January 16, 2026 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, one of the most successful blackjack teams in America was built around an unlikely bond: church friendships and trust. Colin Jones, founder of BlackjackApprenticeship.com, and David Drury, dubbed “the most notorious card counter in America,” tell how they learned to count cards, pooled bankrolls, and turned blackjack into a math-driven edge rather than pure gambling. They describe the discipline, long swings, disguises, and casino backoffs that come with winning, plus why honesty mattered when players were carrying huge amounts of cash. It is a strange double life, from church on Sunday to high-limit tables the next day.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
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
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorite
One of the most successful blackjack teams in America is
(00:31):
made up surprisingly of Christians. Here to tell the story
or two of the winningest players, Colin Jones, founder of
Blackjack Apprenticeship dot com, and the player dubbed the most
notorious card counter in America, David Drewry. Here's David.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
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,
(01:10):
what are we bringing to this fire? Because I want
to throw something in it, you know, And they're like, well,
where 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
(01:32):
and said, you know, talked about gambling, and I'm throwing
this card in the fire.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I'm calling and I've been a card counter for almost
twenty years. And I'm here with my good friend David.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I'm David, and I've been a card counter for I
guess about fifteen years.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
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, callin.
You're a math guy. Check out this book I'm reading.
And it was called Professional Blackjack, written by Stanford Wong,
(02:12):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
Guy, I could probably do this.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
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
(02:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Got stupid lucky.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
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
(03:21):
the table? But he kind of got lonely doing the
card cutting 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.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
W you're eleven thousand hours?
Speaker 3 (03:35):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:18):
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 a 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,
(04:40):
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,
(05:02):
this guy's a card counter.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
Two.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
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
(05:27):
into real state. 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
(05:49):
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,
(06:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And you're listening to Colin Jones, founder of Blackjack Apprenticeship
dot Com, and the player dubbed the most notorious card
counter in America, David Drury, and it seems counterintuitive to
think there'd be card counting Christians, but that's what makes
the story so alluring. And I'm a Christian and I
love well. It's one of the first things I tried
(06:46):
to teach my daughter how to throw a spiral, how
to card count, and the laws and theories of compounded interest.
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
(07:33):
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Speaker 4 (07:49):
Go to our.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
American Stories dot com now and go to the donate
button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
(08:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
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 twenty one, 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
(08:44):
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 too, so I paid him with one hundred
dollars bill, and of course one hundred dollars bill is
a conversation starter. Why are you paying me with one
hundred dollars bill? Like, oh, well, I'm glad you asked.
(09:06):
I've been counting cards and beating black check. 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.
(09:26):
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
(09:48):
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
(10:10):
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 you can talk and there's no cameras in
(10:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
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, 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
(11:13):
of normal.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
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
(11:37):
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 gased?
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
(11:57):
all the questions you would ask if you were in
the DEA and worried. Somebody was like, 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,
(12:18):
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
(12:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
So I said, they're a rich. 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.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
But what we would do is there's two ways to
form a blackjack team.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
You find people that are interested already in you know,
beating casinos, and you try to build trust with them
and team up.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
But we thought the other way is you.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
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
(13:49):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
How it is created.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
There's a guy doctor ed Thorpe, 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?
(14:21):
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.
(14:42):
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 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.
(15:05):
But the point one percent we actually do have that advantage.
So we would teach people cardcounting isn't gambling in a sense,
it's more investing.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
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
(15:35):
hands in a row and that would still be well
within the realm of possibility.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
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 playoff of which meant we could bettle 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
(16:02):
not uncommon for a card carry to go on a
two or three or four hundred hour losing streak.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Well, four hundred might be uncommon, but it happens.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
And when you're on this losing streak, if you've got
other teammates that are also playing, it's like you're getting to.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
The law of large numbers faster.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
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
(16:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And you've been listening thing 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 the story of Colin Jones and David Drury,
(17:19):
the card counting Christians. Here on our American stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and with the story
of Colin Jones, founder of Blackjack Apprenticeship dot Com and
the player dubbed the most notorious card counter in America,
David Drury. Here's Colin and David to continue with their stories.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Some people think because we were a group of people
that had met at church, that that made us all
more ethical or something. I don't know if that's if
that's necessarily true. I do know two people have admitted
over the years that they pocketed money and later felt
guilty and shared, and they were both Christians.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
And I know some.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
People that are incredibly like I would trust them with
my life savings that are not church people. But I
think the fact that it was more that we had
a similar circle relationally, there was a huge cost if
it came out that someone was stealing from the team,
they wouldn't just.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
Lose their job.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
It was like it would hurt the relationship. So it's
almost like if a group of friends and family teamed up,
you know, there's more at stake than just getting fired.
I think that was a big part of why it worked.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Absolutely. My particular situation was that I was married with
young kids, so I was motivated to get these hours
and do this stuff. I think a lot of the
other people on the team were younger, tended to be
you know, maybe single, and so they would fly out
to a resort and were like, wow, look at this
(19:37):
great pool. Wow, this bed is really comfortable. So I
was just working, working, working, So I ended up doing
a lot more playing than resort living.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
I'll step back a little bit.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
As a twenty three year old, you know, just graduated
from a Christian college, Bible camp school, guy, it was
not the easiest thing to tell my family that I
was gambling for a living. I remember when I told
my parents. They were missionaries at the time in Guatemala,
and my mom basically went on a hunger strike. She
you know, she was like terrified that I was just
(20:16):
gonna end up a.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Degenerate gambler, homeless.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
And my dad was afraid I was going to be
buried in a shallow grave in the desert by the mob.
My father in law, when I told him, he said
he wouldn't speak to me again until I spoke to
three older, wise, godly men. And so, you know, the
consensus I got was like, look, Colin, what you're doing.
Whether I would want my son to do it or not,
there's nothing inherently wrong. You know, it's not illegal to
(20:41):
count cards. You're using your brain. It's not illegal to
use your brain in casinos. But you know, there's there's
this whole view of casinos or even like gambling, you know,
like the love of money is the root of all
kinds of people. And this thought like, well, if you're
getting paid well as a lawyer, that's okay, or a doctor,
but if you're beating casinos, there's something really nefarious about it.
(21:02):
But it was really this odd double life doing this
because the days I wasn't playing blackjack, I was volunteering
at church, or playing on a worship band, or you know,
leading a community group at our church, or just being
a normal you know, twenty something thirty something. You know,
eventually dad, but then we're flying out and I'm getting
(21:26):
picked up by a limousine and driven to the strip
and they're offering me free drinks and all this stuff.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
And I don't drink what I played black chack or whatever.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
But you know, you're this this high roller in these casinos,
and then you just fly home and you've got your
normal responsibilities and I'm mowing the lawn and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah, that dichotomy. I remember one Sunday I needed to
get a transfer of like thirty thousand dollars from someone
who was on the team. Went to the same church,
and I was gonna fly out after church, and so
so I went through the commune union line and then
I sat down back of my pew and then I
saw this guy in the communion line and he had
(22:07):
a little paper bag with him. Went through the communion
line and then slapped this paper bag in my stomach
of like thirty grand.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
It wasn't uncommon for me to go straight from worship
band practice to a casino. I remember one time I
played bass in a worship band and a guy's like, oh, Colin,
what what is that in your pocket? It was like, oh,
it's ten straps, And I'm pulling out ten thousand dollars,
you know, out of each pocket, and another ten thousand
out of each coat pocket because I needed forty thousand
for the limits I was going to be playing. And
(22:35):
they started calling me ten Straps. That was like my nickname,
and to me it was I mean, I knew it
was odd, but it wasn't that odd. And one of
the weird things is people assume, you know, because the
amount of money we're playing with, that it's this shortcut
that's really easy. But it's not easy. One way a
friend put it is it's a hard way to make
(22:57):
easy money.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
I mean, it takes two.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Hundred hour to learn minimum two hundred hours, so it's
not something you learn in a weekend. But even that's
not the hard part. The hard part is the emotional
part that getting thrown out of casinos or the winning
and losing streaks, the Okay, it's two am. I just
got thrown out. I don't know where I'm staying tonight.
I got to figure it out. Is the casino scanning
my license plate, so they're going to know who I
(23:21):
am before even show it up in the casino.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, getting run out of a casino, or where they
walk you to your hotel room to watch you pack
your bag so that they can kick you out of
the hotel room that they had camped you, you know,
an hour and a half earlier.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
There's two kinds of people generally, when you tell someone
about this. There's the people that are too excited. They're like, no,
that's amazing, Like so you just go in there and
then you walk out with the casino's money, and you know,
it's like, well, it's don't be that excited, Like you're
gonna go lose a lot of money in the casino
if you're that optimistic. And then there are of the
people that I think are more background, like the church people,
(24:02):
that they're not even curious about it. They've just instantly
put it in this category of that sounds bad, that
sounds wrong. I don't want to ask any follow up questions.
I just don't like that you're doing it. And that's
really like frustrating and disappointing. I was this personality before
card counting, you know. I was the guy kind of
like not doing anything wrong, but also not willing to
(24:22):
do the things I was told to do just just
because I was supposed to do them. Like I went
to a Christian school. We had to wear a tie
for chapel day every week, and so I had a
wooden tie, I had like a sequin tie. I had
a like infants clip on tie, Like Okay, I'll follow
your rule, but I'm not gonna play this part that
your time. I'm gonna at least question it or be
curious about it. And I wish there was a little
(24:44):
bit a little bit more of that from our culture.
There's these people in the Bible called the Pharisees, and
they are these people that are obsessed with their cultural
political identity. They're super defensive. They're terrified that the way
that they think they're supposed to be doing things is
going to be changed or question they're going to lose
their identity. And it feels like a lot of the
(25:07):
background we come from, it's that same thing of like
just play the part, act a certain way, and they're
not even willing to question if that certain way of
doing things is right.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
It's just like protect that identity.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, I was in Palm Springs at a casino and
the circumstances were such that I had been at that
casino before and I had lost a lot of money.
They probably just thought I was a bad player, and
they were happy to bring me back and camp me
a top floor suite and all this stuff. So I
stroll out onto the casino floor the next morning, and
(25:42):
for whatever reason, I sat down and the first shoe
that I played was just one of these glorious things
that happened so rarely, but I just won all the
money in one shoe, like thirty thousand dollars, And immediately
it all clicked for them and they realized, like, oh,
this guy's actually a card counter and he's now taking
all our money. So they backed me off and I
(26:04):
was waiting to cash out at the cage, and this
is particular to tribal casinos. They were like, this is illegal.
You are card cheating. And I was almost entertained by this.
So that's why I said, oh, well, where should I
wait to meet the police and fill out the report.
And of course they hadn't called the police. They were
(26:27):
just trying to run me out of the casino.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
And you've been listening to Colin Jones and David Jury,
and they were telling the story of how they became
card counters. What that life was like, as one of
the men said, it was an odd kind of double life.
By day I was playing blackjack, but soon thereafter would
be leading a small group or a worship service and
then leaving those things to hit the tables again. And
(26:53):
oddly enough, there are many Christians who do this and
that is not card count but play poker or play
the horses and try to find an advantage in the
numbers and try to find out a winning strategy. When
we come back the story of the card counting Christians,
and we're talking about David Jury and Colin Jones here
(27:14):
on our American story, and we continue with our American
(27:39):
stories and the stories of Colin Jones and David Drury,
the card counting Christians. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
That's one of the big misconceptions, a couple of them.
One of them is that it's illegal, and like I said,
it's perfectly legal to use your brain. But the other
is that casinos are are gonna hit your hand with
a ballpin hammer in the back of the casino, or
you know you're going to end up hospitalized or even worse,
(28:09):
no one.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Will ever see you again.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
And there's movies where that happens, and there are some
pretty crazy stories from the sixties and early seventies. But
now these most of these casinos are owned by mega corporations.
And I know people that if a casino just detained
them against their will, they end up with a six
figure settlement. But that doesn't mean I haven't been in
the back room of a casino. One time, we were
(28:32):
playing in Arizona, and this was on the earlier team,
and it was four of us and we were just
crushing the casinos. And after by the end of our trip,
we had one hundred and forty thousand dollars in chips
for the casino. We all end up in the back
of a casino explaining to them. They're saying, we know
you cheated us. Explain to us how you cheated us.
And we're like, we didn't cheat. We were counting cards.
So they're like, well, how does that work? And so
(28:54):
we're explaining card gang to them, and they said, well,
how do you know it to bet? It is one
of my favorite lines ever was Sammy on the team.
He says, I'll tell you for a fee. He was
trying to get the casino to pay up a consultation fee. Eventually,
they cash out our hundred and forty thousand dollars and
walk us to our cars and send us something to
(29:14):
the mail saying we'll be arrested if we ever come back.
But the whole thing of getting roughed up by casinos
hasn't happened. I had one interaction with police, but it
was kind of a mistake. Similar long story short, I'm cuffed.
He takes everything out of my pockets. He looks me up.
He's like, do you have a criminal record. I'm like, well,
I have a speeding ticket from three years ago, and
(29:34):
by the end of it, he's walking me out to
my car and he's like, hey, do you teach other
people how to count cards? I said, well, a matter
of fact, we have a website we just started, and
told him about Black Check Apprenticeship, the website that we'd
just begun. And of course, the casinos all their advertising
is like, hey, come win, we want winners. Look how
many winners we have, And then they find someone that
(29:56):
actually has the ability to win, and they're like, hey,
you're not well, Like, what do you think you're doing
trying to win?
Speaker 2 (30:01):
You know, they have the winner's wall at a casino
with the like all the old ladies with holding up
their oversized check for fifteen thousand, Like I would love
to sneak into a casino and put my picture up
on the wall of the time I, you know, took
them for whatever I took them for. So the fact
that it is beatable is what makes the casino so
much money. So we're just proving the fact that it
(30:24):
is beatable. So they shouldn't hate us too much. We're
we're part of the reason why they're making so much money.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
But when we started the church team, it was working.
We're winning, like crazy. We actually ended up winning, you know,
for the duration of this team, we won three point
two million dollars, but the way that we played it
wasn't really sustainable. So people started kind of burning out.
Either they having a hard time getting hours in at
a casino, or the travel is getting to them, or
(30:53):
like me, want to start a family. And it's one
thing when I'm like out odd hours and gone five
days at a time when I had no kids. It's
different when I've got one kid and two and three
and four kids. I did a road trip with my
wife and four kids. We drove down to San Diego
and back, and I played forty hours of high limit blackjack.
But it would be something like we show up at
the casino, my wife sits in the minivan with an
(31:16):
iPad watching Monsters Inc. Or something on the iPad while
I'm playing trying to get a comped room. I finally
get the comped room, I get the family checked in,
get them tucked in bed, and then I co played
blackjack till I can't keep my eyes open, sleep for
like three hours, and then my kids are jumping on
my bed and it's like, this isn't really the life
I want. For the next thirty years.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah, that's this is the reason I never brought my
family on trips. Yeah, but there were some diminishing returns.
So I remember at the beginning of my career, I
could go out to Vegas and play, you know, ten
to twelve hours a day and come home with thousands
that I'd earned or whatever. And then as time went by,
I was noticing like, oh, I can only get in,
(32:00):
you know, six or seven hours a day. They're kicking
me out. They know my face, and in the end,
I'm having to either bet lower to stay under the radar,
or I'm winning less because I'm doing all this ducking
and dodging. I was at one casino in Las Vegas
and got kicked out really quick, and I was standing
in line to cash out the few chips that I had,
(32:20):
and I hear someone yelling my name, David, David, And
I've trained myself to not turn because sometimes they'll try
and test, like is this that guy, Well, let's call
his name and see if he responds. And if I
don't respond, then maybe they think don't think it's me.
So this guy's yelling my name, and finally everybody in
the line is looking at behind me, and so I
(32:41):
had to turn around and there's this guy with one
arm long, zzy top beard and he comes up to
me enthusiastically and he's like, I'm buying you a drink.
And I thought, okay, so I've got a crazy fan
in this casino. Must have been watching the way I
was playing or something. Well, it turns out he was
the head of all surveillance for a string of casinos,
(33:02):
and sure enough, he sat me down, brought me drink,
and he just wanted to know everything. He was a
super fan, but he was on the other side, and
he ended up giving me, you know, tips to how
to evade his own security because he was such a superfan.
But from that, he told me that I had become
known as the most notorious card counter in America. So
(33:22):
that was my claim to fame from that short time period.
But it also meant that I had sort of worked
myself out and everybody knew my face.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
Well that's how that's how you became a master of disguises.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Right, Yeah, So then I tried to do the disguise route.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Nobody had disguises as good as David's. I don't think
anyone tried his hard and no one pulled it off
as well.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Tell me a couple of your looks.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Well, yeah, I had a knack for looking a lot
younger than I was or a lot older than I was.
And so in a casino, there are shift changes. So
basically everybody who's working there works there for eight hours
and then a new team comes in, and so we
would come back on shift changes because you know, you're
not being seen by all the same people that were
(34:06):
there eight hours ago. So I'd come in on my
first shift at the casino with whatever I could grow
beard wise before the trip, you know, wearing a worn
leather and a Harley Davidson T shirt, and so I was,
you know, sort of like a Harley guy. And then
I'd go and I'd shave it all off and put
on my fubou jersey and be sort of like this
(34:28):
young punk who's throwing money around the casino. And then
I'd go and change again, and I'd put on my
promise keeper hat and my fleece vest and my flooded
khakis and come across like I was sort of a
middle aged accountant.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
David was able to pull that off, but over the
last couple of years of the team, a few things happened.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
One is, you know, we had half a.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Billion dollars of mine and my friend's money invested in
this thing, and people like David are continuing to grind
out hours here and there at casinos, and my stomach's hurting.
I'm not sleeping well. I had I never lost a
night sleep losing my own money. I had nights where
my net worth would drop, maybe as much as six figures,
and it would suck. But it was like, well, whatever,
(35:12):
easy come, easy go, and we trust the math. But
it's different when you have to tell you know, your
father in law or a friend like hey, how's the
team doing, and say not good. You know, it always
turns around. But when it's down, all the investors are
freaking out. So I'm not sleeping well, and my mind
is I'm thinking about these internet businesses more than I'm
thinking about our black jack team.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
I thought, this is scary.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
We got half a million dollars of money that I'm
responsible for and my head's not in the game. This
is a recipe for something really to go bad. And
so I, you know, called all the investors and I said, hey,
I think I want to pull the plug on this
and they were all okay with it, and so I
had to call all the players and say, hey, I'm done.
The church team officially ended there.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
But then, I mean part of that also was that
someone made a movie about us, which we signed up for,
but you know, it put more of our identity out there,
so the casinos can totally yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
It was all these things kind of converged to where
it was like, let's pull the plug. When all that
started happening, and you know, I focused all my time
on Blackshack apprenticeship, David decided to work on his memoirs,
writing the entire story of the weird intersection of spiritual,
personal and card counting.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
You know, I got a degree in creative writing, so
before I was ever a card gowner or a math,
creative writing was my favorite thing to do. And so
now it's time I'm gonna look at these stories and
write them down and see if we can put together
a book.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
So at the end of the day, I feel like
my story was able to come full circle where I
started as a teacher, and I get to teach right.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
And a great job as always by Greg and a
special thanks to Colin Jones, founder of Blackjack Apprenticeship dot com,
and also the man dubbed the most notorious card counter
in America, David Drury, And it is so true he
did get it, or both men got at the misconceptions
about card county a. It's perfectly legal. By the way,
(37:15):
if you're ever sitting at a blackjack table and you
notice somebody on a twenty five dollars table suddenly moving
their bet from twenty five to two hundred and fifty,
they're probably card counters. And then if they bring that
bet back down to twenty five and then they randomly
go back and forth between those two bets, well they're
card counters and they've found that there's an advantage in
the count in the deck. It is the rare game
(37:36):
but for poker, where it's up to the player and
the player skills to win, and also the horse racing
and paramutual windows where skilled horse players can also win.
And by the way, we're not endorsing gambling here either way,
but Americans love to gamble, and by the way, Christians
love to gamble. It's when you have a problem that
you shouldn't do it. The story of the card counting Christians,
(37:58):
and we're talking about Dave, a Jury and Colin Jones
here on our American stories.
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
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorite
One of the most successful blackjack teams in America is
(00:31):
made up surprisingly of Christians. Here to tell the story
or two of the winningest players, Colin Jones, founder of
Blackjack Apprenticeship dot com, and the player dubbed the most
notorious card counter in America, David Drewry. Here's David.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
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,
(01:10):
what are we bringing to this fire? Because I want
to throw something in it, you know, And they're like, well,
where 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
(01:32):
and said, you know, talked about gambling, and I'm throwing
this card in the fire.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I'm calling and I've been a card counter for almost
twenty years. And I'm here with my good friend David.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
I'm David, and I've been a card counter for I
guess about fifteen years.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
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, callin.
You're a math guy. Check out this book I'm reading.
And it was called Professional Blackjack, written by Stanford Wong,
(02:12):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
Guy, I could probably do this.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
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
(02:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (03:00):
Got stupid lucky.
Speaker 3 (03:01):
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
(03:21):
the table? But he kind of got lonely doing the
card cutting 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.
Speaker 2 (03:33):
W you're eleven thousand hours?
Speaker 3 (03:35):
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
(03:56):
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
(04:18):
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 a 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,
(04:40):
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,
(05:02):
this guy's a card counter.
Speaker 4 (05:03):
Two.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
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
(05:27):
into real state. 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
(05:49):
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,
(06:10):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And you're listening to Colin Jones, founder of Blackjack Apprenticeship
dot Com, and the player dubbed the most notorious card
counter in America, David Drury, and it seems counterintuitive to
think there'd be card counting Christians, but that's what makes
the story so alluring. And I'm a Christian and I
love well. It's one of the first things I tried
(06:46):
to teach my daughter how to throw a spiral, how
to card count, and the laws and theories of compounded interest.
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
(07:33):
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,
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Speaker 4 (07:49):
Go to our.
Speaker 1 (07:50):
American Stories dot com now and go to the donate
button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot Com. And we continue with
(08:10):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
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 twenty one, 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
(08:44):
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 too, so I paid him with one hundred
dollars bill, and of course one hundred dollars bill is
a conversation starter. Why are you paying me with one
hundred dollars bill? Like, oh, well, I'm glad you asked.
(09:06):
I've been counting cards and beating black check. 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.
(09:26):
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
(09:48):
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
(10:10):
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 you can talk and there's no cameras in
(10:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
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, 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
(11:13):
of normal.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
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
(11:37):
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 gased?
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
(11:57):
all the questions you would ask if you were in
the DEA and worried. Somebody was like, 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,
(12:18):
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
(12:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
So I said, they're a rich. 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.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
But what we would do is there's two ways to
form a blackjack team.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
You find people that are interested already in you know,
beating casinos, and you try to build trust with them
and team up.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
But we thought the other way is you.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
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
(13:49):
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.
Speaker 4 (13:59):
How it is created.
Speaker 3 (14:00):
There's a guy doctor ed Thorpe, 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?
(14:21):
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.
(14:42):
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 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.
(15:05):
But the point one percent we actually do have that advantage.
So we would teach people cardcounting isn't gambling in a sense,
it's more investing.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
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
(15:35):
hands in a row and that would still be well
within the realm of possibility.
Speaker 3 (15:39):
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 playoff of which meant we could bettle 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
(16:02):
not uncommon for a card carry to go on a
two or three or four hundred hour losing streak.
Speaker 4 (16:07):
Well, four hundred might be uncommon, but it happens.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
And when you're on this losing streak, if you've got
other teammates that are also playing, it's like you're getting to.
Speaker 4 (16:16):
The law of large numbers faster.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
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
(16:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (16:59):
And you've been listening thing 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 the story of Colin Jones and David Drury,
(17:19):
the card counting Christians. Here on our American stories, and
(18:08):
we continue with our American stories and with the story
of Colin Jones, founder of Blackjack Apprenticeship dot Com and
the player dubbed the most notorious card counter in America,
David Drury. Here's Colin and David to continue with their stories.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
Some people think because we were a group of people
that had met at church, that that made us all
more ethical or something. I don't know if that's if
that's necessarily true. I do know two people have admitted
over the years that they pocketed money and later felt
guilty and shared, and they were both Christians.
Speaker 4 (18:44):
And I know some.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
People that are incredibly like I would trust them with
my life savings that are not church people. But I
think the fact that it was more that we had
a similar circle relationally, there was a huge cost if
it came out that someone was stealing from the team,
they wouldn't just.
Speaker 4 (19:01):
Lose their job.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
It was like it would hurt the relationship. So it's
almost like if a group of friends and family teamed up,
you know, there's more at stake than just getting fired.
I think that was a big part of why it worked.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Absolutely. My particular situation was that I was married with
young kids, so I was motivated to get these hours
and do this stuff. I think a lot of the
other people on the team were younger, tended to be
you know, maybe single, and so they would fly out
to a resort and were like, wow, look at this
(19:37):
great pool. Wow, this bed is really comfortable. So I
was just working, working, working, So I ended up doing
a lot more playing than resort living.
Speaker 4 (19:52):
I'll step back a little bit.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
As a twenty three year old, you know, just graduated
from a Christian college, Bible camp school, guy, it was
not the easiest thing to tell my family that I
was gambling for a living. I remember when I told
my parents. They were missionaries at the time in Guatemala,
and my mom basically went on a hunger strike. She
you know, she was like terrified that I was just
(20:16):
gonna end up a.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Degenerate gambler, homeless.
Speaker 3 (20:20):
And my dad was afraid I was going to be
buried in a shallow grave in the desert by the mob.
My father in law, when I told him, he said
he wouldn't speak to me again until I spoke to
three older, wise, godly men. And so, you know, the
consensus I got was like, look, Colin, what you're doing.
Whether I would want my son to do it or not,
there's nothing inherently wrong. You know, it's not illegal to
(20:41):
count cards. You're using your brain. It's not illegal to
use your brain in casinos. But you know, there's there's
this whole view of casinos or even like gambling, you know,
like the love of money is the root of all
kinds of people. And this thought like, well, if you're
getting paid well as a lawyer, that's okay, or a doctor,
but if you're beating casinos, there's something really nefarious about it.
(21:02):
But it was really this odd double life doing this
because the days I wasn't playing blackjack, I was volunteering
at church, or playing on a worship band, or you know,
leading a community group at our church, or just being
a normal you know, twenty something thirty something. You know,
eventually dad, but then we're flying out and I'm getting
(21:26):
picked up by a limousine and driven to the strip
and they're offering me free drinks and all this stuff.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
And I don't drink what I played black chack or whatever.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
But you know, you're this this high roller in these casinos,
and then you just fly home and you've got your
normal responsibilities and I'm mowing the lawn and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yeah, that dichotomy. I remember one Sunday I needed to
get a transfer of like thirty thousand dollars from someone
who was on the team. Went to the same church,
and I was gonna fly out after church, and so
so I went through the commune union line and then
I sat down back of my pew and then I
saw this guy in the communion line and he had
(22:07):
a little paper bag with him. Went through the communion
line and then slapped this paper bag in my stomach
of like thirty grand.
Speaker 3 (22:14):
It wasn't uncommon for me to go straight from worship
band practice to a casino. I remember one time I
played bass in a worship band and a guy's like, oh, Colin,
what what is that in your pocket? It was like, oh,
it's ten straps, And I'm pulling out ten thousand dollars,
you know, out of each pocket, and another ten thousand
out of each coat pocket because I needed forty thousand
for the limits I was going to be playing. And
(22:35):
they started calling me ten Straps. That was like my nickname,
and to me it was I mean, I knew it
was odd, but it wasn't that odd. And one of
the weird things is people assume, you know, because the
amount of money we're playing with, that it's this shortcut
that's really easy. But it's not easy. One way a
friend put it is it's a hard way to make
(22:57):
easy money.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
I mean, it takes two.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
Hundred hour to learn minimum two hundred hours, so it's
not something you learn in a weekend. But even that's
not the hard part. The hard part is the emotional
part that getting thrown out of casinos or the winning
and losing streaks, the Okay, it's two am. I just
got thrown out. I don't know where I'm staying tonight.
I got to figure it out. Is the casino scanning
my license plate, so they're going to know who I
(23:21):
am before even show it up in the casino.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Yeah, getting run out of a casino, or where they
walk you to your hotel room to watch you pack
your bag so that they can kick you out of
the hotel room that they had camped you, you know,
an hour and a half earlier.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
There's two kinds of people generally, when you tell someone
about this. There's the people that are too excited. They're like, no,
that's amazing, Like so you just go in there and
then you walk out with the casino's money, and you know,
it's like, well, it's don't be that excited, Like you're
gonna go lose a lot of money in the casino
if you're that optimistic. And then there are of the
people that I think are more background, like the church people,
(24:02):
that they're not even curious about it. They've just instantly
put it in this category of that sounds bad, that
sounds wrong. I don't want to ask any follow up questions.
I just don't like that you're doing it. And that's
really like frustrating and disappointing. I was this personality before
card counting, you know. I was the guy kind of
like not doing anything wrong, but also not willing to
(24:22):
do the things I was told to do just just
because I was supposed to do them. Like I went
to a Christian school. We had to wear a tie
for chapel day every week, and so I had a
wooden tie, I had like a sequin tie. I had
a like infants clip on tie, Like Okay, I'll follow
your rule, but I'm not gonna play this part that
your time. I'm gonna at least question it or be
curious about it. And I wish there was a little
(24:44):
bit a little bit more of that from our culture.
There's these people in the Bible called the Pharisees, and
they are these people that are obsessed with their cultural
political identity. They're super defensive. They're terrified that the way
that they think they're supposed to be doing things is
going to be changed or question they're going to lose
their identity. And it feels like a lot of the
(25:07):
background we come from, it's that same thing of like
just play the part, act a certain way, and they're
not even willing to question if that certain way of
doing things is right.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
It's just like protect that identity.
Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, I was in Palm Springs at a casino and
the circumstances were such that I had been at that
casino before and I had lost a lot of money.
They probably just thought I was a bad player, and
they were happy to bring me back and camp me
a top floor suite and all this stuff. So I
stroll out onto the casino floor the next morning, and
(25:42):
for whatever reason, I sat down and the first shoe
that I played was just one of these glorious things
that happened so rarely, but I just won all the
money in one shoe, like thirty thousand dollars, And immediately
it all clicked for them and they realized, like, oh,
this guy's actually a card counter and he's now taking
all our money. So they backed me off and I
(26:04):
was waiting to cash out at the cage, and this
is particular to tribal casinos. They were like, this is illegal.
You are card cheating. And I was almost entertained by this.
So that's why I said, oh, well, where should I
wait to meet the police and fill out the report.
And of course they hadn't called the police. They were
(26:27):
just trying to run me out of the casino.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
And you've been listening to Colin Jones and David Jury,
and they were telling the story of how they became
card counters. What that life was like, as one of
the men said, it was an odd kind of double life.
By day I was playing blackjack, but soon thereafter would
be leading a small group or a worship service and
then leaving those things to hit the tables again. And
(26:53):
oddly enough, there are many Christians who do this and
that is not card count but play poker or play
the horses and try to find an advantage in the
numbers and try to find out a winning strategy. When
we come back the story of the card counting Christians,
and we're talking about David Jury and Colin Jones here
(27:14):
on our American story, and we continue with our American
(27:39):
stories and the stories of Colin Jones and David Drury,
the card counting Christians. Let's pick up where we last
left off.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
That's one of the big misconceptions, a couple of them.
One of them is that it's illegal, and like I said,
it's perfectly legal to use your brain. But the other
is that casinos are are gonna hit your hand with
a ballpin hammer in the back of the casino, or
you know you're going to end up hospitalized or even worse,
(28:09):
no one.
Speaker 4 (28:09):
Will ever see you again.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
And there's movies where that happens, and there are some
pretty crazy stories from the sixties and early seventies. But
now these most of these casinos are owned by mega corporations.
And I know people that if a casino just detained
them against their will, they end up with a six
figure settlement. But that doesn't mean I haven't been in
the back room of a casino. One time, we were
(28:32):
playing in Arizona, and this was on the earlier team,
and it was four of us and we were just
crushing the casinos. And after by the end of our trip,
we had one hundred and forty thousand dollars in chips
for the casino. We all end up in the back
of a casino explaining to them. They're saying, we know
you cheated us. Explain to us how you cheated us.
And we're like, we didn't cheat. We were counting cards.
So they're like, well, how does that work? And so
(28:54):
we're explaining card gang to them, and they said, well,
how do you know it to bet? It is one
of my favorite lines ever was Sammy on the team.
He says, I'll tell you for a fee. He was
trying to get the casino to pay up a consultation fee. Eventually,
they cash out our hundred and forty thousand dollars and
walk us to our cars and send us something to
(29:14):
the mail saying we'll be arrested if we ever come back.
But the whole thing of getting roughed up by casinos
hasn't happened. I had one interaction with police, but it
was kind of a mistake. Similar long story short, I'm cuffed.
He takes everything out of my pockets. He looks me up.
He's like, do you have a criminal record. I'm like, well,
I have a speeding ticket from three years ago, and
(29:34):
by the end of it, he's walking me out to
my car and he's like, hey, do you teach other
people how to count cards? I said, well, a matter
of fact, we have a website we just started, and
told him about Black Check Apprenticeship, the website that we'd
just begun. And of course, the casinos all their advertising
is like, hey, come win, we want winners. Look how
many winners we have, And then they find someone that
(29:56):
actually has the ability to win, and they're like, hey,
you're not well, Like, what do you think you're doing
trying to win?
Speaker 2 (30:01):
You know, they have the winner's wall at a casino
with the like all the old ladies with holding up
their oversized check for fifteen thousand, Like I would love
to sneak into a casino and put my picture up
on the wall of the time I, you know, took
them for whatever I took them for. So the fact
that it is beatable is what makes the casino so
much money. So we're just proving the fact that it
(30:24):
is beatable. So they shouldn't hate us too much. We're
we're part of the reason why they're making so much money.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
But when we started the church team, it was working.
We're winning, like crazy. We actually ended up winning, you know,
for the duration of this team, we won three point
two million dollars, but the way that we played it
wasn't really sustainable. So people started kind of burning out.
Either they having a hard time getting hours in at
a casino, or the travel is getting to them, or
(30:53):
like me, want to start a family. And it's one
thing when I'm like out odd hours and gone five
days at a time when I had no kids. It's
different when I've got one kid and two and three
and four kids. I did a road trip with my
wife and four kids. We drove down to San Diego
and back, and I played forty hours of high limit blackjack.
But it would be something like we show up at
the casino, my wife sits in the minivan with an
(31:16):
iPad watching Monsters Inc. Or something on the iPad while
I'm playing trying to get a comped room. I finally
get the comped room, I get the family checked in,
get them tucked in bed, and then I co played
blackjack till I can't keep my eyes open, sleep for
like three hours, and then my kids are jumping on
my bed and it's like, this isn't really the life
I want. For the next thirty years.
Speaker 2 (31:38):
Yeah, that's this is the reason I never brought my
family on trips. Yeah, but there were some diminishing returns.
So I remember at the beginning of my career, I
could go out to Vegas and play, you know, ten
to twelve hours a day and come home with thousands
that I'd earned or whatever. And then as time went by,
I was noticing like, oh, I can only get in,
(32:00):
you know, six or seven hours a day. They're kicking
me out. They know my face, and in the end,
I'm having to either bet lower to stay under the radar,
or I'm winning less because I'm doing all this ducking
and dodging. I was at one casino in Las Vegas
and got kicked out really quick, and I was standing
in line to cash out the few chips that I had,
(32:20):
and I hear someone yelling my name, David, David, And
I've trained myself to not turn because sometimes they'll try
and test, like is this that guy, Well, let's call
his name and see if he responds. And if I
don't respond, then maybe they think don't think it's me.
So this guy's yelling my name, and finally everybody in
the line is looking at behind me, and so I
(32:41):
had to turn around and there's this guy with one
arm long, zzy top beard and he comes up to
me enthusiastically and he's like, I'm buying you a drink.
And I thought, okay, so I've got a crazy fan
in this casino. Must have been watching the way I
was playing or something. Well, it turns out he was
the head of all surveillance for a string of casinos,
(33:02):
and sure enough, he sat me down, brought me drink,
and he just wanted to know everything. He was a
super fan, but he was on the other side, and
he ended up giving me, you know, tips to how
to evade his own security because he was such a superfan.
But from that, he told me that I had become
known as the most notorious card counter in America. So
(33:22):
that was my claim to fame from that short time period.
But it also meant that I had sort of worked
myself out and everybody knew my face.
Speaker 4 (33:30):
Well that's how that's how you became a master of disguises.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Right, Yeah, So then I tried to do the disguise route.
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Nobody had disguises as good as David's. I don't think
anyone tried his hard and no one pulled it off
as well.
Speaker 4 (33:43):
Tell me a couple of your looks.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Well, yeah, I had a knack for looking a lot
younger than I was or a lot older than I was.
And so in a casino, there are shift changes. So
basically everybody who's working there works there for eight hours
and then a new team comes in, and so we
would come back on shift changes because you know, you're
not being seen by all the same people that were
(34:06):
there eight hours ago. So I'd come in on my
first shift at the casino with whatever I could grow
beard wise before the trip, you know, wearing a worn
leather and a Harley Davidson T shirt, and so I was,
you know, sort of like a Harley guy. And then
I'd go and I'd shave it all off and put
on my fubou jersey and be sort of like this
(34:28):
young punk who's throwing money around the casino. And then
I'd go and change again, and I'd put on my
promise keeper hat and my fleece vest and my flooded
khakis and come across like I was sort of a
middle aged accountant.
Speaker 3 (34:44):
David was able to pull that off, but over the
last couple of years of the team, a few things happened.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
One is, you know, we had half a.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Billion dollars of mine and my friend's money invested in
this thing, and people like David are continuing to grind
out hours here and there at casinos, and my stomach's hurting.
I'm not sleeping well. I had I never lost a
night sleep losing my own money. I had nights where
my net worth would drop, maybe as much as six figures,
and it would suck. But it was like, well, whatever,
(35:12):
easy come, easy go, and we trust the math. But
it's different when you have to tell you know, your
father in law or a friend like hey, how's the
team doing, and say not good. You know, it always
turns around. But when it's down, all the investors are
freaking out. So I'm not sleeping well, and my mind
is I'm thinking about these internet businesses more than I'm
thinking about our black jack team.
Speaker 4 (35:32):
I thought, this is scary.
Speaker 3 (35:33):
We got half a million dollars of money that I'm
responsible for and my head's not in the game. This
is a recipe for something really to go bad. And
so I, you know, called all the investors and I said, hey,
I think I want to pull the plug on this
and they were all okay with it, and so I
had to call all the players and say, hey, I'm done.
The church team officially ended there.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
But then, I mean part of that also was that
someone made a movie about us, which we signed up for,
but you know, it put more of our identity out there,
so the casinos can totally yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
It was all these things kind of converged to where
it was like, let's pull the plug. When all that
started happening, and you know, I focused all my time
on Blackshack apprenticeship, David decided to work on his memoirs,
writing the entire story of the weird intersection of spiritual,
personal and card counting.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
You know, I got a degree in creative writing, so
before I was ever a card gowner or a math,
creative writing was my favorite thing to do. And so
now it's time I'm gonna look at these stories and
write them down and see if we can put together
a book.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
So at the end of the day, I feel like
my story was able to come full circle where I
started as a teacher, and I get to teach right.
Speaker 1 (36:53):
And a great job as always by Greg and a
special thanks to Colin Jones, founder of Blackjack Apprenticeship dot com,
and also the man dubbed the most notorious card counter
in America, David Drury, And it is so true he
did get it, or both men got at the misconceptions
about card county a. It's perfectly legal. By the way,
(37:15):
if you're ever sitting at a blackjack table and you
notice somebody on a twenty five dollars table suddenly moving
their bet from twenty five to two hundred and fifty,
they're probably card counters. And then if they bring that
bet back down to twenty five and then they randomly
go back and forth between those two bets, well they're
card counters and they've found that there's an advantage in
the count in the deck. It is the rare game
(37:36):
but for poker, where it's up to the player and
the player skills to win, and also the horse racing
and paramutual windows where skilled horse players can also win.
And by the way, we're not endorsing gambling here either way,
but Americans love to gamble, and by the way, Christians
love to gamble. It's when you have a problem that
you shouldn't do it. The story of the card counting Christians,
(37:58):
and we're talking about Dave, a Jury and Colin Jones
here on our American stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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