I’ve worked, and here’s the money. “Well, here’s where it came from!” And I’m sort of, probably, was a little bit too enthusiastic, and he’s like, “This guy’s not a criminal; he’s just a geek.”

00:12:58 Speaker 3: So, I said, “Their team had four people, and one of the guys, we’ll call him Sammy.” He doesn’t want me to give his real name, but Sammy, when he saw that we were starting this team, he’s like, “What is this, the church team?” Because it was all people we knew from church, and we thought that was hilarious, and so, you know, the name kind of stuck.

00:13:14 Speaker 4: But what we would do is, there are two ways to form a blackjack team.

00:13:18 Speaker 3: You find people that are interested already in, you know, beating casinos, and you try to build trust with them and team up.

00:13:25 Speaker 4: But we thought the other way is: you.

00:13:27 Speaker 3: Take people that you already trust and know that there’s some relational equity, and we felt like we could teach them blackjack, so that it started with one guy and then turned to two, which turned into four, and David was probably number three or four on that team. But we would take him from scratch, and we’d say, “Hey, blackjack is a very unique game in that it’s one of the only things in a casino where future events are dependent on past events.” If you’re playing blackjack and a queen of diamonds is dealt, you will not see that queen of diamonds again until they shuffle, and so that’s how it is created.

00:14:00 Speaker 3: There’s a guy, Doctor Ed Thorp, and in the early sixties he saw that someone had used computers to figure out the optimal way of playing blackjack, and then he just hypothesized, “Hey, what if an ace comes out of the deck of cards that they’re dealing? How does that change the odds?” And he realized, “Oh, it makes it worse for the player,” and so he said, “Well, what’s the other extreme?” He said, “What if a two comes out?” And he realized that actually gave players the advantage because that two won’t be seen again. The game is different now with that two gone. And so card counting was born with his book Beat the Dealer, and, you know, it just evolved where casinos, this cat-and-mouse game, kept evolving. Casinos are then increasing the number of decks and changing the rules, and card counters are also adapting. But it’s this weird symbiotic relationship because blackjack became popular simply because it can be beaten. It wasn’t the most popular casino game, but once a book came out that said, “This game can be beaten,” of course, everybody with, you know, any money in their pocket wants to go and try to beat this game. And ninety-nine point nine percent of them don’t actually have the skills to do it. But the point one percent, we actually do have that advantage. So we would teach people: card counting isn’t gambling in a sense; it’s more investing.

00:15:13 Speaker 2: Yeah, when anybody sits down at a blackjack table, generally they’re going to win forty-eight out of the next hundred hands, and the casino is going to win fifty-two out of the next hundred hands. And we are able to turn that around, so we’re winning fifty-two hands out of one hundred, but you can understand that at any point we could lose that the forty-eight hands in a row, and that would still be well within the realm of possibility.

00:15:39 Speaker 3: And the reason we went with a team is, there are several things that make a team more valuable. One is you get to pool your resources, and so we had anywhere between five hundred thousand and a million dollars to play off of, which meant we could bet a lot of money. We could keep our risk really low. But the other advantages are, this game, you wouldn’t believe the amount of variance there is. Like the swings, it is not uncommon for a card carry to go on a two-, three-, or four-hundred-hour losing streak.

00:16:07 Speaker 4: Well, four hundred might be uncommon, but it happens.

00:16:18 Speaker 2: And I know that from reading the history of some of these teams that had gotten together, like the MIT team and other teams, personality conflicts come into play, especially when you’re dealing with large amounts of cash and the rule of honesty. You know, because you can go into a casino and win one thousand dollars and go back to your team and say, “Oh, I lost one thousand dollars,” and pocket two thousand dollars. Then there’s no way for a team to keep up on that kind of thing. The only way you would know is, over the long half, they’re a winning or losing player. So there’s a lot of honesty that comes into play, and the camaraderie, and it just, it really sort of glued us together.

00:16:59 Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to David Drury and Colin Jones tell the story of their card-counting empire. They’re a small empire, but a growing one, and, well, a recreational one that turned into a livelihood. When we come back, more of Our American Stories and the story of the card-counting Christians here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Colin Jones and David Drury, aka the card-counting Christians. Let’s pick up where we last left off. Here’s David and Colin.