News

David Merry stepped off the plane and felt like he was stepping onto the surface of the sun.

Lugging a single suitcase that contained all the clothes he would need for his new life in Las Vegas, the 20-year-old worked up an instant sweat in the desert heat. All around him, gamblers - the roguish breed who prowled Las Vegas in the early 1980s - must have glanced at the pale kid from Toronto and seen dollar signs.

Mr. Merry didn't consider himself a gambler. He had come to work. His office just happened to be a blackjack table.

"I didn't know anyone," he recalls nearly 30 years after hopping the flight.

"I was just out of high school and wasn't even old enough to get into the casinos. But I grew a mustache and no one ever bothered me."

Like the main characters in 21, a film opening today based on the true story of math whizzes from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who raked in $10-million (U.S.) at blackjack tables throughout North America, Mr. Merry employed math-based strategy and hours of practice to beat the house.

The parallels between his experience and the Hollywood narrative don't end with arithmetic. Within weeks of moving to Las Vegas, Mr. Merry met a group of card sharps who practised a legal but controversial method of team blackjack, much like the more successful MIT Blackjack Team that would form a few years later.

When one member of the five-man team left, they tapped Mr. Merry, who'd worked as a card magician at Canada's Wonderland before heading south, to be a member of a high-stakes team that was taking Las Vegas for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The year was 1981, a boom time for blackjack.

Twenty years earlier, MIT professor Edward Thorp had convinced the gambling community that winning at blackjack was as easy as counting a few cards, and the marginal card game took off. But Dr. Thorp's bestselling strategy book, Beat the Dealer, was too dense for most players to finish. As a result, casinos made a mint off thousands of new blackjack enthusiasts who relied on half-baked formulas.

But the odds swung in the players' favour in the mid-seventies when Igor Kusyszyn, a York University psychology professor working under the pen name Lancelot Humble, started selling copies of a slim volume touting a computer-based strategy called Hi-Opt 1 for $200 (Canadian) each. In it, he outlined a relatively simple yet effective card-counting strategy - where players track dealt cards to calculate the value of cards still remaining.

About the same time, a professional player named Ken Uston formed the first successful blackjack team, winning millions all over the world.

With the Uston model in his mind and a Hi-Opt 1 chart etched into his lighter, Mr. Merry set out to make his fortune with a Las Vegas team that included a teacher and a 6-foot-5 cowboy.

"You'd think we would have stuck out like a turd in a punchbowl," says Mr. Merry, who today makes his living as a comedian. "But we had a good system that didn't arouse much suspicion."

One team member would act as a banker while two would play and two would be spotters, monitoring blackjack tables until they saw that the dealer's shoe, or deck, was about to deal high cards. The spotter would then stand to the left of the table, a signal that it was about to pay off.

"Unlike craps or roulette," Mr. Merry says, "where every roll of dice has nothing to do with what came before, a blackjack deck becomes slanted one way or the other. If you know there are big cards coming and the dealer is showing some middle cards, that is when you want to put your money down. You're monitoring the ratio of small cards to big cards."

While card counting isn't illegal in most states and provinces, casinos will bounce skilled counters - or advantage players, as they're commonly known - out for trespassing.

"That's where the game becomes an art," says Mike Aponte, who led the MIT Blackjack Team profiled in the book Bringing Down the House, the basis for 21. Before students could play on the MIT team, Mr. Aponte and others would grill them in test sessions, creating distractions and diversions that the trainee had to take in stride if they were to make any money. "If you look like you're counting cards," says Mr. Aponte, who now runs the educational Blackjack Institute and is still considered one of the best players in the world, "then you are going to get made."

Getting "made" starts with a tap on the shoulder from a pit boss. Some will ask kindly that the counter leave; others use more physical means. Mr. Aponte has been barred from virtually every casino in the United States. "I've tried various disguises," he says. "But most recognize me as soon as I get in the front door."

Mr. Merry was a master at avoiding detection. He kept count with his feet, freeing up his head for idle chatter. Practising six hours a day, he could add cards faster than any dealer and knew every possible combination of 21 by heart. He also knew enough not to make sudden huge wagers that would signal to a dealer that he knew what cards were coming. The team split its profits every 40 days.

By 1982, team play was carving into Las Vegas profits as early iterations of the MIT team started fanning out across the United States. Mr. Merry could tell that pit bosses would soon catch on. He just needed a good reason to walk away. Sitting in his apartment one day, he heard a gun blast next door. His neighbour had shot his wife. A year into his experience as a member of one of the pioneering blackjack teams, Mr. Merry decided to return to Toronto. The kid was up $6,500 (U.S.). The rest of his team disbanded within a month.

Since those earliest teams, casinos have shored up holes in their blackjack games. Many now use six or more decks to complicate counting.

"I advise students that the opportunity is no longer there in blackjack," says Jason Gao, a Carleton University math professor who teaches a popular course called the Mathematical Analyses of Games of Chance. "It's almost impossible to beat the casino these days."

Could 21 then be interpreted as a sentimental portrait of an exciting but extinct world? Mr. Merry doesn't necessarily think so. On a recent cruise, he witnessed a display of blackjack wizardry that puzzled even him.

"This guy had some new kind of method," he says. "He was there for 15 minutes and made $9,000. I went up to the pit boss and asked 'What just happened there?' We both had no idea what we saw that night."

How to beat the house

You don't have to be Rain Man to beat the house at blackjack. Over the years, card sharps have devised dozens of systems to milk casinos of millions. Some rely on math, some rely on teams, others simply rely on sloppy dealers. They all fall into three basic categories:

Card counting: Using a technique first popularized in 1962, card counters track the ratio of high cards to low cards. In one form, cards 2 to 6 are assigned a value of +1, 10s and face cards count as -1 and 7 to 9 are given no value. If a deck yields 16 low cards, the count would be +16 - time for the player wager big on high cards.

Shuffle tracking: A keen-eyed pro can track clumps or runs of cards through shuffles and predict when they'll be dealt. One form, called ace sequencing, involves watching an ace move through the deck. Being able to predict when an ace will land gives the player a huge advantage.

Hole carding: The most dubious form of beating the house, hole carding involves peeking at the dealer's cards and is easiest when there is a sloppy dealer. (They are surprisingly common.) Some sharps actually place a teammate strategically behind the dealer, then the two communicate like pitcher and catcher.

Patrick White