Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians

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Visit TabooNation.com and sign up today. 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 Drury. Here's David. 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 it was one of these events where you're supposed to bring in 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. I'm Colin and I've been a card counter for almost 20 years and I'm here with my good friend David. I'm David and I've been a card counter for about, I guess, about 15 years. 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, well, I'm a math guy.

I could probably do this 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 $2,000 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 7-Eleven with about 10 table games and I trained way too little. I didn't know enough about card counting, but I went for it and I just got stupid lucky. Like the first two days I doubled my $2,000 to $4,000 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 I'm 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 $7,000 with my $4,000 and then all of a sudden we had $11,000 to be playing blackjack.

We were 11,000 dares. 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 exchange 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 $11,000 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 $11,000 into about a 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 $500 chips and he's just betting like crazy at the casino and then we start watching how he's betting.

I was like, hey, this guy's a card counter too. So the four of us we start playing and over the course of two years we won about $500,000 playing but as many small businesses, especially with 20 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 $400,000 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 in 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 and you're listening to Colin Jones, founder of BlackjackApprenticeship.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 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 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 $17.76 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 Black Friday is coming.

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Here's David and Colin. 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 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 hundred dollar bill. And of course, a hundred dollar bill is a conversation starter. Why are you paying me with a hundred dollar bill? Like, oh, 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. And 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, OK, you made it, you did it. And we were we were debriefing after the test in a casino. And we were in the bathroom, of course, because that's one of the places you can you can talk.

And there are 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, OK, you're all set. Start playing, you know. And so that was of course, it freaked me out because I never dealt with money like that. It's definitely an occupational hazard that you don't have in most 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 a hundred thousand dollars and it's like kind of normal.

I was in Philadelphia and I'm just, you know, just in jeans and a hoodie. And I had I had one 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 as this whole team of guys in suits and they start asking me questions. Where were you? What did you drive? Where did you get gas?

Do you have receipts? Where did 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 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.

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. Here's the money. 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. So I said their original team had four people and one of the guys will 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. But what we would do is there's two ways to form a blackjack team. You find people that are interested already in, you know, beating casinos and you try to build trust with them and team up. But we thought the other way is you 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 was created. There's a guy Dr. Ed Thorp and in the early 60s, 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 99.9% of them don't actually have the skills to do it.

But the 0.1% we actually do have that advantage. So we would teach people card counting isn't gambling in a sense. It's more investing. Yeah when anybody sits down at a blackjack table, generally they're going to win 48 out of the next hundred hands and the casino is going to win 52 out of the next hundred hands and we are able to turn that around. So we're winning 52 hands out of a hundred but you can understand that at any point we could lose the 48 hands in a row and that would still be well within the realm of possibility. 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 500,000 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 counter to go on a 2 or 3 or 400 hour losing streak.

Well 400 might be uncommon but it happens. 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 the law of large numbers faster. 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 a thousand dollars and go back to your team and say oh I lost a 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 haul if 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. 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 the story of Colin Jones and David Drury The Card Counting Christians here on Our American Stories. Black Friday is coming. And for the adults in your life who love the coolest toys well there's something for them this year too. Bartesian is the premier craft cocktail maker that automatically makes more than 60 seasonal and classic cocktails each in under 30 seconds at the push of a button. And right now Bartesian is having a huge site-wide sale. You can get $100 off any cocktail maker or cocktail maker bundle when you spend $400 or more. So if the cocktail lover in your life has been good this year or the right kind of bad get them Bartesian at the push of a button make bar quality cosmopolitans, martinis, manhattans and more. All in just 30 seconds. All for a hundred off.

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That's b-a-r-t-e-s-i-a-n dot com slash cocktail. How do we go about supporting government leaders when we may not want to vote for or support any of them? Do babies who die in the womb go to heaven? Are there only certain reasons in the Bible that are valid for divorce? Is IVF an option for Christian couples? I'm Pastor Mike Novotny and these are just some of the topics I tackle in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny. I answer questions for people just like you on essential topics that are not often discussed in church.

To listen, just search, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike. Welcome to the world of Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, the perfect gift for the music lover in your life. They're designed to give you complete openness to your surroundings while providing rich, private sound. Want to hear what that sounds like? Picture this, a walk on a sunny winter day. You can hear the satisfying crunch of snow beneath your feet and your favorite holiday song playing.

That's the magic we're talking about. Hear life and music at the same time. Bose Ultra Open Earbuds.

Own the gift game and check out Bose.com slash iHeart to shop now. So many of us believe in something far beyond ourselves and now there's a special place for us. Fox Faith on Fox Nation. With exclusive original premium content that lifts us up, sustains our spirit and fills us with hope. Exciting series like God Family Football. Martin Scorsese presents The Saints, streaming November 17th at Jesus' Crown of Thorns, streaming December 8th. Fox Faith is only available by subscribing to Fox Nation.

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Subject to availability, see HomeDepot.com slash delivery for details. And we continue with our American stories and with the story of Colin Jones, founder of BlackjackApprenticeship.com, and the player dubbed the most notorious card counter in America, David Drury. Here's Colin and David to continue with their stories. 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 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.

And I know some 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 lose their job. It was like it would hurt the relationship. So it's almost like if a group of friends and family teamed up, there's more at stake than just getting fired. I think that was a big part of why it worked. Yeah, absolutely.

My particular situation was that I was married with young kids. So I was motivated to get these hours in and do this stuff. I think a lot of the other people on the team were younger, tended to be maybe single, and so they would fly out to a resort and were like, wow, look at this 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.

I'll step back a little bit. As a 23-year-old, just graduated from a Christian college, Bible camp, Christian 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 was terrified that I was just going to end up a degenerate gambler, homeless, 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. So 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. It's not illegal to count cards. You're using your brain. It's not illegal to use your brain in casinos. But there's this whole view of casinos or even gambling, like the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, 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. 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 leading a community group at our church or just being a normal 20-something, 30-something, eventually dad. But then we're flying out, and I'm getting picked up by a limousine and driven to the strip, and they're offering me free drinks and all this stuff, and I don't drink when I play blackjack or whatever. But you're 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.

Yeah, that dichotomy. I remember one Sunday, I needed to get a transfer of like $30,000 from someone who was on the team. Went to the same church, and I was going to fly out after church. So I went through the communion line, and then I sat down back at my pew, and then I saw this guy in the communion line, and he had a little paper bag with him, went through the communion line, and then slapped this paper bag in my stomach of like 30 grand. 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 is that in your pocket? I was like, oh, it's tent straps. I'm pulling out $10,000 out of each pocket and another $10,000 out of each coat pocket because I needed $40,000 for the limits I was going to be playing, and they started calling me tent strap.

That was like my nickname, and to me, I knew it was odd, but it wasn't that odd. One of the weird things is people assume, because of 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 easy money.

I mean, it takes 200 hours to learn, minimum 200 hours, so it's not something you're going to learn in a weekend, but even that's not the hard part. The hard part is the emotional part, the getting thrown out of casinos or the winning and losing streaks, the, okay, it's 2 a.m., I just got thrown out. I don't know where I'm staying tonight.

I've got to figure it out. Is the casino scanning my license plate so they're going to know who I am before I even show up in the casino? Yeah, getting run out of a casino or where they walk you to your hotel room to watch you pack your bags so that they can kick you out of the hotel room that they had comped you an hour and a half earlier. 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. So you just go in there, and then you walk out with the casino's money, and it's like, well, don't be that excited.

You're going to go lose a lot of money in the casino if you're that optimistic. And then there are the people that I think are more our background, like the church people, 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 frustrating and disappointing. I was this personality before card counting. I was the guy kind of not doing anything wrong but also not willing to do the things I was told to do just because I was supposed to do them. 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 a sequin tie.

I had an infant's clip-on tie. Like, okay, I'll follow your rule, but I'm not going to play this part. I'm going to at least question it or be curious about it.

And I wish there was a little bit more of that from our culture. There's these people in the Bible called the Pharisees, and they're 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 questioned. They're going to lose their identity. And it feels like a lot of the background we come from, it's that same thing of 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.

It's just protect that identity. 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 comp me a top floor suite and all this stuff. So I stroll out onto the casino floor the next morning, and 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 $30,000. And immediately it all clicked for them, and they realized, oh, this guy's actually a card counter, and now he's taking all our money. So they backed me off, and I 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 just trying to run me out of the casino. And you've been listening to Colin Jones and David Drury, and they're 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 I would be leading a small group or a worship service and then leaving those things to hit the tables again. And 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 Drury and Colin Jones, here on Our American Story. Black Friday is coming, and for the adults in your life who love the coolest toys, well, there's something for them this year too. Bartesian is the premier craft cocktail maker that automatically makes more than 60 seasonal and classic cocktails, in under 30 seconds, at the push of a button. And right now, Bartesian is having a huge site-wide sale. You can get $100 off any cocktail maker or cocktail maker bundle when you spend $400 or more. So, if the cocktail lover in your life has been good this year, or the right kind of bad, get them Bartesian. At the push of a button, make bar-quality cosmopolitans, martinis, manhattans, and more. All in just 30 seconds. All for $100 off.

Amazing toys aren't just for kids. Get $100 off a cocktail maker when you spend $400 through Cyber Monday. Visit bartesian.com slash cocktail.

That's b-a-r-t-e-s-i-a-n dot com slash cocktail. Is mental illness sin? Why does God want us to wait until marriage to have sex? LGBTQ people say that they were born that way.

So why would God say homosexuality is wrong and then make someone a homosexual? I'm Pastor Mike Novotny and these are just some of the topics I tackle in my new podcast, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike Novotny. I answer questions from people just like you on essential topics that are not often discussed in church. To listen, just search, Taboo Questions with Pastor Mike. Welcome to the world of Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, the perfect gift for the music lover in your life.

They're designed to give you complete openness to your surroundings while providing rich, private sound. Want to hear what that sounds like? Picture this. A walk on a sunny winter day. You can hear the satisfying crunch of snow beneath your feet and your favorite holiday song playing. That's the magic we're talking about. Hear life and music at the same time.

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Fox Faith is only available by subscribing to Fox Nation, so go to foxnation.com and sign up today. The holidays are officially here at the Home Depot, which means it's time to deck the halls and your home with festive cheer. If you're on the hunt for the perfect tree, we've got you covered. Explore our huge assortment of trees in all shapes, sizes and styles. Designed to fit any holiday vibe and every holiday budget, like the Jackson Noble Fir. It's not only super easy to assemble, but it also comes pre-lit with 1,200 color-changing bulbs and multiple lighting functions. Or maybe the flocked Starry Light Frasier Fir is more your style. With over 1,900 pre-lit memory wire branches that hold their shape, this tree's ready to shine right out of the box. Whether it's trees, wreaths or twinkling lights, we've got everything you need to make your home holiday ready. So shop now at homedepot.com and enjoy free delivery on most holiday decor. Subject to availability, see homedepot.com slash delivery for details. And we continue with our American stories and the stories of Colin Jones and David Drury, the card counting Christians.

Let's pick up where we last left off. 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 going to hit your hand with a ball-pin hammer in the back of the casino or you're going to end up hospitalized.

Or even worse, no one will ever see you again. And there are movies where that happens. And there are some pretty crazy stories from the 60s and early 70s, but now 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 playing in Arizona, and this was on the earlier team and it was four of us, and we were just crushing the casinos.

And by the end of our trip, we had $140,000 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 we're explaining card counting to them. And they said, well, how do you know what to bet?

And this is one of my favorite lines ever was Sammy on the team, he says, I'll tell you for a fee. And he was trying to get the casino to pay him a consultation fee. Eventually they cash out our $140,000 and walk us to our cars and send us something in 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 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? And I said, well, matter of fact, we have a website we just started and tell them about Blackjack Apprenticeship, the website that we've just begun. And of course at casinos, all their advertising is like, hey, come win. We want winners. Look how many winners we have. And then they find someone that actually has the ability to win and they're like, hey, you're not well. What do you think you're doing trying to win? You know they have the winners wall at a casino with all the old ladies holding up their oversized check for $15,000.

I would love to sneak into a casino and put my picture up on the wall of the time I 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 is beatable. So they shouldn't hate us too much. We're part of the reason why they're making so much money. But when we started the church team, it was working. We were winning like crazy. We actually ended up winning for the duration of this team.

We won $3.2 million. But the way that we played, it wasn't really sustainable. So people started kind of burning out. Either they're having a hard time getting hours in a casino or the travel is getting to them or 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 40 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 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 go play Blackjack until 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 30 years. Yeah, that's 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 10 to 12 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 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. And I hear someone yelling my name, you know, David, David. And I've trained myself to not turn because sometimes they'll try and test, like, is this that guy? Let's call his name and see if he responds.

And if I don't respond then maybe they don't think it's me. So this guy's yelling my name, and finally everybody in the line is looking behind me. So I had to turn around and there's this guy with one arm, long ZZ 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.

It 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. And sure enough he sat me down, bought me a drink, and he just wanted to know everything.

He was a superfan, but he was on the other side. And he ended up giving me 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 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. Well, that's how you became a master of disguises.

Right. Yeah, so then I tried to do the disguise route. Nobody had disguises as good as David's.

I don't think anyone tried as hard and no one pulled it off as well. Tell them a couple of your looks. 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 whole 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 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, wearing a worn leather and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. So I was sort of like a Harley guy. And then I'd go and I'd shave it all off and put on my FUBU jersey and be sort of like this 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.

David was able to pull that off, but over the last couple of years of the team a few things happened. One is we had half a billion dollars of mine and my friends' 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 never lost a night's 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, easy come, easy go. And we trust the math. But it's different when you have to tell your father-in-law or a friend like, hey, how's the team doing? And say, well, not good. 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 Blackjack team. I thought, this is scary. 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 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. But then, I mean, part of that also was that someone made a movie about us, which we signed on for, but it put more of our identity out there so the casinos could know. Totally.

Yeah, yeah. All these things kind of converge to where it was like, let's pull the plug. When all that started happening and I focused all my time on Blackjack Apprenticeship, David decided to work on his memoirs, writing the entire story of the weird intersection of spiritual, personal, and card counting. You know, I got a degree in creative writing, so before I was ever a card counter or a math, creative writing was my favorite thing to do. And so now it's time. I'm going to look at these stories and write them down and see if we can put together a book.

So at the end of the day, I feel like my story was able to come full circle where I start as a teacher and I get to teach. That's right. And a great job as always by Greg, and a special thanks to Colin Jones, founder of BlackjackApprenticeship.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 counting.

A, it's perfectly legal. By the way, if you're ever sitting at a Blackjack table and you notice somebody on a $25 table suddenly moving their bet from $25 to $250, there are probably card counters. And then if they bring that bet back down to $25 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, but for poker, where it's up to the player and the player's skills to win, and also the horse racing and parimutuel 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, and we're talking about David Drury and Colin Jones here on Our American Story.

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Go to PowerStep.com slash OAS, and use code OAS for 15% off your first order. Welcome to the world of Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, the perfect gift for the music lover in your life. Picture this, a walk on a sunny winter day. You can hear the satisfying crunch of snow beneath your feet and your favorite holiday song playing.

That's the magic we're talking about. Life and music at the same time. Bose Ultra Open Earbuds. Own the gift game, and go to Bose.com slash iHeart to shop the best deals now.