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 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 tricky spot because when you try and describe professional gambling you do sound a bit saying 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 and we try and we try and rip casinos off yeah essentially yeah it does sound like a criminal enterpr 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 cars 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 points 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 but talk to me about how somebody begins their apprenticeship into the world of professional Casino Ripper offerer yeah yeah yeah so card counting falls under the bracket of Advantage play and an advantage player 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 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 want to get into card counting it's it's firstly something that I really 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 that quite a large break and I think the time I was most stressed in my life when I was playing 6 hours a day essentially like a n well not quite a 9-to-5 but I was treating it like a 9o5 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 going to win in the long term the psychological impact of losing the money is really really strong but essentially if someone wants to learn how to to card count there's books there's resources there's online websites now and you just go through it like you would any other skill 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 otherwise you'll just lose loads of money because your Edge is reliant on your mind being completely correct and when the margin Edge that you have is only slightly above 50% any mess up by the brain drags that back for sure yeah which is why also we need like tons of money to even do it because we're playing with such a small Edge you can still have a losing streak that could go on you know one of my teammates had a 300H hour losing streak and it's just insane so if you don't have loads of money to bet the amounts that we're betting which is you know in the thousands per hand well the low thousands like you know a k k and a half if you don't have 100 200 300 $400,000 then you could just burn through all that on a bad run so there's a lot of stuff that needs to be taken into consideration that's one of the biggest mistakes that a lot of new card counters will make they will Master how to count cards but then when it comes to the actual bankroll management and the risk management of it they won't pay any attention to that they'll blow through their bank roll in a very short amount of time and then they'll be that'll be it they'll be bankrupt from card counting so you gotta be super careful who is it not specifically but where is it that you're finding half a mill to fund a trip to go and travel around the US yeah so the way that I actually started was incredibly reckless in that you know I collaborated with a another YouTuber who he's a card counter and he teaches people to to card count called Colin Jones and I got in touch with him mainly because I thought this would make a really firstly it was just like a bucket list item I thought I really want to do this and I also had a a small YouTube channel doing magic tricks and I thought this would make a really cool Vlog Series so I got in touch with him and I thought maybe he'll bankroll me you know 10K or something or maybe I I didn't really have any money at the time so I wasn't sure how I was going to sort the money thing out at the time but then one day I was moving house and I had a friend that was just helping me move house and I was telling him what I was getting up to and I was going to go to America for a month and count cards and then he just shot me a message later on going hey can I invest in you and I was like sure and I think he offered to put something like 10 to 15K in I can't quite remember the exact number off the top of my head but then as we kept chatting he just up that and eventually just said that he'd put 200k in in pounds so more than that in USD and that's the money that I played with now at the time I misunderstood how the risk of card counting like the actual numbers on cang how long it takes you to get to guaranteed profit so I didn't realize how risky this was and it's extra bad because he was actually he actually gave me his mortgage so I was playing with money that he couldn't afford to lose which is insane by all accounts and goes against what every professional Gambler would say all professional gamblers would be like you've got to have your bank roll that's separate if you lose that you've got to be okay but we were essentially all in and it would have probably ruined his life if I'd lost all of of that money and also the crushing guilt I would have felt so I don't really know why you get 200 Grand to count cards have a friend that has a mortgage and then he gives you the money but a reckless a reckless friend yeah but nowadays as you network with card counters card counters tend to have money and because it's like a profitable thing to do and then you meet other people that want to invest in card counters and you build out your network that way and now it's relatively straightforward if we're going to do a trip we can just send a couple of texts and WhatsApp and then raise three 400k whatever it is that we need and they take a cut of some kind yeah essentially so the way that we do it different teams do it differently and the percentage splits are are different but the way that we do it is we have it's it's kind of like you're forming a company just for one project then you dissolve it at the end so you've got the winnings at the end and you'll divide those 50% will go to the investors and 50% will go to the players and normally with the players you you'll pay them out based off playing time not based off how much they've actually won because the only thing that's within the card CS control is showing up and Counting CS whether or not they actually win provided their game is good which we test ahead of time is not up to them so we could have a card counter that's put in loads of hours and got the most hours but they actually made a loss whereas we can have someone that played the least hours and they made a profit but we don't judge it based off results we judge it based off time that goes in so we split it proportionately like that sometimes you'll have a manager and they'll take a manager cut because it's quite a complicated logistical thing to manage so you know manager might take 10% or something but then the rest of it usually split 50-50 with the investors and the players talk me through a typical team people that have seen 21 you've got a variety of people but like probably not a previous bank robber I can't remember the movie but what what's what's the typical Avengers assembled that you take on these trips well the the actual the makeup of the team as in the people is a complete mixed bag of people there's maybe some card counter stereotypes like being white and being in your 20s is a little bit more common but in general our team team is quite is quite a a wide range of people we've got like a core team and an extended team and it's not always the exact same people playing on a trip but the ways that the actual team forms for a trip is that you have two main approaches either what we would call solo team play which is where all the C counters are playing individually at individual casinos in different parts of America or where wherever else it's going to be but they're all sharing a bank role and that can be really useful because it's one of those things where the What's The Phrase the sum is the is greater than the sum of the parts that kind of thing because if you had one card counter with $10,000 and another another card counter with $11,000 and they were both playing they can play with a certain level of bets and they can make a certain hourly rate on average but if you put those together and combine the resources it's not the equivalent of that 20K divided by two it's actually like one card counter with twice the money playing twice as fast so it's really advantageous for card counters to team up and work together because it just it gets you to the the mathematical long run quicker you can have you can place bigger bets you can win more money in theory and that's kind of how that works so that's solo team play the other type of team play which is like the movie 21 and the version that I find the most fun there are very few card counting teams that do this is what we' call Big player spotter team play so one of the things which makes card counters get caught is that we have to bet we we're set we're set there playing bjack like everyone else and there's only certain moments where we have the adant AG over the house that's when the count is high so sometimes if I'm playing in Vegas or wherever I might be betting $25 a hand and then the count goes up and I'll bet a grand a hand and that's a huge jump and any surveillance person that's paying attention to that will know that most people if they're playing Blackjack and have that kind of money aren't betting $25 sometimes and a grand other times they they might vary their bets a bit a bit but never that much so that can be a huge red flag and we can get caught that way so with team play what we do is we'll have different different spotters so card counters that are sat at different tables just betting the table minimum they'll be keeping the count and when the count gets high they'll do it a secret signal to get the attention of the big player who is also a car counter and his or her job is just to bet really big so let's say I signal them in I won't be as you know it'll be less it'll be more subtle than just waving but if I'm just come over here they'll come over I will either tell them what the count is via a code word or I will just use more signals to tell them what to do how much to bet and how to play hands and they'll just come over to the table Midway through the shoe and start betting big but they'll leave when the count drops because I'll tell them to go so it's really cool because everybody's consistent all of the spotters are playing the minimum or close to the minimum and the big player is only ever betting a grand of hand roughly whatever it's going to be which makes it more difficult for surveillance to catch the actual big player in the team saying that nowadays because the movies up 21 and that system becoming more popular pop who knows if it really gets you more time but it's definitely more fun yes so what you're trying to avoid is any one player changing the amount that they bet so the variant that they bet shouldn't be much more okay so going back to the solo team play or solo play generally how do you how do you increase your bet when the deck is hot when you're on your own we just do it you just have to do it and Sort of hope it's it's kind of a weird thing because surveillance aren't only looking for card counters they've got a heck of a lot to do they're checking to make sure that dealers don't make payout mistakes which at you know high limit room could cost a casino a lot of money they're checking to make sure that people aren't trying to steal that that drunk guy that's walking around isn't about to punch someone or grab some chips from the tray surveillance have got a really hard job and they're actually some of the most under appre no definitely the most underappreciated Casino staff that exists like they get a really raw deal in general as a whole of the chat so the main thing is that surveillance have got other things to do so they're not always watching me play Blackjack so they'd have to see me watch me see me change my bet and only then if I do that a few times maybe they'd start drawing a pattern maybe they'd decide they have to run my game down but in general the way that I play and this isn't how all card counters play but the way that I play is pretty aggressively so I'll try and bet as little as I can when the count is low and as much as I can when the count is high because that maximizes the amount of money that I have the potential to win per hour and it's those little the bets that you're betting when when you don't have the advantage that cost you quite a lot over time so we just go for it and now I've spoken to quite a few surveillance people just because they've reached out to me which has been really useful and I think that in general a relatively aggressive approach doesn't really lose you much more time than playing really conservatively and trying to do all this what we call cover play where you might make a a little mistake with your play so that you don't look like you you know what you're doing these things I don't know if they help more than they harm in terms of your actual hourly you know expected value the money that you earn when you're doing the big player team stuff each different person must have a not necessarily a cover story but they're projecting a particular type of person when they go in there so what's what sort of a person are you and then what's your ideal big player Persona yeah our big player is an absolute Legend but I'll get to him in a second yeah so for me when I'm a SP actually I'm more concerned with just not drawing any attention to myself especially given that having the YouTube channel makes me I can get recognizing casinos so I try and just keep a relatively low profile when I'm spotting because I don't want to be the weak link that gets the team busted but in general when I'm when I'm a spotter I'll just sit there quietly and bet the minimum and try not to really draw any attention to myself which is very different to how I'll play when I'm not a spotter when I'm doing solo play like we were just playing in Vegas and I was playing various different characters with different elaborate disguises and I would really lean into being an extrovert or being super obnoxious we've done all sorts of weird stuff we did a stag to so a what's the American bachelor party where we were all wearing t-shirts the same and acting acting drunk and just going around and being incredibly loud and signaling over the BP in those cases was literally hey come here it was a tot different strategy so sometimes it's a case of standing out to blend in but our our big player we we've played with a couple different big players and they all have a different style and there's not really a right way but I think one of the elements is just them looking comfortable with that amount of money if someone's new as a big player or new to card counting then just betting you know, do a hand or a couple k a hand can be really daunting but our big player that we most commonly use is called Irish AP that's what he goes by and he just plays this very loud obnoxious I don't extrovert but kind of aggressive Ang R Gambler so whenever he's losing he's kicking up such a fuss and just being like just cursing constantly and just complaining about the cards he's been dealt not really taking it out at people but taking it out at cards so he just plays this role where he's so annoyed that people are a little bit scared of him which I think in a way can bias more time because they're not looking at him through the lens of a card count that's trying to blend in they're looking at him like oh this angry Gambler that we kind of want to stay away from right obvious question what's the legality of all this yeah it's totally legal in general I mean we could get into real specifics team play technically could be deemed maybe illegal in certain state in certain States perhaps but there's a lot of arries on that just because I don't want to speak too definitely but in general card counting is fine because you're just using the same information that anybody else has the way that I describe it is can you imagine that you're playing high level chess and you're like one of the best chess players in the world and the tournament manager comes over Taps you on the shoulder and goes excuse me we actually have seen well we can tell that you're thinking four moves ahead and in this tournament three moves ahead is the max it's just deemed not fair it would just be ludicrous all we're doing is using our brains the same way that anyone else could we're not yeah we're not cheating it doesn't legally classify as cheating and therefore it's legal everywhere as far as I'm aware the only sort of not exactly exceptions but there certain countries like the UK is actually weird to count cards in because you don't have a lot of Le legal recourse if you get kicked out they can potentially just withhold the money and there's been stories from other Advantage players like Phil Ivy did this whole thing with uh it wasn't Blackjack that he was playing but he did this Advantage play it went to court he didn't get paid out if I remember that correctly so there's some weird stuff where there was a person in I can't remember if it was Ireland or Northern Ireland that played roulette and then didn't get paid out they weren't even they weren't cheating or doing Advantage play they just were playing roulette won a load of money and then it was deemed that they were a uh oh it's a private business so they can do what they want so there's certain places where you might have more difficulties than others but legally speaking it's not cheating and it's perfectly legal right so this this to me kind of Jades my not as if I thought casinos were bastions of ethical s High flute in Tru isness but what I did think was if somebody does manage to be the house that they've done it fairly and if it's not legal the casino should take it on the chin given that they're fleecing every other non Advantage player in there yeah it's it's absolutely wild because really we don't even Dent their bottom line and most of the time they know that I think they just have a a vendetta against card counters because we actually don't the way that we get treated sometimes you know I've had police called on me multiple security guards just intimidation tactics or them refusing to cash you out unless you show ID which is not a legal requirement all these kind of weird things that they'll do for what essentially won't Dent the average casino's bottom line it's so rare that we'd make any kind of impact especially like these big casinos in Vegas it's so funny that the lengths that they'll go to to stop you counting when it just sometimes they will they will ruin a blackjack game to make sure so that it's not countable and it's just why are you doing how would they ruin it well there's certain things that they can do for example if you've played a regular shoe game of blackj where you've got maybe six six stacks of cards shuffled together they'll have a cut card that goes towards the end so when you hit that cut card they know oh yeah we got a shuffle now but if you move that cut card further forward that means that you might only play say three of the decks before a shuffle or two of the decks if you're going to be absolutely wild but the further forward that gets the the Le the fewer cards or less cards that you're going to play before Shuffle Now the less cards you're going to play that's bad for a card counter because our information gets more useful more accurate towards the end so they'll sometimes put the cut card more forward so that it stops card counters but the cost of that is actually they're losing a lot of time in rounds per hour that other non-card counters would be playing and people have crunched the numbers and even just moving it a couple cards forward costs like the average Casino a ridiculous amount of money per year so they'll do all sorts of things I just describe it as they drop a nuclear bomb on a house to blow out a candle like yeah they'll stop card counters but they will cause themselves so much damage in the process so do you see the process of this largely just being a race against the clock to be discovered to be rumbled what would you say is the percentage time that you actually manage to get in do the thing and get out having not been recognized or noticed and how many times do you get in there and get kicked out I think most of the time it ends with being kicked out well that's kind of the goal in a way not that we want to be kicked out but there's a there's a phrase in card counting called Don't Back yourself off from a casino back off being just the term for being asked not to play Black Jack and if I leave a casino because I think they might kick me out soon then what what's that achieved I've left I might as well have stayed and played another hour before they'd actually kicked me out so I I normally will play until a back off on the trip I just did you know in Vegas I was trying short sessions and going from casino to casino trying to leave before a back off but then as soon as I compared my my hours played with another teammate who was just playing until back off he got way more time and sometimes we'll feel what we call heat which is just suspicion we can tell when they're on to us we'll feel that and we think oh maybe we should leave but if we actually just keep playing it might take them an hour or another two hours to actually get the go-ahead to back off a car counter so in general the approach that me and my team make usually is just to keep playing until we get backed off so in which case the vast majority of the time we'll get a back off but it depends on the casino sometimes I could last the shortest was about 12 minutes and this was pre YouTube videos but someone just thought he looks like a card counter called surveillance and then surveillance were watching me from the very first hand played and very quickly figured out that I was counting but then I've had nine hours in the casino in a shift and gone back the next day and sometimes just weeks at one casino before they actually caught me so it really varies but we play aggressively until the back off usually how how do you choose the particular casino that you're going to go and take on because if it was a Hollywood movie it would be because of a vendetta that the guy's current ex-wife is now dating the owner of that particular Casino I guess it's probably more strategic than that yeah a little bit although there is a a small element of Revenge sometimes in that I think a lot of Casino staff think that if they give the card counter a really hard time and back them off and make it really hard for them to get their money at the cage and send their photo everywhere and and just be really aggressive that the C counter will go that was horrible I'll tell all my card counter friends how bad this casino was and we'll all avoid it but the exact opposite will happen the card count will tell the people I had this really hard time at this casino and then the C they're telling will be like all right where is it I want to because there's a sense of that's not right so might as well prioritize that casino but in general we'll play any casino that offers a good blackjack game not all Blackjack is created equally there's different subtle rule changes that can affect how much we'd win there's certain elements of the game which might affect how risky it is or how long we'd have to play to guarantee that we're going to be up so but in general if if there's a with a good blackjack game will play it okay Vegas is Vegas a genuine Hot Spot you've mentioned it before but surely they've got to be [ __ ] hot when it comes to security they've probably got the best surveillance departments in the world but also they're the most used to card counters so the backoffs tend to be tends to be quite chill I say as I'm thinking of lawsuits that that are going on against Vegas casinos but in general they tend to be pretty tend to be pretty chill but they are very very fast so we play Vegas mainly because we really like it and it's so Casino dense there all these casinos that you just have this what feels like unlimited options and because it's so fast moving it feels like even when the shift changes it's like a whole new casino so there is a lot of opportunity in Vegas a lot of car couns hate Vegas and they think it's really bad and it might be compared to other places but also Vegas has a certain kind of weird charm to it that just makes it a fun place to play maau is that too dangerous go over and get taken by the CCP yeah I I've not I it was on my list of places to try but I think I spoke to a card C friend and and he said that they don't have any shoe games I don't know if that's true but nowadays it's becoming more and more common that there'll be this machine that is constantly shuffling the cards so you play out a hand or two they pick up the cards put them back in the machine and it constantly shuffles and those you can't count because I mean there's nothing to count when they're constantly shuffling and I've heard that maau is just ases that which is a shame because I'd be well up for it yeah there's a couple places on my list that countries that I probably won't name but that I want to go try but yeah I don't know if macau's playable is it fun or stressful like talk to me about the felt sense of either being part of a team and being a spotter or or doing solo play like what's the actual felt sense of it is it a grind yeah it's it's a combination of things it can be a grind for sure especially on those seven hour Blackjack sessions I I know I keep referencing the last trip it's just because I just got back but there was one time when I was just so tired and wanted a break but I hadn't been backed off so I just kept going and I was sort of begging the casino internally to back me off so I could go take a break but you just don't want to give up this opportunity because who knows if the stars are going to align there might have been a surveillance person that's written you off not from something you did and they think ah he's not a cow counter so you don't want to give that up and that can be a real grind playing the same card game because also the thing is is you're not making decisions in the same way that the average player is you know the average player playing Blackjack will get their 16 versus a 10 and they might think oh should I hit this time or should I not hit and they get to sort of play the game but all wor really doing is we've internalized like a decision tree that we've memorized and that that changes depending on the count but we've just got a preset memorized formula and we're just pressing go on that formula so we're not really making any decisions it's very much like an automatic process so that can be a bit tedious in general though it's more of a thrill than it is anything else you are still getting the same I guess dopamine hit from gambling except you know that you have an advantage which is a very satisfying satisfying thing and the whole thing it does feel like a massive Adventure but it's all it's like such a weird combination of emotions it's super stressful it can be really stressful especially some of the times when we've been backed off and they'll not pay out our money or be incredibly aggressive but the overall experience is incredibly rewarding and as soon as I come back to the UK I'm sort of thankful that I get a bit of a break but then I'm sort of itching to play again because of that combination of things yeah what what are some of the worst backoffs that you've had in your career yeah the worst one I had was I think oh there's a there's been a couple of contenders recently but I think Chip Casino in Washington state people have people have asked me why aren't you calling these places out so there you go there's the exact name CH Casino in Washington state gave me the worst I think I was playing there and in essence I've been backed off from their sister property well they they sort of forcibly ided me and I'd left and they chased me out the casino so I was playing it tup and it just hit this point where a guy came over to me tapped me on the shoulder and I turned around and I knew it was a back off and I did the thing that you probably shouldn't do I acknowledged that the guy you know was backing me off I just said okay I get it no more Blackjack because I was trying to alleviate any hostility before it even happened but he said no no no I just want to see your ID I said well I don't really I'm I'm happy just to go I I'm I'm good I just want to cash out and leave it's important for me to not here that a lot of people think that when you're in a casino you need to show ID or you need to have an ID now yeah if you're going up to the table and you sit down and they ask you for an ID and you don't show it they have the right to not let you play or they could ID you with the door and turn you away if you don't have an ID but if you've played blackjack have your chips you then have the legal right to cash them out and you don't need to show an ID couple of asteres if it's over 10 grand changes things but you don't need to show ID however casinos will often try and force you to show ID so that they can get your name upload it to their little system write their little report maybe send it to other casinos and as a car c count you really don't want to give your ID for the most part and presumably using fake ID would then be a federal crime yeah exactly yeah I'm not sure if there's maybe some weird loopholes in that but it's not something that me or anyone on my team has ever experimented with but yeah there's a good phrase I think it's from Molly's game if you've seen that movie but I think it's uh the phrase is don't break the law when you're breaking the law which is something I always think about when when card counting what we're doing is not illegal just it feels like a crime but it's not quite a crime so don't mix in a crime like fake ID yeah okay so this guy right yeah so he comes over and he's just immediately he's got this such this sort of I don't even know how to describe it but this this kind of Macho Alpha energy where he's decided that he's getting my ID and he's immediately just demanding it and I'm declining it and then he just escalates and he goes I'm not gonna play games with it you either show me ID or you get out I'm like well I just want to leave grab your chips get out you can't even cash them out which was the first time I'd been in that situation where the casino was denying me a cash out and I'd been advised by card cter friends that if I just Stand My Ground eventually they will cash me out so that's what I decided to do and I just wouldn't leave this casino until they cash me out and they immediately brought over extra security a gaming commission person who once again the gaming commissioner should be impartial but when it's a I mean there's a whole host of other politics regarding that stuff often the gaming commission isn't impartial they're a bit biased towards the Casino so there's the gaming commissioner multiple security people other Casino staff and this whole big argument breaks out well I'm just basically shouting that I just want my chips all of this is I got on hidden camera and they just won't do it they say that they're going to call the police they call the police and then they all start to kind of leave me alone at this point they start to just sort of leave maybe except one guy and I'm a bit concerned because this casino is in sort of tribal land so it's on an Indian Reservation so the law regarding Indian reservations is a little bit different regarding the rest of us law they have like tribal sovereignty so they can have their own laws that are a bit independent so in a they can have tribal court and obviously the casino is bringing in all the revenue so in a way the casino is funding these things maybe not directly and the whole thing is just a little bit a little bit different to what I'm used to and that goes with the police force too I thought the police were essentially paid for by the casino and whether or not that's true or not that's kind of how I was reading the situation the time so I was a bit worried that the police would immediately side with the casino and I might be in a very bad situation so I started slowly walking towards the door not wanting to leave but at least if the police came in then I could say I was just leaving if they came with really aggressive energy and as I'm getting to the door the police arrive and they immediately tell me to sit down ask me what's going on and they asked my ID I gave it over I wasn't really familiar with the with the laws regarding when a police officer can have your ID but I thought they're suspecting me of a CR which they weren't so it was a weird thing but I gave over the ID we had this whole thing and they in the end just escorted me to the cash desk and got me got my chips cashed out and they may have given over my ID or not they said they wouldn't but you never know but I was actually really relieved that the police sided with me I've had other situations where the police have just taken an a media no we we don't want you here we don't want to help you side and also gaming Commissioners that were totally useless so but that was a kind of a scary situation because of just how aggressive the tone was and how many people there were and how early it was in my card counting journey and the fact police were called so that was pretty bad one but there's been so many that are quite similar yeah that especially if you're tired and stressed and have been playing for a long time keeping your cool as you're being pushed away from a game that you know is taking every other person sat in this casino's money and the fact that you have manage to spend enough time to be able to learn a process that gives you a what's the edge 50 what is it oh it's like one or 2% it's like tiny itend it's really really small funny you should say that though because there's been two instances that that really banked this up one time also in Washington there was a guy that was at my table so drunk he couldn't stack the chips up properly and he was just playing and just pushing the chips in a pile no idea what he's doing losing hand after hand after hand he was tipping the dealer every hand something like 25 bucks and I just made eye contact with the dealer and just sort of said is he okay and the dealer totally just just fobbed it off I like he's fine and then 20 minutes later that I get backed off and I just thought you're letting this person play that's clearly not in of sound mind to play because it benefits the casino whereas here I am being kicked out for playing the game honestly and another thing that happened when I was in Vegas that isn't in a video yet but I found out that there was a player at my table and she was I think a 77 year old woman she'd been playing for over 24 hours and she hadn't eaten or slept and I sort of spoke to a couple of members of of Staff about this I asked mentioned it to a dealer I was like hey she's been playing for you know this long do you think you know like is there something and the dealer laughed it off I then spoke to a Pit Boss same kind of thing at this point I knew that they were running my game down I knew that I was my time was limited so making a bit of a spectacle wasn't really going to cost anything and each person I spoke to in essence was just totally fine with this woman continuing to play and it's just one of those things where I get that everybody makes their own decisions and has a right to do what they want and I guess and I get that there's high-ups in the casino that are setting these policies about how they handle people that have gambling problems but I also was just left thinking isn't there like anybody that's just sort of going to go hey maybe take maybe take a 10-minute break maybe go have a sandwich and just see just no like what point is it just a human decency thing that wasn't you are if if you are going to casinos in the hopes of finding some ethical decency I fear that you may be looking in the place I know but still casinos are made up of individual people right when I look at them as institutions I'm like yeah they're horrible but they're still like perfectly nice members of staff that I've met in casinos yet this kind of thing happens I mean recently there was a I've just been told I was told by uh someone that works in Casino industry that a casino in Vegas is being sued or being sued because somebody died at the blackjack table and the the dealer kept dealing the cards oh my God they had a heart attack and they only realized when the when the dealer switched and it was a new dealer and this dealer was like are you okay oh my god dude it's wild I I was watching a story it might have been a sunny V2 video about this Chinese millionaire multi-millionaire who lost in the space of 18 months two years in Vegas was flying back and forth and lost nearly 200 million at the same casino and yeah was just propped up on a cocktail of all sorts of stuff for the entirety of the time he was I think he was playing Blackjack to yeah it's wild like surely the whole because I've seen what Blackjack can be when it's fun and when people are having a good time and there are rare occasions where the whole table is losing money as as is going to be the case but everyone's still having a good time and I'm like oh yeah it can exist in this space which isn't like completely depressing but so much of the time there's no there's just it just seems like there's no actual care of the people play which really like how do you deal with these sessions where you end up being lots of money down and and how how much can that get and how much can that get across a team as well in a day yeah we can lose tens and tens and tens of thousands I think the biggest loss that we have on record for our team in one session and I think that was probably like three or four hours was one of my teammates called syntax he played and lost 42k which is I mean he posts we have like a little results group chat and he Post in the group chat this is a result and we all just immediately feel it because it's it's so much money no matter what the context is outside of that no matter what you were up at one point or anything it's still 42 Grand your brain automatically thinks how many years rent is that or how many it's just it's crazy so the times that are the worst are when you're losing not necessarily a huge amount but it's repeatedly session after session after session and you're on what seems like a NeverEnding losing streak the first time we played in Vegas in in 2020 we won I think it was something like 97k in two or three days which is the best thing ever and then in the next couple days we proceeded to lose 110 from that point and just the way down Chris it's not fun because each time you're thinking someone's gonna have a win and then but maybe there's a couple K someone wins but then someone else loses 10 and you're just like it has to stop and I remember I had a session where I lost 30k on that down swing and I just went into the into the restroom and just sort of had to splash water on my face and just try and compose myself and then I went out and there was a bunch of security guards waiting for me which was lovely oh fantastic just what you need it it can be really tough and I think it it sort of takes more than it gives in away I think you have to have the it's a certain kind of person to be a card counter just for like I don't mean who's capable of it I think a lot of people could learn it but the actual lifestyle and having to go through those losses and having to lose that money and not change what you're doing you can't chase your losses you just have to keep playing like a machine there's times I really want to leave because I'm down a lot of money and I just want to break but the Count's still high so you've just got to keep going and you're buying in you're losing you're buying in you're losing and the dealer keeps getting blackjacks and you're just like this is what are the odds of this but you still have to just keep going and that those are some of the hardest times that's the reason why playtime is so important then because you need to be able to accumulate knowing that given a long enough amount of time you're going to be one or 2% up which means across infinite time you would win and therefore if you have too short of a bunch of sessions just straight up variance allows to chip into you and chip into you and chip into you and despite playing the right way even on hot tables you can still lose or it can just the count can just never get to where you need it to be and you will continue to walk away with means that's why it needs to increase you need to have that longer time for sure yeah it's all about getting those hours in quality games can also you know affect the amount of hours you need but in general yeah it's just all about getting those hours in because in the short term you are just flipping coins and hoping for the best all right so what about good games what have been some of the best ones that you've been a part of oh if I if I mentioned them they might make them worse yeah I'd be actually really cautious about saying place has got the best black chat game because I genuinely no no like what days what days have you or what sessions have you done where oh right which are the days where it's just like we can't lose yes yeah I think some of some of the team sessions which have ended in when we've been doing team play and they've just been you know anything honestly anything above like 30k win feels like fantastic no matter what Stakes we're playing at so yeah 30k 40K wins are always really satisfying I yeah yeah there's there's just been sessions I think I had a 19k session in my one of my more recent trips which maybe doesn't sound like a lot in the scheme of what we've lost at times but there's something just so satisfying about even just winning 10 grand 20 grand and knowing that you're going to post that in the chat and everyone's going to see that that's incredibly satisfying so yeah we more look at it in trips as opposed to days but we we've had some very very successful trips that have just been really really big wins in the six figure range and that that for being a couple week work is is pretty good even if you are splitting it between a lot of people yeah how you've mentioned $10,000 anything above that it's difficult to get cashed out without giving your ID in so do you purposefully know when you're at about 10 grand and then stop yeah that is a strategy so so just I'll have to make this super clear in case it sounds like I'm promoting illegal conduct if you have bought in or have got essentially 10K worth of chips generally then there's a currency transaction report that the casino has to fill in and if you are Cashing Out 5K at one cage and then going to a different cage and Cashing Out 5K you could Dodge that that report because they might not realize you have the 10K that is actually a crime called structuring so if we hit that 10K Mark for whatever reason then we have a hard rule where you just go and cash it out and you give over the ID now maybe you don't necessarily need to cash it out there in then depending on the circumstances but in general you're still going to have to show show the ID so yeah if you're playing a session provided you're not Midway through a shoe because you never want to leave when the count is high that would be very very bad because you're throwing away money yeah if you're up 9k in a session and it's the end of the shoe and you realize oh if I win one onek more I'm gonna have to hand over my ID it's probably not going to be worth giving over the ID so then we'll just leave but we'll never actually physically Dodge those checks if we legally have to do them all right and how the [ __ ] do you get six figures back into the UK yeah this is weirdly a question that no one really asks which is like no one really asks about the actual cash management but yeah we have like so much cash we have to move around airport security is always annoy it's in cash right it's in oh yeah it's Cas wedes of hello sir where is this $150,000 come from it literally is that so we just we each have just money belts filled with money and we have to just go through so I mean when you go to the airport if you're transferring more than 10 grand in US currency you have to sort of declare it so we just go through those checks and you fill out a form you've got to fill out the form again maybe when you get to the get to the airport even the airport staff don't often know what you have to do and we have to really insist no no no we have to speak to a border patrol officer before we go through airport security or we're in a real bad spot and they're oh okay well um I guess if you go downstairs and knock on the door so there's weird things like that but yeah we just take it and sometimes there just these awkward conversations that we have to have do you tell them where it's come from well yeah I mean I mean the the origin is honestly gambling it's just it doesn't sound very probable it and it it sounds like the perfect it's like the kind of thing you would do if you were trying to launder money or move money so it's like the the honest answer is not super reassuring so sometimes I go through my phone and I'll be like look here's all these photos of us in the casinos and here's this here's me being chased out by airport by the casino security exactly yeah but there's nothing illegal about taking cash around the thing that we're really worried about or I'm concerned about is law in the UK US called civil forfeiture have you ever come across these YouTube videos Chris where there's people that it's absolutely it's insane so someone will get pulled over by a cop for whatever reason and then the cop might go oh JY Firearms or currency in the car and the person might go well actually yeah I've got some I happen to have my life savings this one guy does Didn't Trust Banks he had like I can't remember how much it was but I think it was in maybe the low six figures so we had a significant amount of money and then the police officer has the legal right to just seize that money if they're not convinced of where it's come from and that it's legally held they can just take it and have it and as far as I'm aware it can be really difficult to get that money back that money can be used within the police force or something weird but just one of these laws that that seems so backwards where they can just take the money from you and that's it you'll get a little receipt but getting it back is a whole other thing so I've often worried about oh What if I get pulled over because you don't want to lie to a cop either you don't want to say oh I have no Curren you're right it's a to you're in a different set of problems then but yeah there that's the thing I worry about the most is just being it's honestly just police in the US regarding regarding the cash of course being mugged and stuff is still a concern in fact just on the I was playing in the we were playing in the Bahamas recently I was in the Bahamas were you I went to so I went I went to the Bahamas for two days and before I went I was at a wedding in Northfolk Virginia and this is when we' confirmed this episode and I'm watching some of your Vlogs and stuff and I'm like uh talking to this guy and this guy was a part of the Navy this wedding right he was saying dude do you gamble like no no I know a guy that does actually uh well I'm about to speak to a guy that does and he says dude the SLS and Paradise Island the two casinos that you've got in the Bahamas he like their dealers uh they haven't got a clue the airport the um see no security aren't that tight and blah blah blah so I remember thinking at the time I might be able to tell Stevenson he doesn't know about here but it seems like you beaten me to the punch yeah that's really funny I mean I wonder if we were there at the same time but yeah I was I was over there and we just had a situation where we this is like a weird tangent story but we were playing at this casino and it was just me and Irish that were at the casino and we ended up leaving the casino together normally we wouldn't be seen with each other but we both got so lost in the casino and didn't have like cell service that we ended up just in the end walking out and hoping that the cameras hadn't seen us so we left this casino finally find a bit of road we really we got so lost in this massive building and a taxi pulled up and we we got into the taxi and the taxi started driving and then the uh I was a little bit concerned that it wasn't a real taxi but I wasn't sure and there had been another taxi driver that told me that the taxis in Bahamas are chill so I wasn't like super worried but then the taxi driver started offering us like prostitutes and drugs and I was like ah maybe this guy isn't a legit taxi driver so we're driving and he said oh you're going to need to give us directions because I don't have a saav or GPS bit of a weird flag for a taxi driver but okay and we've got between us I don't know how much it was but 50 60k something like a lot of money and then the taxi guy says by the way I'm just going to need to stop off at the strip club to pick up some food that I've ordered at like this is 4 in the morning or whatever and it just sounded like the most sketchy thing we're about to be mugged cover story that's kind of how I felt right and i i s we were like no no no we'd rather you just take us home and he goes it's on the way this guy doesn't even know he doesn't know the address so it's on the way and he says no no no I have to do I've already I've already picked it up and I messaged Irish saying are you a bit worried that we're about to get mugged you know long story short is we actually go through these quite unsafe area of the Bahamas and Bahamas is like super chill but there's obviously going to be crime areas in every place that you go and uh and then he pulls up outside this building which didn't look like a strip club and there's some like Heavies outside the building and he gets out and he goes inside which made me feel a bit better because he left us alone but I'd like been shoving my my cash down at my trousers to sort of just hide it because I was like being mugged is one thing but being mugged and robbed of like 50 60k is another and and then a guy one of the heavy said don't worry I'm a cop and this guy was stoned out of his mind and flashed this badge and he goes I've known this guy for years well if you've known the guy that's you know propositionally like trying to sell prostitutes and drugs I don't know if I feel like this is a great character reference but the whole thing in the end was just like a false alarm and the guy got back in with his takeout and the strip club from the strip club which okay and drove us to rbnb but it was just like the first half of that story was the story where you get mugged and then we luckily didn't have the second half but it's moments like that where you get yourself these situations where you're in some Street you don't know and you've got a lot of cash on you and then you don't really know what to do there's been times in the in the US where I've looked up afterwards where I've been and gone oh this is an incredibly High area place that I was staying should not should not have been there yeah on the map this is the red part for crime and yeah Wonder Grand down my pants yeah we like we have to load of cash in the car once in in um West Philadelphia and uh that was dumb but we just left a backpack in the car we forgot about with cash and I just thought the next day that it was going to be gone but it was it was there as was a ticket on the car but I'll take that any day you can use the cash in the backpack to pay the ticket that's on the car exactly right yeah unfortunately that wasn't a team expense I had to pay that but never mind shame um so you must be having to do more elaborate disguises and covers given the fact that you've got a YouTube channel with half a million people on it it's not going to be any easier after you've done this episode with me either so I guess you're uh the detailing of your experiences and the difficulty of your experiences are inversely correlated to each other yeah it's weird it's like I'm My Own Worst Enemy because as my YouTube channel goes up then my car count gets harder so it's like when when I started the series I obviously knew that this could happen but I the way I looked at it was well either the series kind of simmers and it doesn't really do any harm in which case I'm card counting and it's fine or it does really well in which case it's like a luxury problem which is sort of where I'm at right now but yeah I've had to go all in on disguises so for the previous trip I just did which isn't on YouTube yet I we designed these different looks you know using beard dye and changing my beard and getting a goatee and fake tattoos that were like the ones that they use in movies so they look quite real and I even went to a place called fangs FX which make sort of fake teeth and change how your jaw sits for actors in movies and I didn't get fake teeth in the end but I got like these jaw fillers that just would push out the side of my face and an upper bit of my face that changed sort of how my face looked so we were just doing everything that I could pulling out all the stops and it really worked as well I mean I got backed off and I got caught eventually people find out who I was it because you're stepen Bridges though well yeah exactly it only takes one person in surveillance to be like wait a second guy and then and that's it but it it absolutely brought me so much more time and yeah it got me way more time so it was really really helpful because I was keeping track of different looks in different Casino chains so I'd know okay this casino chain I'm still clean with this look so I'll just Hammer this casino chain until I get backed off you know when I was mentioning before how I had this set seven hour session or whatever and I just was praying they'd back me off it's because I wanted to stop spraying my goatee with dye every day when I got up and having to like makeup wipe all the such a nut getting dye in my mouth I was just like please let me change this disguise but I was keeping track of the luckily I've got surveillance people that will me information which is super handy new I was going to say so you've got this network of fans who work actually in the casino world you also probably have a even larger network of enemies that work in the casino world but um yeah you there's like a FBI Most Wanted do not admit under any circumstances known Advantage player list uh so are there some places that you're never going to be able to go back to now like are there some are there some chains that are just completely boxed off for you yeah not necessarily some chains because in a way it's not like every person that works in all these casinos knows who I am by look right but all of the casino chains will know who I am and there'll be a description and a photo of me in their database and there will be a case of if you see this guy back him off or don't let him play however if I go to a new region in the US that I haven't been to for ever then there's no it's not like they're looking through this of like known Advantage players for every single person there's thousands of of people that are unwanted players for whatever reason so it has to be the first someone has to actually spot me for the first time and then that that's s goes to the top of the list and then it can become a bit of a problem but yeah this there maybe some casinos where I've played before and because I've done a YouTube video there'll be extra maybe everyone in the casino will have seen it because hey we're in this in this video and which case I probably would struggle at going back to those but I don't think there's a chain that I wouldn't be able to play at apart from the UK there's no Casino I could go in the UK unfortunately in the UK you've got to you've got to be a member to go in 99% the casino so I get sto at the door of course of course what are there any other games I mean you know it's so funny to think about you being a professional gambler but you're not you're a professional blackjack player like it's not it's this yeah a whole panoply of different games that you could play in this Wizard of Oz Charlie Chocolate Factory way to lose money and you just play one like are you do do the Blackjack Advantage players speak to the I don't know what like the [ __ ] backarat Advantage players or the roulette Advantage players uh yeah so there's sort of this larger community of Advantage players and the other forms of Advantage player kept pretty lock and key and it I basically only do card counting part for for a few reasons but the main one being is that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing other kinds of Advantage Play on YouTube card counting is a thing that exists in basically every Casino you could go and count cards whereas other forms of Advantage play tend to be very select loopholes that might get patched so if I shine a light on something that's possible in one game in Louisiana then that would get patched it wouldn't exist anymore so there's a certain kind of degree of stuff that I wouldn't really want to tackle on YouTube so I just sort of stay in this Lane and go really hard on this L but there is like a I'm not going to go as far as saying any game could be beaten but there's there's lots of different ways that you can exploit various different games that people have figured out right and has it ever been the case have you ever been in a casino and seen some other Advantage player either playing blackj or playing some other game have have like multiple teams crossed streams at some point yeah I don't think I've ever really had a situation where two teams with big player spots that be absolute nightmare at the same Casino that's never happened but there's been loads of times where there's been other card counters not that there's loads of card counters but I've sat down at a table before started playing and then when I raise my bet somebody else is raising their bet and I'm like wait a second and then you're watching how they play and you're waiting for a hand like soft 18 you know A7 because those are the kind of hands that that non-car counters tend to play wrong so you wait for hand like that and then you see oh they played it correctly this person's either really lucky with their timing of their bets or they're a card counter so if that happens the etiquette is whoever got their last will lead the and it's just a non-verbal signal that's Unwritten into the rules of the degenerates of the Blackjack World otherwise it's like synchronized swimming right it just becomes really obvious when I raise my bet to a ground at the same time somebody else raises their bet and then we both lower it at the same time and Razer it it just looks um it can look super obvious so that can be an issue I've also had times multiple times where I've sat down at a table and someone's just gone Stephen good to see you and just continue play well even with that like if they know that you're there to count cards like they're just gonna follow what you do lot of time couns right okay okay so I kind of be like do you like to play alone that's this weird stifled conversation yeah but no it can be funny I kind of encourage you know if it's a non-card counter I'll be like take insurance when I take insurance which is a move where you bet if the Dealer's got Blackjack I'll just give like a little tip or something or if they ask me a question i' be like well I wouldn't but there's also been times with the dealer where you know if you're playing and the dealer knows you're counting and then let's say you're going to tip the dealer you go oh do you want me to tip it to you or do you want me to play it so you can do this thing where you put the chip in front of your your your own bet and then they're gambling with you right so there'll be a time like way yeah it's just a common thing right that that that that's done in um in casinos not count it's just everybody so you'll be like oh I might say do you want it or should I bet it for you and they'll go what do you think and if they know I'm C I go I think you should definitely bet it dude yeah I mean you must have had the amount of dealers that you've spent intimate time with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours you know of time with these dealers what's the experience I guess that you're trying to remain under the radar so maybe you don't speak to them so much but like yeah what's your Insight about the life of a typical us Blackjack de person I mean they vary as much as regular people vary I think my experience with all Casino staff is is a complete mix bag there's been some people and dealers that I just think oh these people are so fun I want to be friends with them in real life and then there's other people that just aren't very nice people so it's hard to sort of really give a uh you to sort of try and paint like a brush or kind of give an idea of the typical person that works in a casino because they vary so much I mean certain security people can be a bit power trippy at times a lot of Pit Bosses can be quite power trippy but some of them are really nice so it's kind of hard to sort of give like the archetype of a dealer I think yeah I mean I've met a lot of dealers that are really nice a lot of dealers I've known I'm counting and they haven't dobbed me in so those people are nice and they have they could have just made things really difficult but then I've also gone and met dealers that have gone and pointed me out when I walked in the door after driving six hours to get to the casino so yeah it's a real mixture but yeah you can have some really nice interesting chats and actually the dealers being Tet is one of the things that keeps me going on these trips if it's not a team trip where where I'm with the team you're away for whatever it is two three weeks you don't know anybody and you're just driving around and your only human interaction that you get is when you order a coffee buy some food or playing at the blackjack table and as an extrovert being able to talk with the dealers is one of the things which actually kept me keeps me like sane on these trips so yeah it's really nice when you get a dealer that's up for having a bit of a chat dude yeah yeah I didn't think about that I didn't think about how you know it sounds all romantic and fantastic and cool and sexy but the reality of it is remembering plus one D1 or zero in your mind for eight hours and then going to bed and then getting up and doing it all over again for a couple of weeks yeah I mean it can be such a CH I mean I've done trips where the amount of time spent driving has basically one: one ratio the amount of time playing so for every hour play hour driving because there's so much just got to go to this casino next casino and you can you can it's not an exaggeration to say you can drive 6 hours to the nearest casino because you've had to leave the town where that town with the five casinos have all called each other and told them what you look like so you burnt out that town when you just got there you drive six hours to get to the next place and you walk in and someone in my case recognizes me or maybe you just get a quick back off and it's just those times are just it's just brutal because you get back in the car and you go all right got to go drive another three or four hours to the next place now and yeah so it's way more way way more about logistics than it is necessarily about mathematics yeah for sure yeah the actual math that you're doing isn't that complicated it's just a bunch of relatively simple components that get quite tricky to do together but the math gets about as complicated is you have to look at the discard tray where the cards are estimate how many cards are there to the nearest half deck and then you divide your count by that number that's about as complicated as gets but even that you're rounding down or whilst you know trying to keep the conversation going or not look like you're concentrating a lot but yeah step Bridges ladies and gentlemen Stephen I love your YouTube channel every once you go and check that out where else should people go where do you want let me go on the internet to to look at your stuff thank you so much yeah I mean I am mainly on YouTube but I'm also on Instagram and x and threads kind of I guess so yeah you can find me it's just Steven Bridges wherever those places are oh yeah Steven good luck with whatever you're doing next cheers Chris if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to [Music] subscribe