Crazy Stories From A Professional Card Counter - Steven Bridges

How do you describe what you do for work when you meet somebody?

Yeah, this is something which frequently (laughs) comes up, and it's really tricky to explain because I think the, the most common thing I say is, "Have you seen the movie 21?" Because if they've seen that movie, they already have a basic understanding of at least the theatrical version of what card counting is. And if they haven't seen that movie, I just ask them if they know what card counting is, and a lot of the time, people don't know, and then I'm in a really (laughs) tricky spot because when you try and describe professional gambling, you do sound a bit insane.

(laughs) Right. Yeah, I keep track of the cards at casinos and have a complex system of friends who have money bankrolled by anonymous, huge donors-

Yeah.

... and we try and, we try and rip casinos off.

Yeah, essentially. Yeah, it does sound like a criminal entrepi-

(laughs)

... enterprise when you put it like that. But yeah, actually, you put it really well, actually. Just keeping track of the cards is quite an accurate way of doing it, because most people think that you're memorizing all of the cards you see, which is way harder than what we're actually doing, even though what we're doing is relatively cool. So keeping track is like a nice way of, of summarizing it, because we're actually assigning each card in the deck with a different point, point value, separate to its point in the game of blackjack, and then we're keeping track of that running total, which we're using to get an advantage over the house, basically.

Dude, I love your YouTube. I think your vlogs that you're doing with hidden cameras as you go in and take these casinos for everything they're worth until you get found out and rumbled and then escorted off the premises, I, I absolutely love them. I think they're fantastic, so everybody should go and check out, check out your vlogs once they finish, uh, listening to this.

Okay.

But talk to me about how somebody begins their apprenticeship into the world of professional casino ripper-offerer.

Yeah, yeah, (laughs) yeah, so card counting falls under the bracket of advantage play, and an advantage player is es- essentially anybody that can beat a casino game, in this case, legally. So there's a difference between card counting and advantage play and cheating. So cheating would be, you know, you're sneaking an extra card in, or you're maybe using, uh, technology where it's illegal to use software to run a computer algorithm to crunch numbers to beat the game. So with advantage play, you're just playing the game within the rules with the same information that everybody else has in the casino, in theory. You're just using it in a different way. So if you wanna get into card counting, it's, it's firstly something that I really (laughs) don't recommend for most people because the actual lifestyle of it can be quite brutal, and the way that I have it is I play for a bit, and then I have like quite a large break. And I think the time I was most stressed in my life when I was playing six hours a day, essentially like a nine... well, not quite a nine-to-five, but I was treating it like a nine-to-five job, playing six days a week. And even though you're playing with an advantage, you can just lose so much money, and even though you know you're gonna win in the long term, the psychological (laughs) impact of losing the money is really, really strong. Essentially, if someone wants to learn how to, to card count, y- there's books, there's resources, there's online websites now, and you just go through it like you would any other skill. I, I don't think it's... particularly way harder than the average skill. It's just that with card counting, you have very, very little margin for error. So you have to master each element of card counting and get it perfect.