Walk into most any casino, most anywhere in the world, from Atlantic City to Monte Carlo to Macau, and you will see wall-to-wall gamblers. They play the same games, adhere to the same rules, and generally have a blast.
A few might win, most will lose, and the casino will profit by an expected percentage. For the most part, these people are recreational players, out for a good time and a good gamble. Casino bosses love them.
Sprinkled among those who enjoy the action are the one-in-thousands smattering who are there for something beyond fun. They are advantage players, people who have learned or devised strategies to legally beat the casino games that fleece nearly everyone else, Whether they are hitting blackjack, Three Card Poker, or baccarat, advantage players have their ways of winning. Casino bosses view them with disdain.
Over the course of writing my new book Advantage Players, I spent time with some of the world’s most feared and talented professional gamblers.
Here is an introduction to three of the best APs (as advantage players like to be called) and what these master strategists do to beat casinos at their own games.
If this article interests you, keep reading. Alternatively, explore other topics like roulette odds and how to play roulette.
The GOAT of Advantage Playing Gamblers
Among the people who attack casino games, James Grosjean resides at the top of the pyramid. He’s mastered enough ways of beating games that he published a hard-to-find book called Beyond Counting, which is an AP bible and comes loaded with densely explained strategies for beating baccarat, blackjack and a passel of what he likes to call “carnival games.”
After I asked Grosjean what compelled him to publish a book that exposed his game-beating secrets, he all but sneered as he replied, “Do you think it is my only book?”
The point being that he has many books’ worth of techniques for taking down casino gambits. The public, of course, will never see them.
Grosjean got seriously into counting cards while attending grad school in Chicago. During a night at one of the nearby casino riverboats, he came across what is known as a hole-card game. The dealer was unintentionally divvying out cards in such a way that she routinely revealed her hole card. Grosjean was pleasantly shocked, stoked by the profitability of knowing what the dealer holds, and winning more money than he could have imagined.
Soon after, he forsook a job on Wall Street, where he could have put his Harvard degree in applied math to good use. Instead, he focused on crushing casino games. Grosjean’s genius comes in his ability to design original techniques for doing this. He employs computer programming with a knack for strategizing on how to not get caught plying his trade. It’s completely legal, of course, but casinos hate to lose and aim to show APs the door.
The astute gambler spends his life traveling the world, looking like the consummate low roller (maintaining a discreet profile is key for Grosjean), and signaling big players (that is, other people who do the high betting) on moves designed to bring down the house. Having served as a BP (yes, people in this world like initials) for Grosjean, I can tell you that his plays run seamlessly and profitably.
As to where the peripatetic James Grosjean may be at any given time, it’s tough to get a read on that. I once called him while he was on the road, between casinos. After I asked where he was, he mysteriously replied, “I’m a moving target.”
The Man Who Lived Large & Took Down The Big Games
While serious advantage players usually take the James Grosjean approach, when it comes to succeeding in the game-beating craft – that is, they eschew players cards, stay in roadside motels, prefer for casino bosses to view them as nobodies who bet table minimum – Don Johnson is something else altogether.
In 2011, he made headlines for dinging the bottom line of the Tropicana in Las Vegas. He won $6 million from the casino by counting cards and taking advantage of an offer and using blackjack strategy that included soft rules, generous rebates, five-figures worth of chips just for walking in the door. Whether he liked it or not, Johnson was outed as an AP.
But being a dyed-in-the-wool advantage player – who continues to earn most of his money via a horse racing team that leverages an odds-crunching computer model to earn many millions at the track – he did not let a barrier get in the way of winning.
Johnson not only scaled that barrier; he exploited and exploded it. Coming off as a guy who won by getting lucky, Johnson developed a reputation for being the hardest partying gambler in the world.
After blowing through bottle service at casino nightclubs (naturally, it was all comped by the casinos), he showed up at his private table with a splashy entourage from the club in tow. Johnson used some of them as card eaters – consuming cards while making small bets during low counts – and all of them as major distractions.
Being signaled by skilled advantage players who appeared to be random members of the party crew, Johnson won untold sums before moving on to the next good time and leaving casino bosses to figure out what just happened to their high denomination chips.
Baccarat Machine
Ordinarily, mini baccarat is viewed as an unexploitable game. After all, players don’t even get to touch the cards. But pulling off a play that a high-flying AP described to me as “magnificent and ingenious,” Cheung Yin “Kelly” Sun, aka the “Baccarat Machine,” managed to find an advantage that led to tens of millions of dollars in profits.
Following an altercation with a Las Vegas casino, to which she had lost large sums of money at games that included baccarat, Sun came up with a brilliant move. It began with her learning to read tiny inconsistencies in the top and bottom patterns of playing cards. It is a move known as edge sorting.
Sun’s brilliant strategy came when she convinced dealers to turn the cards for her so that key cards in the game (7s,8s and 9s) could be identified by Sun before they were even dealt from out of the shoe.
Collaborating on the play with poker great Phil Ivey, she won enough to be recognized as one of the greatest advantage playing gamblers out there. They earned profits in high-limit enclaves around the world.
However, like many successful, big-money yielding plays, this one did not last forever. Eventually, casinos became wise to the ways of Sun. But she still finished on top. After her brilliant move wound down, Kelly Sun sold her life rights to Hollywood.
A movie based on her casino run, set to star Awkwafina as Sun, is in the works. That may prove to be her most enduring advantage play of all.
