1405: Steven Bridges | How a Card Counter Learned to Beat the Odds

Card counter Steven Bridges reveals how to beat blackjack legally, dodge casino surveillance, and why playing perfectly can still cost you a fortune. Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1405 https://jordanharbinger.com/1405 What We Discuss with Steven Bridges: How card counting actually works — not by memorizing cards, but by keeping a running point tally to spot when the remaining shoe favors the player, then betting big on those waves for a slim one to five percent edge over the house. Why you can play perfectly and still lose a fortune. With such a thin edge, counters need hundreds of hours to reach the long run, and Steven’s team once won $97,000 in Vegas only to lose $110,000 right after. What casino surveillance looks for, and how Steven buys extra time at the table with movie-quality fake teeth, bruises, tattoos, code-word team play, and the paradoxical trick of blending in by standing out. Why Steven, a professional gambler, detests how casinos operate — from staff ignoring a drunk player who couldn’t stack his chips to a 77-year-old woman left gambling for over 24 hours without food or sleep. How to judge your decisions by process rather than outcome. A good choice can lose money and a bad one can pay off, so understand the downside, respect variance, and never let one lucky win convince you that you’ve outsmarted the game. And much more... And if you’re still game to support us, please leave a review here https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id1344999619?mt=2&ls=1 — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking https://jordanharbinger.com/course — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course https://jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser https://www.jordanharbinger.com/news/ newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanHarbinger/! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deals/: AT&T: Get an iPhone 17 Pro for $0: att.com/iphone or visit an AT&T store for details https://att.com/iphoneXero: Find out more: xero.com https://www.xero.com/Boll & Branch: 15% off first set of sheets: bollandbranch.com, code JORDAN https://www.bollandbranch.com/Cash App: Get $10: Download app, use code Bitcoin10, and send $5 to a friend in the first two weeks https://cash.app/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:34Speaker 02

  Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks. From spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional arms dealer, hacker, astronaut or extreme athlete. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults and more. It'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Today on the show, casinos will happily help you lose your life savings. Start doing arithmetic and suddenly you're the problem. Today, professional card counter Stephen Bridges takes us inside a job that's less James Bond and more fake teeth, secret signals and trying not to cry in a casino bathroom. We'll unpack how you can play perfectly and still lose a fortune, what it takes to stay ahead of surveillance and security and what the casino business reveals about our own capacity to fool ourselves. If you think being smart makes you immune to getting played, well, this one's for you. Here we go with Stephen Bridges.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Your team went up about 97 grand in Vegas in two or three days. Then before people collapsed, lost 110 grand from that point. So during one $30,000 losing session, you go into the bathroom, you splash water on your face and you're like, all right, compose yourself, right? Give yourself a little pep talk and security is waiting for you outside the bathroom, which by the way creepy move.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Most people would then go, hey, this is the universe telling me to knock it off. Maybe I should stop doing this. But you're like, all right, this is variance, whatever. Take me into the bathroom. What happened? How you pep talking yourself and then why do you return to the table after this? All of these seem like strange choices.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's very interesting. I think part of it is that you're so committed already.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  You know, I'm in some place in Chicago in this casino that we've flown to to play and I'm sat there, I'm playing.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  There's casinos in Chicago?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  I think it was Chicago.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Or Illinois. It was somewhere around there.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  And I'm already committed, like I'm doing the job. I think a lot of people say to me, they think it's brave to go into casino and count cards and I'm like, not at all, because every step is just a small step, right? I get to the casino, that's easy. I walk in, that's easy. I sit down, that's easy. And then before you know it, you're in a situation that might be quite hostile, but you're already in that situation.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  So it's kind of similar with this. Our team's getting absolutely destroyed and we're quite new as a team at this point. So we'd experienced this amazing high of going to Vegas, winning like 97K.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're all gonna be rich.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're on top of the world. And at the time I wasn't super loaded or anything money wise. So for me, this was like pretty life changing moment.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 4:23Speaker 03

  And then we had the flip, whereas a lot of the time the variance might be you win a bit, then you lose a session, you win a session. But for us, it felt like we did all the winning and then all the losing. So in that casino in particular, I was on a 30K losing session, which was the worst session I'd had at the time. And I went into the bathroom just to.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Cry.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, like I wish I could have cried some of it out. But splash water on my face, look at myself in the mirror, remind myself that I'm doing the system correctly and this is sort of part of the gig. But I was feeling really low. And then when I walked out, when you've got a group of security as well, Jordan, it's like the most overkill thing for a guy that's playing cards well.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  That's an intimidation play, I assume.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  We'll talk more about getting backed off and banned from casinos, but.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  And I don't know how much you've dealt with security before, but I found there's like quite a big range in how power trippy they are.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  I used to work in security and I'm not big, right? So I had to be like the smart one who talked people down and reasoned with people. But yeah, there were huge guys, small women. We fired the people who were like, I'm in charge here. It's like, relax, we don't want to get shot. Okay. We want people to respect us, like us, want to calm down. So we actually filtered for smart people.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  For sure. It's wild to me because the whole job surely it's like de-escalation must be like the number one thing, because you don't want things to kick up a fuss. But if you ever want to make a card counter or any person feel on edge, surround them with a bunch of people that could beat the crap out of you.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  And you're gonna suddenly tensions rise.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  So assume the listeners never played blackjack, although geez, I probably played on my Apple 2C computer when I was in kindergarten. But in 60 seconds, what are you tracking? How does that sort of change the odds? What are you not doing? And this is not going to be like intro to card counting, but like this is 30,000 foot overview of card counting.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Sure. In essence, all we're doing is keeping track of the cards that have been played in a card game and that gives us an idea of what cards are on the way. And then we can use that information against the casino. So in essence, we're waiting to catch a wave where we're more likely to win. And when that wave is coming along, we place really large bets. We win more of those bets than we lose. And then when the wave goes away, we drop our bet down to small. And that's essentially all we're doing. So we're not memorizing the cards, which is the big misconception that everyone's like, wow.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Oh, you need a eidetic memory to do this, right?

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah. We're just more keeping track of the cards through some elaborate point system.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  I see. So is it sort of like all the twos and threes are gone already out of this deck? So it's not going to be a two or three. So that raises our probability of winning to 0.6% over 50%. So now we have a slightly higher chance of winning than the casino.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's 100% it. In essence, in blackjack, if you get a 10 value card and an ace, you've won in a special way where you get bonus money on top of your bet. So if you bet a hundred bucks, normally you just win a hundred bucks if you win. But if you got a blackjack, you get 150. Whereas if the dealer gets a blackjack, they just take your hundred bucks. So if you can imagine a situation where for some weird reason, it was just you get a blackjack as the dealer and then the next round I get a blackjack and we went back and forth like that, the player would win more money than the dealer, right? So in essence, what we're doing is we're keeping track of the odds of a blackjack coming. We don't, well, I say we don't care who gets it. We definitely care. We'd prefer to get it, but we know over time, the dealer will get half those blackjacks. I'll get half those blackjacks, but I'll make the money from that profit. Everything about card counting is based on that one thing and the rest of it is just

• 7:38Speaker 03

  stuff around it, basically.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Okay. So how good is your edge under good conditions?

• 7:43Speaker 03

  We've basically got about a one to 5% edge over the house.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Right, okay.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Tiny in the scheme of things.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you have to play for, I don't know, a couple of hours and then it's like, hey, we won some money.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Oh, way more than a couple of hours. We're talking like 100 to several hundred hours to be, I say quote unquote guaranteed, to be like very likely in profit. It's a very, very volatile. We've got to stack up hundreds and hundreds of hours. The games vary a bit, right? So sometimes you've got really good blackjack and sometimes the rules are a bit crappy and we can get to that long run quicker. But yeah, in general, we've got to play for hundreds of hours before we're guaranteed.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Cause watching the videos, I'm like, what were they there for like two, three hours? So are you sitting in a casino for nine hours?

• 8:23Speaker 03

  If they'll let me.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Right, if they'll let you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  And that's one of the trickiest things, right? Because especially if I go and play Vegas, what will usually happen? Because they've got the sharpest surveillance departments in the world. They'll be watching, they'll see the bet changes and then they'll go, oh, he might be counting. They'll watch for a while, they'll count the cards themselves and then they'll conclude and they'll kick me out, right? Vegas are really, really sharp. So sometimes I'll get 10 minutes in a casino before they kick me out.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  That's gotta be facial recognition though, isn't it ever?

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Not even a face rec.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Really?

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Like this is just, they see, oh, there's a white guy. He sat down, oh, and he's buying in for a few couple thousand dollars or whatever. Or he's betting black when this is a downtown casino that's not used to $100 bets, right? They see that, they start watching, they figure it out, they kick you out. But that might happen quite routinely in Vegas, right? If you get 10 minutes in one casino, 20 minutes in another, maybe an hour. And then one time, just randomly the stars will align and we'll just get hours and hours and hours. So we're in essence, we're waiting for those sessions that are sort of paying for all of the other sessions, which were kind of crappy.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  I see. So you're actually gambling on even being able to gamble, really?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Kind of, yeah, very much.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  That's funny. You said the surveillance people will say, oh, there's a white guy who bought in. Is it a benefit to be like a person of color who counts cards? Cause you don't fit the, maybe the stereotype of like nerdy white guy counting cards?

• 9:38Speaker 03

  100%. It is essentially all forms of prejudice or discrimination flipped on their heads.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  It's wild because also surveillance people that, and I've chatted to them, don't think that women can't count cards or.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  No, it's just subconscious bias.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  It's just a subconscious bias, yeah, for sure. But they undoubtedly, when we look at the time that they get in, they get average longer sessions before they get kicked out. Same with older people, Asian people, black people.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  I was going to say somewhere there's an Asian guy who's like, I'm just playing cards and I keep getting kicked out of the casino.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  That happens every now and again.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  It does it, okay.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  One time my team were playing in East Coast and we were all in the same casino doing like big player spot a play, which is like the movies, all this sort of dramatic stuff with lots of us. And they round us all up to kick us out and they just picked off some random guy from the table as well, that they just thought was part of our group that wasn't.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And he's just like.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  And then he just gets banned.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  This vacation sucks.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  For sure, right?

• 10:28Speaker 02

  So when you're going in, can you just pick any table? Or are you looking for like, oh, there's three players that this one that's better because I blend in? Maybe you don't want to be the only person playing blackjack with one dealer who only is looking at you?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  The tricky thing is that what works well at one casino for cover might be a terrible idea at another casino. It just depends on how the surveillance people are thinking about their job.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  It's not uniform. In general, if we find a table where we're the only player at the table, we'll get faster rounds dealt per hour. We can get the dealer to go really quick and that is like doubling, tripling, quadrupling our hourly rate. But as you say, if you're the only person at the table and table games, blackjack, they're more social things. You could have sat down at the other table and joined someone else, then you look a bit suspicious of being by yourself. So different card counters will approach this in different ways. It's all kind of depending on what you're going for. You could look like a miserable gambler, just likes to be sat by themselves.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  There was one video where you were almost pretending to be just like a guy in a bad mood is angrily gambling, which is kind of funny because that's an unhealthy person, right? Who's just in there like, I don't care how much money I lose. I want dopamine right now.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's probably a lot of those in real life and it's like, oh, I don't want to sit with that guy.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate because I find that the angry guy at the table is one of the most deceptive forms of cover that you can employ in terms of just social cover and how you're being. Whenever I've gone neck tattoos for the disguise, slicked back my hair, dyed my beard black and just got some gold chains around me and looked kind of like some poor man's mafia character.

• 11:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  It's always, I get a lot more time looking like that. And maybe it's because people are a bit intimidated. Or maybe it's just because they think that guy's not a card counter, he doesn't look like a nerd.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  That guy didn't even graduate high school. There's no way he's counting cards. Yeah, this guy just got out of jail or something. Yeah, you're calculating something called expected value and this is, I don't want to get mathy, but can you kind of explain what that is? I mean, that's a, there's got to be a way to do this that somebody like me who became a lawyer to avoid math can understand.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  In essence, it's just what your hourly rate should be when you're doing what you're doing on average. So as you know, we might win 10K in one session or lose 10K in another session. And it's all over the place, but that graph overall on average is worth X dollars per hour. So when we do all our calculations or whatever, we might go, ah, cool. If we bet like this, we'll make 500 bucks per hour. What actually happens could be anything, but over time, on average, all of our wins and losses will average out to about $500 in profit per hour and that's EV.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Is that your real profit per hour?

• 12:58Speaker 03

  That's a pretty good example.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is a weird thing to say, but we can set our EV to almost anything that we want, provided we've got enough money to endure the volatility and those

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  $110,000 downswings that we've talked about. But yeah, in essence, we can do whatever we like. There's just pros and cons to doing that because if we bet really small and then really big, like $5 to $1,000 in our range, we'll make way more money. It's way better for us, but then we look way more like we're counting cards.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  You've got to try and find that sweet spot to not look so obvious, but also make a lot of money.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then you have to be able to play that number of hours, right? You could, there was the Bahamas videos where it's like, all right, there's two casinos here.

• 13:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  If we screw this up and one, they're going to call the other one or it's going to upload to the database in the other one. Or the security guy's going to text his friend at the other one and be like, team from the US. Five of them, whatever, they're this ethnicity and you're done. You're just flying home, like that whole trip is a waste of time. So you've got to be able to do that. You, and people think, oh, just go to Vegas, there's a million casinos, but they also share security information, I guess. Is that accurate?

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, Vegas is actually arguably the worst place to play. We like playing in Vegas because it's so casino dense that we can get like an Airbnb and have a fun time, basically. But really Vegas, they're so sharp and exactly what you said happens, right? You get caught at one casino, that casino will take a screenshot of you on the security. They'll upload that for all of their casinos and maybe they'll share that via email or a database or whatever it is to other casinos in the area. So we're also tracking how each casino operates and what their procedures are usually. So if I'm going to Vegas, I'll go, well, this casino shares with this one and this one shares with this one. So if I avoid this one and play this one first, we map it out in order that will help us get the most time before our faces are shared. If I go to the wrong casino first, they could share it everywhere. And then, as you say, I might be like, damn.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 03

  I guess we're off to California or whatever.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Right, right. So you wouldn't want to go to the one with the sharpest surveillance guys, the most up to date AI facial recognition. You want to go to like, I don't know, the golden nugget or something where it's like people with oxygen tanks playing slot machines. Cause if they catch you there, then it's like, tell who? And then you go to the win at the end or whatever it is, right? There's definitely some sort of rhyme and reason to that. That's kind of funny. Before we keep going, there's so many security questions I have, but I want to know how the money works. Cause in one video you start by saying, oh, this trip to the Bahamas was super expensive. It's like $10,000 and in order to make money on it, we're going to need to play for like three hours, making $4,000 an hour. I'm like, I think a lot of people would be satisfied with $4,000 per hour. Granted, you're on a team, but still, what is that like $800 per hour per person?

• 15:33Speaker 02

  That's a pretty decent wage in 2026. So the problem, of course, again, is getting kicked out, but I don't know. Are you just saying the trip to the Bahamas was super expensive for your YouTube audience? Cause that seems like a peanuts for guys making 4K an hour.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  I guess in that particular situation, it was also very possible that we'd hit some roadblock almost immediately.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  If they spotted and recognized one of us initially because of these surveillance systems or sharing information, or just me because of my face being more well-known, then that would have completely killed the whole thing. So yeah, when I'm writing the videos and thinking about it, I am thinking, what are the dramatic elements? But it's always grounded in how I felt at the time. So if I'm saying something, I could be totally wrong about my assumption, but it's coming from, this is how I felt at the time. And we all went there, we nearly canceled that bit of the trip because it was going to be bankrolled by someone else. And we were like, great, we have no risk here if he's going to bankroll it. And then he pulled out and then we'd all sort of wanted to do it anyway, in this weird spot where we weren't sure. Yeah, it could have gone really wrong because we could have got kicked out within 20 minutes. We had no idea what the Bahamas was going to be like and it was a pretty big fancy casino.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Right, with a budget potentially to hire real surveillance and buy tech, yeah. So is the enemy mostly tech or is the enemy mostly people who know what they're doing?

• 16:44Speaker 03

  It's 100% surveillance. I won't call them the enemy because I have a lot of respect for surveillance.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  But the people or the

• 16:50Speaker 03

  The people.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  The software, okay.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have software, but most of the time, any surveillance guy in Vegas is going to be able to count cards manually themselves. And in general, that's a lot

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Really?

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's part of their actual training and their job interview. They have to count down a deck in front of whoever they're being interviewed with.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Oh, so that they can spot you guys.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, in essence, yeah, because it's a lot easier than the software. The software, funnily enough, is that they have to manually input the card that you have and then the other card that you have, and then the dealer's cards. It's very tedious to use, right?

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Ridiculous.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  There's one time though, that I used that whole kind of thing against the casino. And once again, this was a hunch that I had about a casino that I was playing in Colorado. It could have gone horribly wrong, but I developed a strategy that would be quite harmful to my hourly rate. Because I would be doing the wrong thing when the count went up, I'd be betting less and it was just a very weird strategy. But overall, it was still very profitable.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Cause it got you more time.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Well, they ran me down. I, I know they did because they made the phone call to surveillance and you can just tell sometimes it's really not subtle. And then I got several hours there and I went back the next day and it was purely because I just know this for a fact. The surveillance person looked at me, started assessing, saw that I did a dumb thing and went, well, no card counter is going to bet like that. But really, if they had run it through software, in that case, they would have come out and gone, oh yeah, he's actually profitable.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  That was my best session of all time. It was like a 40K win. It was great. Had a blast.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Can you make every decision correct and then still lose for like a hundred hours in a row, essentially?

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Yes, you can. You really, really can. So it's just like any form of investing. If you look at it like that, you know, if people are investing in startups or companies or whatever, you can still have a bad run that is attributed to bad luck. And in essence, if you take a hundred card counters and then they sim their game and make sure they've got a 1% chance of going bankrupt. Well, you're still going to have one of that hundred that's going to have a terrible time. You're going to have to flip as well with the other guy that's just made so much money. But yeah, in essence, 100 hours is not nearly enough to be guaranteeing your profit. I keep saying guarantee, but there is no guarantee. We are still gambling, we're just gambling where we have the advantage. And just like the casino in theory could lose loads of money to luck, they're playing so many games for so many hours. They're not worried about that. They're bankrolled, it would be mathematically so slim.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Our odds aren't quite that good, but they're still pretty good.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  What makes one blackjack table countable and another table worthless or uncountable? Is that a thing?

• 19:11Speaker 03

  For sure. So there's a couple of things in general. The main thing that can harm how good the game is, is how many cards they deal before shuffling. It's quite a weird thing to visualize, but they've got a little bit of plastic that they shove in the shoe of cards.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I've seen that before. I don't know what that, what is that thing?

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's partly so that they don't run out of cards, right? If they just keep dealing and they get to the very end, they're like, oh.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Oh, I see. So that's a reminder to the dealer that they need more cards on the top of the table.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just like, okay, great. We've hit that bit of plastic, play out the rest of that hand, and now shuffle the cards, and they'll never run out of cards, right? But it's also to prevent or deter card counting. If they put that card really near the front, like just one deck from the front on a six-deck game, right? You only play a few hands and then it's a shuffle. So all of the information we're gathering is pretty useless to us.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  It gets reset, right, when they do that? Okay.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  So where they put that card is, it varies quite a bit. And sometimes they'll just put it quite far forward to deter card counters. But really, they're shooting themselves in the foot because every time they shuffle, they're losing money on the time that people aren't gambling.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. I was just gonna ask, why don't they just constantly do that then to deter you guys?

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, someone did the math on it once and it really massively impacts their bottom line to slow down the shuffling procedure, which is why nowadays they have a lot of these machines where they put the cards in the machine, press the button, it shuffles the cards, they take out the other cards and play them.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  In a bunch of places, they have these machines where the cards are being continuously shuffled. We can't count those, but luckily for us, Americans seem to really hate these machines. They just don't like how it feels to play them.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  So the last comment.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  That is very interesting because, yeah, that goes to my next question, which is theoretically, guys like you should slowly drain casinos, but obviously that's not happening because they're still in business. So what protects casinos more effectively? It seems like the fancy shuffling thing, not really, but is it surveillance? Is it the limit of your bankroll because you can't, there's only so much you can do? Is it human fatigue because you can only play for a few, nine hours, and then you're bleary-eyed and you really don't want to be there anymore, right? You're hungry. Is it fear, greed, the inability to execute perfectly because you guys get emotional? Like, why aren't there thousands of card counting teams in casinos just struggling to be profitable?

• 21:16Speaker 03

  I think one of the things is that a lot of card counters don't take the time to really refine their game. I don't even think that card counting is the most difficult thing in the world. Like, I don't have a math background. I'm not particularly good memory. I'm not that smart. But I can still do it because of practicing for a long period of time and being, I guess, quite open to when I'm wrong. I've always got to be aware that maybe I'm losing my edge.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  So I'll keep testing and getting friends to test me, make sure that I'm good at the game. So a lot of card counters will get really excited, they'll learn the counting bit, and then they won't figure out the bankroll management stuff, and they'll just blow through their, their money. Or they'll be making more errors than they realize. A really good example of this is, you know how if you're driving drunk, that's obviously really bad?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  But if you're driving really tired, that's also really dangerous.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  People don't think of those things as the same thing. So if you imagine that on a card counting level, if people are playing a long session and they're tired or they're jet-lagged, they might be thinking, well, I'm still playing with an edge, but maybe they're making more errors than they can afford to. And because we only have a tiny advantage over the house, we win only just over half of the time. We have a load of losing sessions. So if we're too tired or drunk or whatever it's gonna be, then yeah, the errors could be gone. Really, in the scheme of the casino's bottom line, there just aren't that many card counters, or at least the damage we're doing isn't gonna be as much as, say, dealers that might be stealing or trying to skim chips, or people that are trying to cheat in other ways. So it's just one small thing amongst all of the millions of slot machines they have and the money they take in. We're an inconvenience to them at most.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Is the casino's greatest edge the math or is it human nature where like, look, you might have that edge, but sometimes, like you said, you're gonna be drunk, you're gonna be like, I know I shouldn't do this, but I just have a feeling, uh, oh, that was a bad idea. Is there just enough of that where they always win?

• 23:06Speaker 03

  There's two kind of things at play, right? You've got the natural edge built into the game, that every game they have an advantage.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  And either they pay you not enough for what you would be paid mathematically or whatever. Basically, they have the advantage in every game, so more time playing that game, the more likely people are to lose money. But then there is that other human component too, where the very way that they build out the culture of gambling, isn't that you just go there, place one bet on red, win, and then leave the casino, is that you keep playing. So most of the time, even if people win, they psychologically treat that money as like bonus money, and then they'll keep playing, and inevitably, the vast majority of people will just keep going until they lose. So there's like those two components happening.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Really, it is the math of the games, but then also human nature where people will just keep playing until they lose on the money.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  Nothing says VIP like spending a hundred grand to get a free buffet. We'll be right back.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  This episode is sponsored in part by AT&T. If you've done my free six-minute networking course, you know I'm big on keeping in touch. It doesn't have to be a whole production. Send somebody a quick text, share a photo that reminds you of them, that's part of digging the well before you're thirsty, building relationships through little, everyday conversations so you're not only reaching out when you need a favor. And AT&T has a deal to keep those connections going. Right now at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with eligible trade-in. It has the ultimate pro camera system and a big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Share a photo, check in on an old friend, follow up on something they told you last time you talked. You don't need a big reason to reach out. Just remembering what's going on in someone's life is a pretty good one. Learn how you can trade in your phone for the new iPhone 18 Pro at AT&T. Connecting changes everything.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Required trade-in of $230 or more on eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit an AT&T store for details. This episode is brought to you by Xero. That's Xero with an X. Running a small business means there's always something competing for your attention. Managing your finances shouldn't make your day more complicated. Xero brings accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics together in one connected platform, so you spend less time piecing together the numbers and more time actually building your business. We've been using Xero for nearly a decade now, and honestly, we don't know what we'd do without it at this point. That's meant clear reports, dashboards we can actually read, forecasts and AI-powered insights that help us understand our own cash flow and see how the business is really doing. It was simple and easy to use from day one, and it still is.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  In fact, 91% of customers surveyed agree that Xero is easy to use. And when you choose Xero, you're joining 5 million customers worldwide, including us. That's Xero with an X at xero.com. The 91% claim is based on a 2024 Xero survey conducted in the US, UK, and Australia. Use our code, it's a win-win. You get a great deal and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now, back to Stephen Bridges. What about people think like, oh, I should do this? Initially, when we were talking, hey, does a person of color have an advantage? And I don't need to be good at math? So a bunch of my listeners are like, wait a minute, wait a minute. I'm a female person of color who's not gonna, like, I wanna be a card counter. But the reality is what, nine hours a day in a casino if you're lucky?

• 26:10Speaker 02

  And then do it again the next day? That sounds miserable, by the way.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Nine hours would be great. We'd be over the moon with nine hours. Yeah, in general, I don't recommend card counting to people. It's one of those things where people think about the identity of the job as the thing that they get. So with acting, for example, acting is cool and all that, but those actors are on set, especially for TV and movies, doing the same lines again and again and again. I think for most people, even if they find the idea of acting appealing, the reality is gonna be pretty boring, where they're not gonna enjoy it, right? It's the same thing with counting. There was one trip I did where I counted up the hours I spent driving versus the hours I spent playing, and there was a perfect one hour of play to one hour of driving ratio. So people don't think about the fact that I might have to drive six hours to some casino in the middle of nowhere

• 26:55Speaker 03

  to then get there, walk inside, and someone go, hey, Steve, how's it going? You can't play blackjack here. And then that's so demoralizing. The hours are awful. Often, we play at nights. You get a little bit better conditions at night.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Why?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Surveillance just don't seem to be trying as hard at night.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  They're tired.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Same with the pit bosses. I don't know what it is. We seem to get a bit more time on average at night. Then you're playing night shift, and that's awful in itself. And then you've got the swings, the wins, the losses, all of it. And because of loss aversion, you probably have more negative experiences than you do positive anyway, right?

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  So in general, I just don't recommend it because it's a pretty brutal way of making money. But for some people that feel drawn to it, even when I've said all of that, it's those people that might be right for it, if they're okay with that adventure.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  That makes sense. Loss aversion, I have that pretty bad. It's one of the reasons I don't gamble, is when I win, I go, oh, okay, I won. That's bound to happen sometimes. And when I lose, I go, I'm so stupid. Of course I lost. It's gambling. Why would I, you're gonna lose more than you win. And so I might win like a hundred bucks, and I'm like, oh, that's cool. And then I lose 30, and I'm like... Idiot.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  It's awful, right?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  And then I'm like, wait, why am I doing this? I'm gonna go see a show and buy a meal. And, oh, wait, the meal's free because I won that. Well, that's kind of nice, but then it's like, I didn't have fun doing that necessarily. So the only time I gambled was probably at those bachelor parties because everyone else was doing it. And it's like, do you just not want to hang out with us for the next seven hours, however long we were there, and talk? Because it's like, well, no, I'll do this with you guys, but I'm not gonna go on my own. I'm not gonna bring my family there. I'm not gonna do that with my friends if I have a choice about what we're doing anywhere in Vegas. It's not for me.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, two things on that. One thing is that it's exceptionally rare for me to see anybody in the casino that is genuinely having a really fun time.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Anybody at all.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  It's rare enough that when I see it, I'm kind of enamored by these people because I'm like, you're just here, losing money and genuinely having fun.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  It's not their money, gotta be.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Well, maybe, yeah, but there are occasionally these people that are just having a good time gambling. And the very fact that I say that with such like novelty shows you how most people are kidding themselves that this is an enjoyable pastime. Maybe they go there, if they're a bit lonely, there's a bit of a social element to table games, that kind of thing. But overall, people in general aren't having a fun time at the casino. That's one thing. And then what you were saying before about how it feels when you're losing that money, if you lose thirty bucks one time but win a hundred another time. Imagine just taking a ten dollar bill and ripping it up into pieces. You feel so awful.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Not because you've lost ten bucks, but because you've wasted it so purely.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  And that's how gambling feels when you lose it.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  And the whole thing would maybe make sense if it was like a couple of cents a bet or like a dollar a bet. But when they're forcing you because of the minimums and how they construct everything to bet twenty-five bucks a hand or whatever it is, that's a really expensive hobby.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  And I'm blown away sometimes when I go to these smaller casinos in maybe poorer areas and there's people playing these twenty-five dollar tables because that's all they have or even ten dollar tables. I'm like, how many bets do you have to lose before you've lost a significant amount of your money?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  Not many.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  No, that's a really good point. I know some wealthy people that gamble. I don't know what they're betting, but I assume it's a ton because it's like they'll invite us to their New Year's party. And it's like, oh, you can eat lobster and shrimp and, oh, the hotels are comped and it's at the win. And, oh, yeah, well, how are you guys getting there? Well, they're sending a jet for us, but you guys can get some Southwest flights and the meals are all free, the rooms are all free, they're the nicest rooms in the hotel, they're flying you. Like, how much are you losing? So I asked one of my friends, I was like, what do you think they're spending? And he's like, over two days, three days, a hundred grand. You could buy a hell of a vacation for a hundred grand.

• 30:32Speaker 03

  And sometimes they'll give these millionaires loss rebates or free bets, basically.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  They'll give them this free extra bet. And you can actually, ah, this is a thing, I'm like, should I say this? I can say this, it doesn't really massively matter. Sometimes those little discounts, as they call them, can lead to a profitable situation if you know what you're doing. Because they can give you more money back than the house edge in certain things. But you know that these gamblers will take that and go, great, I got twenty K back. Where's that twenty K going?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Straight back in.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Back into the casino until it's gone. For being a professional gambler, I really detest the way that casinos operate. I'm pro the idea of gambling if it were regulated properly, but if they were regulating these casinos in a way that was actually reasonably preventing harm, I don't know if they would stay in business. Because their whole business model is people that have, I'll say, an unhealthy relationship to gambling, because I don't know if it's just pure addict, but there's a huge component of it. You see people like that, and I see them at the blackjack table all the time telling me this story about why this makes sense for them. And I can just see that they're trying to alleviate that horrible feeling they have. And it's just, these people have gambling problems and no one's helping them and it sucks.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  There was one man at your table who was so drunk or something, high, whatever, that he couldn't even stack his chips. How are you allowed to continue playing when you're just meshing things into the corner and falling off your chair? I mean, what the heck? Come on.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you're not allowed, I'm pretty sure, as a casino to let that person play, but there's a certain look the other way mentality. And this was a really small casino in Washington State. It made me really angry. I was sat there, my blood was boiling because this guy just couldn't put his chips in a neat pile on the table. And it was just hundreds and hundreds of dollars at this kind of small, relatively low-end casino, right? So the guy's not, as far as I could tell, super rich. He's definitely hammered, really drunk. And I say to the dealer, I make like eye contact and I just kind of go, is he okay? And the dealer completely just fobs it off. Of course, the dealer's getting a tip every hand, no matter what's happening. So the dealer doesn't super care. And then twenty minutes later or whatever, the pit boss comes over and asks me to stop playing for my way smaller bets that are having a, that I'm winning.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  It's wild. Yeah, it's really exploitive. There's another situation too where there was this woman in the casino next to me. And this is one of those situations, I handled it so terribly.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  I saw this video, I know where you're going with this.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Exactly. I still put it on YouTube because I really want to show like the reality of what's happening, not just like a polished, look how great I am. But there was this woman that was seventy-seven years old, next to me, this lovely elderly Asian woman, she was really, really nice. And then her friend sat down at some point and just mentioned that she'd been there for over twenty-four hours.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:05Speaker 03

  And then this woman, she almost bragged when she said, no eat, no sleep, as if like, yeah, I've been here for a long time. Twenty-four hours, that old, without eating or sleeping is definitely not cool. So I casually try and mention this to the dealer. The dealer fobs it off like, oh, yeah, that's just whoever name, that's all fine.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Annie's crazy, she doesn't eat and she barely pees. What's happening right now?

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, they could easily time her out at any point. In the UK, we've got, our gambling situation is by no means perfect in the UK. But if I go into a casino in the UK, well, when I could, and if I lost like a couple grand, they would genuinely take me to one side, sit me down and go, Mr. Bridges, we just wanted to check, how are you doing? You've lost quite a little bit of money today.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  You feeling okay?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  You feeling okay? Yeah. And sometimes, I had a friend that played for like a twenty-four hour span, he was at card counter, they timed him out. They were like, you can't be playing this long. So there's at least a little bit more safety put in place. But to me, in the spirit of people having a good time, she's still gonna be a regular customer. You could just say, that's enough for now, get some food on us, she's definitely paid for it, go home, have a sleep and then come back, we'd love to see you tomorrow.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  I would just take them so little. But I spoke to the dealer, a pit boss, another pit boss, I mean, you saw, I wasn't being great about how I was handling this. And by the time it was over.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  You guys should care more. I mean, I'm, but everyone watching is like, yeah, they should care more. Like, imagine you're related to this person, you would be like, grandma, stop gambling.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  Well, actually, I got a lot of pushback for that situation because people were really saying that this is America, she has the right to gamble, this is the freedom thing. And which I get that as a concept, but it's also really funny to me how much these situations are manufactured. Like, just to reference your own show, I heard that Skeptical Sunday episode you did about alcohol.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  That was really interesting how much architecture there was in planning to try and make this a thing that people did.

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  And it's very much like that with gambling. People think, well, I just want to be able to gamble. Yeah, sure. I get that maybe that's an element of human nature that's fun, but in this environment, in this way, how it's constructed, is, nothing's natural about this.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  You only want this because of all of the marketing that's being pushed at you to do this thing.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  It's very hard balance with the whole freedom thing versus the actual responsibility by the casinos to not be predatory.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  It's kind of like, oh, well, this is America, we want freedom. And it's like, you have freedom, but you also realize that your free will is being deliberately hijacked by this multi-billion dollar organization, right? That's the idea.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  I actually wouldn't even say that. Like, that's a good way of looking at the other side. But I think that gambling addictions, based off what I've read about it, seem to be pretty harmful to the people around.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure, yeah, of course.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  You know, when someone's got an addiction, when they're that far gone, they're not thinking about these things through the way that we would logically think about it. So if someone's truly addicted to like some class A drug, they're gonna steal money to buy the drug. The addiction is the number one, I'd say priority, but it's beyond that, right?

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  But it's same with gambling. So people might lie to their spouse, they might be borrowing money from a friend, they might, all sorts of things. And whenever you put a casino, I wish I had the stat off the top of my head, but if you put a casino in a city, the general kind of metrics of happiness or financial stability, they go down in that city. Like, yeah, it just affects everything.

• 36:12Speaker 02

  So before casinos, you're a street magician, actually, right?

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, my background was doing magic tricks. I grew up just being really interested in magic and then I moved to London, started gigging, but then found street performing, which I actually preferred, gave me a lot of freedom.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the, you have this London Three Card Monte video, which is funny. I, I've seen that in real life in New York in the nineties, where I went to Times Square and guys were actually running Three Card Monte. I mean, this is like watching a movie, right? You roll in, you're like, wow, there's a guy with a folding table and cards. And when the cops walk by, they fold it up and put it up, like, what, that's real? Intelligent people convince themselves they can beat these kinds of games.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and actually, it's just like a regular magic trick. Magicians can be fooled by a magic trick just as much as regular non-magicians.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  Because if you want to fool a magician, you just build a trick that's based off assumptions that the magician will make and you use those assumptions against them, right? So anybody can be taken in by scam. I don't think it's really an intelligence thing. I think it's more of like a planning thing by the scammer. If they know everything about you, they can find a nice way of doing that. And obviously with these games like Three Card Monte, they're going for a mass market.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  Where's the ethical line between misdirection from a magician, it's entertainment, and then misdirection to conceal essentially fraud?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Well, I think anytime that it's interesting because a lot of magicians will do this thing where they are doing pseudo skills. So one of the big ones is mind readers pretending that they're doing body language reading.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know people like this.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Exactly right. If it changes your beliefs about the world, that's when I think it's a problem, right? When you have these people that are doing the medium stuff or they're connecting you with people that have passed away or any of these kind of things, that stuff can really shift someone's whole life.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  I agree with you.

• 37:57Speaker 03

  But that law of attraction, it's like, well, they're just thinking positive. Yeah, but those beliefs could lead them to beating themselves up about something. And you know all this stuff. I'm just preaching to the

• 38:05Speaker 02

  No, it's good to hear on the show, the law of attraction thing like, oh, you just didn't believe hard enough. And it's like, no, no, no, you just can't do the thing that you were led to believe you could do based off of positive thinking. All right, back to card counting. It's a team thing. You're not just in there doing this all on your own. So you've got cool nicknames because you have to, right? Enigma, Syntax, Ultimate, Irish A P. What's an A P? It could be anything. I want to

• 38:29Speaker 03

  Advantage player.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I've got it. Okay. So what role does each person perform? And their identities are concealed because you'd get kicked out 10 times when you already do, right?

• 38:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. It's just that whole classic, like, you don't want to have your first name, last name on the internet where the casinos could look it up. So we have usernames. There are two ways of doing card counting, basically. You can do it solo. You go in, you change your bet sizes. When the count goes up, you make money. But the big thing which gives you away as a card counter is that the thing you can't avoid as a solo player is when you have an advantage, when you catch a good wave, you got to bet big. When you don't have an advantage, you got to bet small. Most players at the blackjack table, let's say they're betting $100 a hand if they're at that level of whatever. Maybe if they are feeling lucky, they'll bet 200 a hand, maybe 300. But that's about the range. They're not going to go crazy. But card counters will go from 100 to 1,000 without batting an eye if the count calls for it. So that is the main tell that we have that we cannot

• 39:21Speaker 03

  run away from that civilians are looking for. So this whole concept of team play was to solve that problem. The idea is basically, what if instead of having one person do all of the roles of a card counter, we split those roles up and divide them amongst the group? So the way that we would do it, you go in this casino, we have, let's say, five of us go to different tables and sit down and start playing. So we're all playing at a different table. And all we're doing all night is betting the minimum, keeping the count, and trying to look as

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Inconspicuous as possible.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Exactly, right. That's all we're doing.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  And you can't even pee, though, because you'd lose track of stuff. Somebody could take your spot.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Well, it depends on the casino, but we have a what we call a spotter at each table. And the job of the spotter is just to sit there, count the cards, and bet the minimum the whole night. When the count goes up, normally they would bet big, but instead of them doing it, they'll do some kind of secret signal. And then that will call over what we call the big player. The big player is just the rich person that's wandering around the casino, impulse betting whenever they want. So the big player sees some secret signal that's being done. Maybe someone's sipping a drink or whatever it's going to be. They come over to the table, and then the spotter will tell the big player what the count is through some kind of a code word.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  That's the most common way. So maybe the big player comes over and says to the table, hey, everyone, how's the table going? And then the spot might reply, oh, it's really crap. The phrase really crap might indicate that the count is 12 or whatever it is.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  So we just memorize a bunch of these things. And then the big player comes in, that's big. And then when the count drops, they leave. And to the casino, it doesn't look like he or she has been counting because they didn't watch the whole shoe. They just got there, right? So that's essentially what it is. And we've experimented with different ways of doing this. Maybe we won't use code words, we'll use gestures and stuff like that to direct the big player what to do without them really knowing. Well, they know why they're doing it, but they might not know the count at all. They're just following instructions.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  There's like 12 limousines outside and it's hot. It's like 108 degrees. Exactly.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, you better believe that the first version of our communication system was pretty bad.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Did you see those 17 and a half women out there wearing dresses that were all red? Red.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  One time when I was being like tested in a casino when I first like learned to just just count in general, we had a card counter come and just watch me play to see if I was doing it right. And he said that he would casually ask me questions and I would answer with number based answers. It wasn't very subtle. He didn't really care. It was really small stakes. It was fine. So he might be like, oh, how many hours are you here? And I'd say two hours or whatever. And at one point, he asks me, so after not saying anything for ages, just like quiet for 10 minutes, he goes, so how many bananas do you think you could fit in your mouth? And I have to say 17.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  17. I've tried.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  It's a fun afternoon.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  What kind of personality makes a really good counter, but just a crap teammate?

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Well, the biggest thing that we have to deal with when we consider adding a teammate is trust. It would be so easy to just lie and under report your wins or over report your losses.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. No one's going to be able to check that ever. I mean, oh, yeah, he just skims a thousand bucks every time he plays and wins.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And there's occasionally a story will come out where a card counter will have caught a teammate stealing or something weird like that. Or they'll have sent someone in the casino to like, watch them play and then catch them in the act. But in general, trust is like the number one currency of doing this. I tend to believe that there's a chance that some people skim money, not on my team. I just mean, I really trust everybody on my team with my life. Like, I have no concerns with that. But I'm just aware that sometimes people cheat a little bit. It's that whole study that I'm sure you're aware of where they gave people test answers. They would use the test answers a little bit, but no one would use the whole sheet of test answers. People are comfortable with something, a little bit of sneakiness, but not too much. So I can conceive of situations where maybe some card counters feel like, well, actually, this contract for our arrangement

• 43:12Speaker 03

  is actually really unfair. And I, you know, I had to wait around. So maybe they would do little things or they misreport time or something like that. But I imagine if it's happening, it's on quite a small basis. And it's not a thing I worry about on my team. But yeah, trust is like one of the huge things. If it's not a hell yes from everybody, we just don't do it.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  Secret signals, code words, and a guy who just wants fries. It's Ocean's Eleven with low blood sugar. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Boll and Branch. We stayed at a hotel recently and you know what we missed? Our Boll and Branch sheets. You look forward to a hotel bed, but then you get in, you think our bed at home is a lot better. That's probably a pretty good sign. You found the right bedding, especially this time of year when you want to pile on the blankets and make everything cozy. But cozy can turn into kicking off the covers at 2:00 in the morning because you're overheating. Boll and Branch sheets are made with 100% organic cotton woven specifically for airflow. The breathability comes from how the cotton is woven instead of synthetic cooling technology or chemical treatments. So you can layer up for colder nights without feeling trapped under heavy

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• 44:38Speaker 02

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• 45:23Speaker 02

  buying process is what's holding you up, Cash App makes that part easy. Download Cash App today. Visit our link in the show notes. If you liked this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. Take a moment, support our sponsors. They make the show possible. They're searchable and clickable on the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor or find a code, email me [email protected]. We're happy to service codes for you. It's that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Stephen Bridges. Don't you guys stay at the same Airbnb? So it's not like after you play and you're not talking to each other, you just go your separate ways. Like, you guys have to hang out or at least be around each other. So you get somebody who's just annoying or bad

• 46:06Speaker 02

  hygiene or bad attitude. It's like, I don't want them sleeping in the same house as me. And then I gotta deal with them for a week at a time on this trip to Europe. I mean, that just sounds miserable, right?

• 46:15Speaker 03

  It's really funny, actually, because our team is made up of such a weird bunch of people that would never be friends in real life. But it's weird how actually just the game itself and the mission that we have where we're trying to accomplish this thing brings us all together and we're really, really tight knit. And I think that's because of just you go through these ups and downs together and you have to like trust people constantly. It's just a reminder that you can be friends with a lot of people, even if you don't agree with them on a lot of things.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's interesting. That's a really good point. How do you pay the team? Is it, it can't just be based on how much you all win because that's not up to you, really?

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Love this question. And that's a really good insight because people instinctively think that, well, if you win more, you get paid more.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  No, that wouldn't make sense at all.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  Right, yeah, exactly.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  For what you're doing. Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a few different ways of doing it. The most common structure is two count cards. You need a ton of money to justify the bets that you're doing. So some people are putting money in. Those are investors. So let's just oversimplify, 50% of the winnings go to the investors proportionately based off what they put in. 50% go to the players based off the hours that they played.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  That makes more sense.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Now, if we're getting really into the weeds of it, then some games are better than others. A game that might be worth $500 an hour, another game might be worth 600. You can pay people based off the quality of the games they're playing. You can give bonuses based off things. Sometimes there's manager cuts, that kind of stuff. But in general, it's usually like a roughly 50/50 between the players and the investors. And then it's based off just what you brought to the table, whether that's money or time played.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Your investors are people from your team that just have money now, though, right? You don't have to go borrow money from some dudes on goal to do this anymore.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Well, when I started, it's just like a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. When I started, I didn't really know how I was going to get any money together. I kind of thought that my mentor, Colin, that was sort of teaching me this stuff, would give me 10K to play with or something.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  He's like, are you crazy? I've seen you gamble. I'm not giving you any money.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. But then a friend of mine was helping me move house one day and we were just catching up. And I was telling him about all the card counting stuff. And then after I got home or whatever, he just shot me a message saying, hey, could I put in like 10 grand, 20 grand, or whatever it was? And then I was like, if you want, sure. We talked about it. And then later he upped that to 200,000 pounds, which is like a quarter of a million dollars.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  That is in what the hell?

• 48:23Speaker 03

  It gets way worse. Because he isn't loaded. That was his mortgage money.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  So this is money he cannot afford to lose.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  And the number one rule of professional gambling is that you have your bankroll that is separate from your life expenses. That is your asset that you can afford to lose. You should be able to lose it all and not be like the end of the world. And this was a situation where if he'd lost that, it would have been life ruining. Not only that, This is, once again, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  I misunderstood the long run math of card counting, where I thought that the amount of time we needed to play to be quote-unquote guaranteed to be in profit was way shorter than it actually was.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  So really, that whole thing was like a terrible idea. I mean, luckily, we ended up in a small amount of profit with that, and then we stopped doing that. And to answer your initial question, nowadays, it tends to be the players putting the money in.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  That makes more sense, because you don't want outside investors in any business if you can avoid it.

• 49:17Speaker 03

  The other funny thing is, is that the asset that we need is cash, physical dollars.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  And that is a lot harder these days than just digital. So if someone's like, oh, I could wire you 50K. It's not actually that useful, because withdrawing 50K from the bank, once again, when you're still gonna have to have that weird conversation with the bank that you've just done there.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Can I get that in an aluminum briefcase? Do you have one of those handy back there? I want, and maybe some handcuffs, so I don't get mugged on the way to the casino.

• 49:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, banks hate people that withdraw and deposit large amounts of cash. They really hate it.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  And you have to report it.

• 49:46Speaker 03

  For sure. And when I take money back from the US to the UK, I've got to convert it to pounds when I go to the cash conversion place. Once again, all these checks, I can't prove where the money is from most of the time, because casinos aren't giving me a receipt. Or more accurately, if they were gonna give me a receipt, I'd have to give them my ID. And there's this whole other thing about counting what you don't want to really give over your personal information.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good point. And if you have like FinCEN, you have like anti-money laundering stuff where you can't just go, hey, I've got 25K. Can I drop this in a bank? No, I have to like give a bunch to other people on this flight with me that are hopefully friends and bring it to the UK. Oh, and by the way, it's illegal to do that, because it's called structuring and there's, yeah, so we'll get into a little bit of that. How do you decide where to go? Because it's like, oh, the Bahamas seems nice, but it's actually a terrible idea. There's two casinos. You get made instantly and you gotta fly out there from London or whatever. I assume you're also not going to Moldova to gamble at a casino with a bunch of people paying five bucks in like another language, and you're the only Americans.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  There's definitely a bit of a strategy to it. So card count is much like the casinos. They have their own database. We have our own databases where we write down what the game conditions are of a game in a casino.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  I see.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  So it's kind of crowdsourced information to a degree. So that gives us a bit of an idea. Now, of course, with crowdsourced info, not everybody's gonna wanna share accurate information.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  You don't share the good stuff, and there's probably red herrings in there, right? Like, I wanna send everybody to this crappy place.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  There's been a couple of times where it's more the other way around. There'll be like a really good place that someone will report. Oh, I got kicked out in five minutes. The game was crap. But really, it's like this honey pot of amazing game. But in general, that's kind of our starting point. And then networking, keeping in touch with other card counters will give us an idea where to go. But it's funny that you touched on playing elsewhere outside of the US, because that's when things become really tricky.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  Because there are, A, fewer European card counters, B, Europe is a totally different ballgame, and C, most importantly, European casinos aren't all legit. There's actually cheating that happens in some of these casinos.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Oh, we're definitely talking about this.

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  So you said it's a different ballgame. Why? Besides the cheating, which we'll get into.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  The games themselves are slightly different rules, but then the way that currency operates is very different. And the amounts that you can buy in for before they like stop you, just based off like money laundering checks and things like that, right?

• 52:02Speaker 02

  I see.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  In England, as I mentioned before, we've got so much regulation around gambling, which I think in general is a good thing.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  But as a card counter, it makes it difficult. When I was playing full-time in the UK, my source of money was gambling. And you try telling a casino that you're okay betting 650 pounds a hand, like, I don't know, 800 bucks.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Don't worry, this is my job.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Get out of here. Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  A hundred percent, right? So really, you get a bunch of different things. Europe, there's less information about the casinos, because there's not as many European card counters. The information that does exist, they are way more cautious about sharing it. The game seemed a little bit more fragile. There's all these kind of weird little differences that I could get into. But the main thing that I worry about, that I never thought was a thing, and I would have bet money that it wasn't a thing in modern day time, is that a lot of these casinos, well, enough for it to be a problem, do cheat at the game.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  It's crazy that there's more regulation, but oh, also it's rigged.

• 52:53Speaker 03

  England's chill. I don't think there's any rigged games in England, but in certain countries. So there was this one time that a friend of mine, who is a really good card counter, I really, really respect him. He told me that he lost quite a lot of money playing this one game in this European casino. So long story short, a few of us go to this casino to check it out. And in essence, we play, and I'm watching the game. And what I realize is happening is that the casino is cheating by doing something called second dealing. They're using sleight of hand. We call them out, which is the dumbest idea of all time, by the way.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I wouldn't have done that. Okay.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Hey, we're cheating, which means we probably have organized crime connections, but hey, I'm gonna make a scene here.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  What are you doing?

• 53:38Speaker 03

  They held their own in this conflict. It was a small casino. There was only one or two people there. We ended up leaving the casino. We tried going back another day. We're banned on arrival. They're like, oh, you can't come in here and that kind of thing. But I had this footage, and I was like, this is gonna make an amazing video to expose a casino cheating is gonna be crazy.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Talk you out of that one.

• 53:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had this little thought in my brain where I thought, maybe, maybe I should try and find out who owns this casino. So I get in touch with a PI. He looks into it. In a couple of weeks, comes back. And basically, there were mafia connections with the casino, and someone was murdered by this mafia. And it just made the whole thing like, oh, this is too close to being potentially a problem.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Odds are, it would have been fine, but it's also like a dumb thing to be.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  The upside is minimal to expose this place, and the downside is, oh yeah, we were walking around and then someone shot Steven in the head.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Exactly, which wouldn't be a great afternoon.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  No, terrible. Okay. You ever run into another card counter at the, I don't even mean somebody who recognizes you from YouTube, which does happen, but just somebody else where you're like, that guy's doing the exact same thing as me. He's gotta be counting. This is not a coincidence, right? Because if you're counting and your bets go from 100 to 1,000, and someone else is doing that, that's gotta be pretty noticeable for you.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  For sure, yeah. Weirdly, we have a bit of a sixth sense about it, where you can just look at a person and go, maybe they're a card counter. There's just something about it.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  They're paying more attention than most people are for gambling.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  If you're just looking at their eyes, even that, they're not gonna miss a single card. There's been a few times, and it's always funny when it happens, where you sit down, start playing, and then the count goes up, and then both me and another player raise their bet at the same time.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Sometimes we'll just immediately know, and there'll be like a little bit of eye contact. And normally, the polite thing to do is whoever's got to the table most recently leaves. Because much like what you said, as soon as you're both raising and lowering your bet at the same time, if there's one thing that looks obvious, it's that.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  It's like a spy movie, like, oh, Bond is here, but so was that other agent from the CIA. So like, one of us has to get out of here. You're gonna blow each other's cover. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like Casino Royale, right? Where Jeffrey Wright's like, look, man, I can't hang in this card game.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  You need to handle it. CIA's got the backing for you. We'll fund the whole thing. Yeah, oh my god. I think one dead giveaway that you've experienced is, oh, man, are you that guy from YouTube? Oh, I love watching your videos. I watch them all the time. Then it's like, yeah, okay, we're, shut your face. We're gonna get trespassed from this casino.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, the worst example of that that happened to me wasn't even that long ago, and this story isn't on YouTube yet.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  A few seasons of content behind.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 56:02Speaker 03

  But I go to this casino, and I really put effort into changing my look. And I go in this casino, I'm in the high limit room and I'm playing. There's only two tables that are open, and one is opposite me. And this guy sat there, and at one point, he just comes over to me and just goes, what's the count?

• 56:17Speaker 02

  What a dick.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  I couldn't believe it. He's clearly not a card counter, so he's obviously just watched the videos, because presumably he likes them. He's recognized me through the disguise.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  And he just wants to ruin your night, slash your whole run.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  It was wild. So I just was like, uh, what? I don't know. I guess nothing, because we're shuffling? And then he left, and the dealer was like, what was that about? I'm like, yeah, maybe it's because I'm losing. He's mocking me or something?

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 03

  And then he sends his son over to basically make the same joke again later on in the session. It really bothered me, because I thought, don't you realize that, for me, this casino is the big drive away?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  I've got here. I've done this whole plan. I've got this one chance to really utilize this appearance. And as soon as it gets caught, they're gonna share it around, and then I'm gonna have to fly to a different state or something.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  And also, they've just potentially cut your time either to zero or way in half, because if they suspected that you were counting and somebody had previously made a joke, what's the count? It's like, okay, there's something going on. As opposed to like, huh, he could be counting, but I don't know. Let him play for another hour. Let's see what happens. They basically cut your runway way down by trying to be funny. That's like somebody screaming over me recording a podcast, and they're like, hey, I'm gonna ruin Jordan's show because I want attention from him or something. That's irritating.

• 57:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was quite lucky in that situation, because I was losing money. And even though pit bosses and surveillance know that you can be losing money as a card counter, there is something psychologically disarming about the losing player. It just seemed as less of a threat. I think if I was winning, then the dealer really would have perked up and been like, whoa, what's going on here? Yeah, it was just a total dick move.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Dick move, man. You bring up a good point. There's a lot of social engineering going on here. Playing dumb. Maybe like, I should raise my bet, but I think they're getting suspicious, so I'm gonna actually not do it this time. And then if surveillance is watching, because the pit boss just made a phone call, he's gonna see that I should have raised my bet, but I didn't, and maybe that'll throw him off. Like, you're thinking of this too, right?

• 58:06Speaker 03

  The problem is, is that we never know what our opponent is thinking. What strategy works well at one casino might not work. I mentioned before that I did this strategy where I was betting funny, but then betting correctly later on or whatever. Profitable, but I took a bit of a hit money-wise to get longevity. I've since tried that strategy with a teammate. I've gone, use this in this casino, give it a go, and they got backed off in 10 minutes. So it's just what works sometimes might not work. Another time, I never underestimate surveillance. They're very smart. They're very good at their jobs. But I also don't assume that they care, and maybe they are on Angry Birds on their phone in that moment. You know, you just don't know. Maybe they're having a bad day. Maybe they're hungover. A lot of the time, if I get time in, I don't assume that I've outsmarted surveillance. I just assume that they're busy. They might be looking at this drunk guy that's been harassing some woman and that's their main priority right now.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Right. I also, there's gotta be surveillance guys who go, this place underpays me. My boss is a total dick. I have to pee. They're not letting me eat. The other guy called in for the 80th time in a row, but he's shagging the manager. So he's never gonna get in trouble for that. And they're just sitting there and they're like, this card counter? I'm rooting for him. I'm gonna let him count until I can't ignore it anymore or the pit boss sees it. And if anybody asked me, oh, well, I was watching camera six because.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  It definitely happens. One time I got an email when I got backed off from a casino and it was just, hey, I'm in surveillance from this casino. I let you play as long as I could. I'm sorry, man. When he called me, I had to run you down.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. That's funny. So you had a fan on the inside, inside fan.

• 59:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:31Speaker 02

  Wow. Do you ever like spill something, ask the dealer dumb newbie questions to throw them off or is that too obvious?

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Sometimes the thing that we'll do is a lot of talking and then it's basically assumed that you can't talk whilst counting. But much like anything, if you do it for long enough, you get the hang of multitasking isn't so much a thing most of the time, right? You're like rapidly task switching.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  It just requires less brain power to keep track of it.

• 59:56Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  It's like riding a bike.

• 59:58Speaker 03

  There is a tipping point where my brain is like updating this tally of numbers and I'm saying words and I can do both those things at the same time. So sometimes I will make a point of talking a lot just so that the pit boss maybe thinks, oh, he can't be a card counter. Because he's talking or they never have the thought that maybe I'm a card counter. Because we have two things that can happen, right? Either surveillance are watching or it's the pit boss and then maybe they make a phone call to surveillance and go, hey, can you check this guy? So there'll be little things like that. For me, my number one priority is to not look like Steven Bridges when I go in the casino. So I'll go with a lot of disguises and what I found to be really effective for me sometimes is if I'm really trying to stand out instead of blending in. It's like a weird paradoxical thing. I think it's that if I was trying to hide, why would I be so extrovert and vocal?

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Exactly. You're in a chicken suit or something like that. If the blackjack table clearly are not, I'm not trying to blend in like a card counter. Cause I'm a drunk guy in a chicken suit. So casinos comp people who win and you're winning. Do they ever go like, hey, you got, how about a free room and some food? Do you take that? Or are you like, nah, it's okay. I got an Airbnb.

• 1:00:58Speaker 03

  Well, we try not give over our ID whenever we can.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Oh, right. And they're gonna want some ID if you check into the hotel.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. It's like the comps, they're conditional. You can have it if you get a player's card. Because once you've got a player's card, they can track you, they can hit you with offers. You're more monetizable to them. So they really want you to have a player's card. The long story short in casinos is that in most situations, you actually don't legally need to give over your ID. People just assume that you do. There are some exceptions to that. So in general, we try and never give over our ID. That's a tongue twister. But if we want the comps, then we have to. I have experimented with giving over ID in situations where I know that they don't have the database to track my name. And it is nice when you get the free hotels. That's pretty good. I do take that stuff sometimes.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  In general, most card counters will say you shouldn't do it, but I also know a bunch of very, very proficient women card counters that are getting so many free things that they, and they never get caught. And partly when you are playing with the player's card, because it's a thing that you shouldn't do as a card counter, you're giving up your ID so freely. They can see that you're logged in on the table. They can see your name. So then they just think, oh, probably not a card counter.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:03Speaker 03

  And so it can give you a bit of time, but once again, once you get caught, you're then screwed.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Then it screws you up. Yeah, okay. The disguise thing is worth double clicking on, right? Cause you got some ridiculous disguises. Wigs, okay, fine. Accent training, I never thought about until you brought it up in a video, which totally makes sense, right? Because if you're in Vegas, well, okay, you're not just a white American dude from Montana, you're a white British dude. So now it's like, oh, wait, okay. Much more recognizable by a factor of, you know, whatever, a multiple. That's not good. Fake tats, all of them really tacky. Chest tats, neck tats, dyed facial hair. You could probably sweat that onto your face. That wouldn't be a good look. My favorite was the movie quality fake teeth that like chained your jawline.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  I would assume those are thousands of dollars, right?

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Luckily I got this during pandemic times, so they did me a really good deal. It was a few hundred pounds.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  The fake teeth market was struggling during the pandemic.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Teeth market. Yeah. No, I put a lot of effort into disguises. One of my favorite ones that isn't in this YouTube stuff yet, but has happened is that, once again, blending in by standing out. I got a bunch of bruised tattoos. It's the same place that does the tattoos I wear. They're like movie studio tattoos, right? So they're a bit, those tattoos, they're a bit faded. They look quite realistic, but they also do bruises. I shaved my beard and everything like that and I put loads of these bruises on. I got like a cut tattoo, that kind of thing, black eye. I got a sling and I put on this beanie as well that I just pulled back in a weird way where I looked so rough. I looked like I'd been beaten the crap out of and I walked through Durango Casino in Vegas and someone went, dude, what happened to you, man? So it was that kind of look.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  It was so satisfying because once again, once that look got caught, I could never use it again.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  But first it's like, they don't wanna mention that you look awful.

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  They were avoiding it and they just think you wouldn't look like that.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  Also, oh, darn, I can never use this look again where I look like a complete, like a person who just got out of prison, got their butt kicked on the way out. Okay, I guess I'll pick a different look. It's not like, oh, man, I have to shave my beard forever.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Right. It's completely, you're not married to looking like.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, you don't get real tattoos.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Gosh. People are gonna wonder how they don't just immediately catch you with facial recognition software. That stuff's really good these days, isn't it?

• 1:04:21Speaker 03

  Yes, it is. It's quite a complicated thing, but it comes down to budgets, money usually.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Casinos are famously struggling for money.

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  Well, but they're cheap, you know?

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Oh, that makes sense. That makes sense.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  You ask surveillance people what their experience is like. They're not treated very well and there's a lot of corners that are cut behind the scenes.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  I didn't realize that. That makes sense, of course.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Surveillance people, maybe it's changing these days. I wouldn't really know, but definitely back in like the eighties or whatever, they were treated like bottom of the barrel. Like they couldn't come to their office parties or anything like that because they didn't want collusion between the surveillance and the table dealers, which makes sense.

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  That does make sense.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  But they didn't need to treat them like crap either and they really get like underappreciated. They're running game protection for the whole casino. But the casino sees game protection and catching people stealing or whatever it is, is kind of a bit of an annoying expense, to be honest.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Right, sure.

• 1:05:09Speaker 03

  A lot of casinos just don't wanna spend the money on the subscription service that it is to have that face recognition software.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  You wouldn't think that would even be expen- like my Ring camera can do that in my garage.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  It's wild, isn't it? It does really confuse me, but casinos are cheap and they don't wanna spend more money on something like game protection when they can spend more money on getting customers and all that stuff. So that's one of the things. Some of the face rec technology, they have to like take a screenshot of you, then upload that and then scan it. Whereas some of it automatically scans.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, you would think that's.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. If I walk into Caesar's casinos in Vegas, they will greet me at the door because their face rec will go ping. But in general, most casinos don't use face rec. It's not that great some of the time. And then with the right disguises, you can maybe block some of it. It really just depends. It's definitely a problem. Right now, it's not so much of a problem that it stops us doing what we're doing. It's just a bit annoying.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  I'm so curious, not that you'd know the answer to this, but I'm, you know, like they have a database of criminals. They have a database of card counters. I wonder if they have a database of like, oh, this rich guy just walked in. We wanna make sure he's treated extra well or like, oh, there's a celebrity that maybe nobody working here has recognized right away. But they're actually like a B-list person. We want them to be treated well and so they don't leave.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  I'm pretty sure that with VIPs, they do use the, I think, I don't wanna start saying stuff that I don't know to be true, but I have heard that somewhere. That with VIPs, they'll be using the face rec. With VIPs, right? They will have, if you're a real high roller and you're in town, they'll have the table that you like. Reserved for you with the dealer there for the whole 24 hour period constantly whilst you're there. No one else can play that table just in case you walk in. And yeah, I think that they use face rec for those people to give them a better customer experience. And as much as I find face rec annoying and maybe a bit invasive, I know that they use it and it's very effective against like some human trafficking stuff. But for me, there's a thing about it which makes me a little bit uncomfortable, just in terms of like a civil liberties thing.

• 1:06:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Your time though, doing this has to be somewhat limited with this technology out, right? Like, oh, they're too cheap. Okay. What, when it's basically free? The camera system that they have is just built in. It's 25 bucks a year to use this. It's a thousand dollars a year. It's essentially gonna be whatever that impulse buy level is, or it's just included when the thing is purchased and turned down in the first place, because why wouldn't you have this?

• 1:07:21Speaker 03

  For sure. And I think a lot about AI and how, I don't see why that's not killed counting already, because for me, it doesn't seem hard. Read the cards, read the bet size, correlate those two things, chuck in some face rec there as well, and then you could back off a card counter instantly.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  With no issue and no human, well, I guess human approval maybe, but be a breeze.

• 1:07:38Speaker 02

  What do you think the casinos, has any sympathetic security person told you what your file looks like in casinos or is it just here's his face? Or do they have like 50 disguises that are also you?

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  They do have 50 disguises that are also me. It is really nice that surveillance people do send me this stuff relatively routinely. And it's so funny, some of the notes that I see on the account as well, and some of this stuff I can't talk about in videos because they specifically asked me not to.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  Right. It'll give away who sent the thing.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  But it's very funny when sometimes, I think I can say this because it's vague enough, there'll be a disguise and they'll be like, we don't know who this person is. And then eventually they'll figure it out and then they'll update the profile to say, oh, well, Steven Bridges appears to be wearing a disguise. Yeah, no shit show. Like you didn't realize that before. You can't arrogantly write that as if it was a poor effort when you didn't know.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Right. Like, oh, it took us four hours to find him, but oh, he was wearing a disguise. A lame one, I might add, that fooled us for most of my shift. Yeah.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  That stuff's super useful because if I then know, oh, this casino has got me in this photo and they've sent that photo around.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  Burn that disguise, switch it. Or if I know that this casino doesn't talk to this casino, use that disguise in this casino. Wait until that's done. Now I switch look entirely and you kind of do it in waves. We once did like a bachelor party setup.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  I saw that, yeah.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  We all got T-shirts and these pink T-shirts and we went in as these rowdy English guys. That was really fun and quite effective. It was more just for fun than anything else, but yeah, blending in by standing out.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then it's like, you have to take the wig and sunglasses off. Why? It's part of our thing. Like, well, you're in a casino and we have surveillance and stuff and that might not continue to work for us. Yeah, it's smart though. People might be wondering if this is legal or not and. Well, is it legal?

• 1:09:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, card counting is fully legal.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  And there's a real distinction between card counting and advantage play, which is the umbrella term that card counting falls under, and cheating, because we're only using information that everybody else has access to.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  We're just looking at cards, tracking those cards and using that information. The way I always describe it would be, imagine that you're playing at high level chess and you're in a chess tournament. And then the chess organizer comes up to you and they go, excuse me, Jordan, we've noticed that you're playing and you're thinking four moves ahead, but actually the limit is thinking three moves ahead.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  You'd be like, what the hell are you talking about? I'm just doing the game better.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Sorry, I'm playing better than other people here, yeah.

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  Sure, we're using the information in an unconventional way. You ask any blackjack player that plays recreationally and they're trying to catch a wave or they're seeing that a load of big cards came out, so maybe some small ones are on the way. And they're not doing that precisely enough to get an advantage, but the spirit of that's there, we're just doing it well. There's actually a couple of states where it is illegal for them to ban a card counter from playing, because they've just deemed it unfair to stop someone playing a game skillfully.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's interesting. How come you don't just go there and play all the time?

• 1:10:21Speaker 03

  Well, they get around it by coming up to you at the table and they, they'll do one of two things. They'll say, hey, everybody, we're just changing the table maximum. Instead of it being $5,000, it's now going to be $5. So now we can't, that big anyway, it becomes pointless. Or they'll demand that the dealer shuffles every single round. And they'll just do that kind of thing, which is really funny, because both of those measures will affect their revenue probably more than us being there.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  Like, you could let me win money and just keep taking all of these people's money.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  They can't do it. It's against their, I don't know.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  We want to rob everyone, including ourselves. Yeah, that's crazy to me. So even team play and all that stuff is legit?

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, team play is maybe a little bit more up for debate, depending on the actual way it's done. Long story short, as far as I'm aware, because you're playing a game where you're allowed to communicate with other players.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  If you communicate secretly, then that's not illegal or against the game's rules.

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  Now, I'm not saying that maybe there's some states somewhere where it's different or whatever, it's been ruled differently, but as a general blanket rule, team play is fine. Now, if you were texting the count to somebody or using electronics to communicate that in any way, or you're using electronics to actually count the cards, that is deemed cheating and therefore illegal in most states and countries, I believe.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

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• 1:12:10Speaker 05

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• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  By the way, y'all, I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Most of the sane people, well, some of the sane people are there. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Stephen Bridges. Theoretically, you could just have a bunch of people that speak, let's say, Mandarin Chinese or Cantonese. They just go to where there's a dealer who's not Asian and they have a pretty good way of speaking. Hey, Tim, what's the count? Actually, it's 42. Okay, and nobody knows what you're saying.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  I mean, maybe surveillance is wired to, listening to every table too. I have no idea.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  They can't do that, basically.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  They can't do that.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  They can in the UK, there's microphones at the tables, but in the US, it's illegal.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Oh, it is, okay, yeah. So, I mean, you could just say it out loud.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  What about recording? Because you're recording for videos. So, there's no expectation of privacy. Everyone's on a million cameras in the casino, but can you record? I mean, that's got to be against their policy at the least, right? To record at the table.

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll speak about this, I guess, fairly vaguely, because I don't want to accidentally give some kind of advice or legal advice or whatever that's not covered. But yeah, you've got different laws that affect things in different ways. So, for example, you've got one-party consent states versus all-party consent states. That's just about whether, as long as someone knows that the conversation is being recorded, then it's okay in certain states. And then you've got reasonable expectation of privacy and you don't really have that in a public space. Now, a casino is private, but it's operating like a public space.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  It's open to the public.

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  You'd have to ask a lawyer. My main strategy that I employ, in my videos, I blur the faces of everybody that I see as like a significant person. So, the dealers always get blurred, the pit bosses get blurred, most of the players get blurred. I'm really on it with that. And that is one of the longest and most tedious things in our production process. But for me, I don't want to poke the bear. And also, I have a problem with the casino, not necessarily with the individuals that are doing their job. In a way that I think is scummy sometimes, but they're still just doing their job.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  And it's also about the proportionate reaction too, right? If a video gets a million views and this person's not had their best day and they've said something to me that's kind of rude or they've been rude about it.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  That person's going to get so much hate from my audience and I just don't want that. It's not even about whether I could legally have their face blurred or not. It's just that I don't want them to get shit. And so I just generally try and treat them with respect within the box that I feel is correct, if that makes sense.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So, they ask for ID. You never want to give your ID as a card counter, because then they can, what? Start, add that to the profile and got your name? And that's the beginning of the end, right?

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, in essence, yeah. It's just a lot easier to build a database of pictures around somebody once you know who that person is. It's just all information is harmful for us if they have it. For me, it's a little bit different. There was this weird tipping point in like season two of me putting out my show, where I realized that my desire to protect my name was, it was almost getting in the way of just getting the job done and getting paid out when they kind of knew my name anyway. Or that, it just became this thing where it's like, well, actually, I've got to pick my lane. So, I'm a bit more free with my ID at times, but even then, I'm still careful about when I do it. I might be in a casino, get these chips and then I need to cash them out. I know that they're going to argue with me about the ID, even though there's no legal requirement for me to give over the ID. They're still going to argue about it.

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  A lot of these cage people are like, you have to give over your ID. It's the law. No, it isn't. Yes, it is. And you also probably know that it isn't. You're just being a jerk.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think a lot of them don't know that it is.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  They might not.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  I think it's, they equate policy with the law.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  I've noticed at some places, they're like, well, we're not going to cash you out. And me, the lawyer in me, I'm looking at this video and I'm going, oh, the fuck you aren't. I'm holding chips that you have to consider as cash. I could give these to Osama bin Laden and he could come in here and cash these things out and you would have to get, like, there's no scenario in which you can just say, we're not honoring money today, from you specifically.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  And what's mental about this is that intuitively, you don't even need to look up the law.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  No, you don't.

• 1:16:23Speaker 03

  You just know there's no shot that they can do that and then not honor that side of the transaction.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  Right, because otherwise, what's stopping them from just not paying people out who win all the time?

• 1:16:31Speaker 03

  So, it's mad to me that they say this all the time. And sometimes you know they know. That's the worst situations.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:16:37Speaker 03

  Where they just go, well, what are you going to do about it? And a lot of the time, we'll call the gaming commission, the third-party intermediary that is neutral, and they just immediately default deciding with the casino before they've even heard your story. There's been times that the gaming commission have come down to me and said, well, look, why don't you just give it over to them? Why don't you just give them the ID? And I go, look, you're American. Isn't your whole thing about your rights and your freedom? And like, this is such a key part of American, like, identity.

• 1:17:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Speaker 03

  Why aren't you batting for me here when I'm not doing anything illegal? Yet they'll just stand their ground and say, well, you got to.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Speaker 03

  It's insane.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  No, that's crazy to me. I mean, I guess you could always say, that's fine, I have a bunch more chips at home. I'm going to send my friend and you guys can't do shit about it.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  Well, these are partly the solutions, right? We could give chips to somebody else, we could sell chips, we could just come back a different day. I could come back in a week, give over ID at the cage, and if they don't put me with that other person, it's fine.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  They won't aggregate it, yeah.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  There's a bunch of approaches that we could use. And definitely when I started, my approach was, I'm going to stand my ground because I'm correct.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  And that led to a bunch of shit that's happened in the videos with police being called and all sorts of stuff. So, there's definitely a point where being right is not being effective.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  You've got to think about what battles, battles you're going to have. I mean, don't take any of this as legal advice. And also, there is certain limits, like 10K is like a magic number, where they then have to do a form. That's a whole other thing where you, when we hit those things, we just go, oh crap, I'm giving over my ID today. So, don't take any of this as advice.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, none of this is legal advice.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Vegas has changed the law recently, so then it's a little bit different. They can make you give ID at the cage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Point being, do your own research.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  If you lose enough money, can they demand your ID? I feel like, there was something you said in a video, they'll CTR me and I'm like, oh, I don't know what that is and you didn't explain it.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  Yes, currency transaction report, the document that they have to fill out. It's basically triggered by being in for 10K or cashing out 10K. Either way, so yeah, if we're losing $10,000, that's when we have to give it over.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Speaker 03

  Sometimes we'll leave the casino before we hit that point, because we know that we're going to have to give over the ID.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  There's places I wouldn't want to do this, right? Like, you got to find the sweet spot. You go to America, it's fine, they got tech. You go to Europe, it's fine, they got tech. Latin America and stuff, it's like, you got to check who owns this place. Because if you win $200,000, they might be like, this is cheaper for us to kill you. We're just going to do that instead.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  It's while a friend of mine on my team went to a casino once and I can't quite remember exactly what happened, but they refused to pay him out. They told him, if you come back tomorrow, we'll pay you out. For whatever bullshit reason they were giving him. He comes back tomorrow, gets to the door and they hand him, oh, here's this letter they gave you. And it literally just said something like, go fuck yourself. It's just a casino.

• 1:19:09Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  It's crazy. And they just decided, are you going to try and sue us? Good luck, there's no gaming commission here. And he does nothing he can do about it, he just has to take the loss.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  I'm actually sort of, maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm surprised there's not a cage for like, oh, hey, you want 500 bucks? Oh, you're getting $50,000. Come around into this room where you can sit down and have a glass of water, because this is going to take 15 minutes. And also, maybe we don't want everybody seeing that you're walking out with a burlap sack full of $100 bills. That's weird and uncomfortable.

• 1:19:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are high-limit rooms that do have cages sometimes, so it depends on the place. But yeah, sometimes you're just queuing up with your racks and racks of chips, like everybody else, and people are talking to you because they're like, whoa.

• 1:19:49Speaker 02

  Holy shit.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  How'd you do? What game are you playing?

• 1:19:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  They wanna know stuff. So yeah, it can be a little bit sketchy.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  Think about it. You're basically holding actual cash. It's sure they're chips.

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:58Speaker 02

  And then it turns into cash. Imagine someone goes to the bank and gets a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. You're not like, dude, whoa, that's a ton of money. What are you gonna do with that, huh? You'd immediately call the police if somebody did that at the bank. But at a casino, totally fine.

• 1:20:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm just gonna walk through this dark parking structure alone with all of this in a bag. See you later.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  Well, it's funny actually, because sometimes you get so used to carrying the cash, you become a bit numb to it. Especially for me, right? American money isn't the money that I have in the UK.

• 1:20:24Speaker 02

  It's funny money, right?

• 1:20:25Speaker 03

  Funny money. But after a while, you just kinda get used to it, which is very weird and sometimes quite worrying. There was one time I was on a trip and I had, I can't remember how much it was, but let's just say it was seventy K. It was probably around about that. Seventy K in a bag, and I just had this attached to me at all times.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  Like a fanny pack?

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  I'm like a forgetful guy at times, ironically, as a card counter. So I'm like, I'm gonna have this strapped to me. Every minute of the day, except when I'm sleeping, and then I'll put it on the side of the table that's away from the door, you know, all these kinda precautions. I'm just doing that and I'm living my life like this. It's solo trip, so I'm nowhere near anybody else. And then one day, I go to the local cafe that I was getting my breakfast from. I go to the restroom and I go, I'm just gonna put the bag on the shelf. Go to the loo, leave the restroom, go sit down there, drink the rest of my coffee, and then obviously just shit myself in terms of, holy shit, where's this money? Run back in the bathroom, it's still there.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Thank god.

• 1:21:14Speaker 03

  There are these horror stories that happen with card counters because obviously we're all human, people make mistakes.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  And you think that you would never be so callous. Everybody listening to this is gonna go.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  I've left my laptop on subways before, like, or not subways, but like the air train.

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  Then the police have to give it back to you and they're like, so, uh, are you just stupid or what? And you're like, yes, sir. I'm an idiot.

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  You leave like your whole luggage and laptop because I'm talking to somebody and I'm like, nope, I'm just, you just don't know me. I do this all the time. Meanwhile, you could do that with seventy five thousand dollars.

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  It's just one of those things that you get weirdly used to, and therefore it doesn't flag up as like this big issue in your brain. And, which is funny because I was trying to like put precautions in there and then the one exception to the rule was when I.

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  It's how people get caught with drugs, right? Like they're just on them all the time and then suddenly they're at an airport and they're like, I have cocaine in my pocket. I have to pee right now before I go through that scanner, right now.

• 1:22:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oops. So if you think, you said this before, like, oh, I know when they're talking to surveillance, they're gonna kick me out. Do you get up and leave on your own ideally at that point? Or do you just like, screw it, I'll just play another hand, wait to get kicked out?

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  Once again, it becomes this weird game about us thinking about how do we think instinctively this casino is gonna act?

• 1:22:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  Because there are definitely times where if a casino is suspicious and we leave, they might then go, surveillance, rewind the tape, check if they're accounting, update the database, do all these things.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:37Speaker 03

  And in which case, that process can take sometimes an hour or two, especially if surveillance have got something to do. They've got a queue, they've got more important things to worry about. So sometimes it's like, if we leave, that's gonna happen anyway. And we've wasted all of that additional time that's gonna happen.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:51Speaker 03

  But other times, as you can imagine, it's just like a suspicious meter is going up. And if you leave before that hits a certain point, they just go, oh, well, who cares?

• 1:22:58Speaker 02

  And then you show up again tomorrow and it's, you have to do it all over again.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  Staff and it's like a fresh start. So it's always just a judgment call, basically. In general, we find two principles that work pretty well in terms of card counting are, aggression, both in the bet sizes, like being subtle about things and doing all this cover stuff. On the betting front, doesn't tend to buy you more time than the money that you sacrifice by doing it in general. You might get more time, but it won't exceed the extra few hundred dollars in, that you left on the table.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  And then also that extends to playing. It's like play until you get backed off. Maybe there's certain regions like Vegas where we'll try and be more strategic because we've got more info, but in general, it's hit them hard. Keep playing until they make you leave. Never back yourself off.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Cause sometimes you might just be overthinking it and they're not suspicious.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  They're worried about the guy behind you who's like pickpocketing women who are playing another game or something.

• 1:23:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in the Caesars Casino database, I for some reason, and I only know this because a surveillance person told me, I am listed as a cheater, which I take great issue with. How dare you? Also, if they back me off and that information gets to whoever's doing it, they're gonna treat me differently. It genuinely worries me a bit. One time I'm playing in a Caesars property, not in Vegas, they don't have face rec, and I'm playing, for quite a while, it's like this sort of sweet spot at the time where I got days and days in playing at this case, which is really rare. You can't do that there now. But at the time, that was this sweet spot. And then I see, finally, we have this thing that we call heat. Oh, here's a suspicion. The pit boss is looking over at me, looking back and having these little whispering conversations. There's been a couple of phone calls and I just remember feeling like my whole heart rate just going up.

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  I was essentially in like a panic mode because I thought they are going to realize who I am. And then they're gonna be freaking out because I'm a quote unquote cheater.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  Yeesh.

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  I'm up like a large amount of money at this casino, like it was going really well. And arguably, I've been, this is a weird kinda complicated one, but maybe trespassed from a Caesars property. It's more that they haven't done it, but they've noted it down. So it's this weird thing legally. This whole combination made me genuinely really worried that they would just confiscate the money. Because if you're in a casino where you're not illegally allowed to be in there, different story about the money, right? It maybe goes one way or the other depending on the court or the particular state. So I was getting so worried because I just knew everything about my experience doing this. I'm about to get backed off and I just know it's gonna be bad. Anyway, a few minutes go by and sure enough, the pit boss comes over to me and he's like, sir, can I, can I speak to you?

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, we just need you to fill out this form because you put the UK number here where it should be here. And it was just a false alarm. They were just talking about the CTR form, the whole currency thing. And it was just a complete non-issue. Funnily enough, two hours later, I got backed off, tame us back off of my life. They're really nice. I wasn't trespassed. They were pretty chill with me and I left and it was fine. So there's definitely these times where our instincts are working against us.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  And who knows? We assume that we know what's going on, but it's maybe arrogant to assume that we always know.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. You actually said, an especially nasty casino can attract other counters who want revenge. So that doesn't seem like a professional decision to target a place because you're pissed off at them, but I also totally understand the instinct to be a little bit upset. These people treated me like crap for no reason, or they screwed with a friend of mine. I'm gonna take them to the cleaners. That's interesting. I never really thought about that. So there's people who go, I just particularly hate this place and I wanna take their money in particular.

• 1:26:24Speaker 03

  It comes down to, some casinos will assume that if they treat us like shit, that we'll be scared and we won't wanna come back. So when they do the, the back off, they might make it really aggressive. They bring all the security, they yell at you, they scream at you, whatever it is. So that you are like scared of the casino and then you tell all your card counter friends and they never go back. But in my experience, a hundred percent of the time, if the casino does something like that, then the other card counters on principle just don't like that. They don't like the bullying, the intimidation, all that stuff. So they'll make a point of prioritizing going to the casino.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  All it ever has to be is, hey, you can't play this card game anymore. And maybe this, one of the hundred times the card counter will throw a hissy fit, but other than that.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  There was one time where the guy said, you're like, why? And he goes, you're just too good at it for us. We're losing a ton, we're losing our shirts or something. And, and you're like, have to laugh. Okay. So you're just honestly upset that I'm winning. And they're like, that's what my boss said.

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  But yeah, when they come in and they're like, we're gonna treat you like you're robbing us, when they're busy robbing everybody else who's there.

• 1:27:20Speaker 03

  Some people take it super personally. They really feel like angry that you've done this. It's really strange to me.

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  Which is funny because it's like, hey, you know what? Not your money. This place doesn't give a shit about you.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  They will fire you tomorrow and replace you with somebody else and they won't care if you're homeless, but make sure you simp for them a little harder. And take it personally, like get your blood pressure going and treat me poorly.

• 1:27:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so wild.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  Nah, it is wild, man. You think an advantage player can still become addicted to gambling or is it generally not a thing that happens?

• 1:27:48Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a great question. That's a really good question. I would never advise that someone that has a gambling problem gets into advantage play.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  Generally a bad idea, sure.

• 1:27:56Speaker 03

  Weirdly, I do know of some people where it's almost like, it's almost acted as a form of therapy where, it's dismantled the game so much in their head that then the prospect of them playing becomes really unappealing and those people have gone on to be great card counters. So I can think of two people that have done that. Now, for those two, there might be a hundred that did the same thing and then their gambling problem got worse.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  So in general, if you've got a problem with gambling, I wouldn't try and learn card counting or advantage play. But yeah, the flip can happen. It's pretty rare, I think, because we're so aware of how the sausage is made.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Speaker 03

  We're so aware of it. But there was a Josh Axel Rad, am I getting that name right? There's a card counter that ended up with a poker addiction, just because he got into that. Poker, a game that's really easy to self deceive. You think you've got an edge when you don't, you don't know when your opponent's better than you. So it can happen for sure. In general, I would tell everybody to be incredibly cautious about gambling as a hobby. And most of the time I'd say, there are probably other hobbies that you would enjoy more. Not that I'm saying don't gamble, but for most people, it's not worth it.

• 1:28:52Speaker 02

  That makes sense. That makes sense. Have you ever filed the count because it was correct, but also you secretly wanted the dopamine from the win?

• 1:28:58Speaker 03

  There's definitely an element where we can play for really long periods of time because it is such a dopamine heavy activity.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  And at the end of a trip, when I get back home, I find that my dopamine is fried.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:29:09Speaker 03

  Like everything is boring and it's just really weird. So there's definitely that thing where it's an addictive game that can keep us playing for a long period of time. But honestly, most of the time, if I'm sat there and I'm doing like a seven hour session, I'm almost looking forward to them backing me off because I'm, I wanna go home.

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  I would imagine, yeah. How do you decompress when you're home to make sure that you don't just like, get addicted to the dopamine and start doing other weird stuff to keep it going?

• 1:29:29Speaker 03

  I think luckily for me, despite having quite an addictive personality, it's just never happened that I've got addicted to card counting. And I do my play in trips. So I'll come and I'll be in the US for two or three weeks. I'll play really intensely in that period and then I'll go home. So there's such a separation, almost ritualistically, like I get the flight and then I get home and then I'm jet lagged and then I recover from that. But it's almost like my brain turns off from thinking it's even a possibility. Well, actually, it isn't a possibility in the UK for me. So I'd have to go and gamble on some other weird thing if I wanted to do it. Yeah, luckily for me, it's just not a thing that has manifested into a gambling problem. Definitely is a risk factor for people. Treat gambling like heroin.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Man, I assume when you leave the, because you've, you've asked to be watch your car before, you're carrying all this cash. I guess I'm kinda surprised nobody's ever tried to rob you guys at all?

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  The closest thing we had, I say the closest thing, it was completely a false alarm. But when we were in the Bahamas, we got in a taxi that wasn't a legit taxi. And the taxi driver told us that he was going to stop off on the way to a strip club to pick up some food he'd ordered. And it just felt incredibly sketchy.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  Cause people order food at strip clubs?

• 1:30:36Speaker 03

  Exactly, right?

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  And it's so good, you want to take it out and not go in the strip club, actually.

• 1:30:40Speaker 03

  Of course, right?

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  You just want to bring it home.

• 1:30:41Speaker 03

  Well, we told him, no, we just want you to drive us directly to the street that we're on. And he said, no, no, no, it'll just take a moment. So we were really worried. We pulled up to this building that didn't look like a strip club, just this kind of big concrete thing where there was a bunch of heavies outside, stood, arms folded, looking aggressive. It just looked really sketchy and he gets out. We were stuffing money into our pants and just trying to like, I really thought we were going to get mugged to the point where I messaged him saying, do we make a run for it?

• 1:31:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:31:09Speaker 03

  But we're in a sketchy area, but it was totally a false alarm. He comes out with his Chinese takeout and it's leaking from the bag and he gets in and he drives us. But that was one of those moments where I was genuinely really worried. But yeah, luckily for me, never been robbed.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  So far, so good, touch wood.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  So today I'm wondering what percentage of your income is blackjack versus you have YouTube, you have sponsors, there's affiliate stuff, there's training that you offer, memberships, I don't know, you're probably investing in stuff for all I know. Ranges are fine, I'm not asking how much money you make or whatever, but I'm curious, is it like, oh, well, actually, are YouTube's doing really well? Are you a production company now that the subject is card counting or are you a card counter and you just have a YouTube channel?

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that people would assume that most of the money comes from card counting. And if I was a full time, always card counting, card counter in the US, then maybe I'd be making more money doing that. But really because of being a Brit, there were just limitations to.

• 1:32:02Speaker 02

  Why don't you just move here?

• 1:32:03Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I guess I could, but that'd be offending my entire life to.

• 1:32:07Speaker 02

  No big deal.

• 1:32:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, right? So I actually, I make more money off the YouTube channel. I tend to think of that as just one big bucket, whether it's the sponsorship revenue, the ad revenue.

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  I'm super fortunate that the show does really well. I think it was just kind of lucky that I was sort of first to that and it's gone really good. So for me, I make more money off the YouTube channel. Sponsors are a huge component. I wouldn't be able to make the videos without the sponsors. We put like a ton of time into the edit and the story, maybe more so than makes sense profit wise, but we just want to tell a good story. So yeah, most of it comes from the channel, decent chunk from the actual counting. And then I invest in other car counters and other trips or maybe I'll manage things. So I've got like essentially a decent amount of cash that's just in various places in the US that people are using to play. And then I get a cut of their winnings. So that's pretty useful too.

• 1:32:50Speaker 02

  Man, so that's interesting that part of the business is the highest return on your time, actually.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  I guess so, right? Cause it doesn't take me anything and it's actually really useful for me to have that money split in different places because I'm a bit less worried about. I don't want to put it in the bank because it's hard to get it out the bank. I don't want to leave it at one person's house or even in a deposit box.

• 1:33:08Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  It's all a bit tricky. So having it split between different friends that are playing with it, it's a pretty good situation to be in.

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  That makes sense. Wow. Is there a line you won't cross with the whole video production thing and the card counting thing? Is there something you just won't do, even if it'd be a sick video?

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  I try and just, I don't know how to say this in a way that doesn't come across wanky, but in essence, I just try and live the experience of me counting and then document that and tell that story in an honest way. I try not to do things too much for the content.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:33:40Speaker 03

  I'll do disguises and stuff and maybe I'll lean in more to that because I know it'll be good for the content. Or more accurately, the content makes me do that because of putting my face online. But I try not to engineer arguments with staff or anything like that. There's been this trend of people, especially on short form, arguing with pit bosses and things. I just try and keep it to how I would naturally be in the casino because I just want to document a real thing and I don't want to glorify it either. Obviously it kind of glorifies it because I'm showing the sexy element of being a car cat.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  But I also want to show me crying in my car when having an awful time or whatever it is. The main kind of principle is I just try and tell things honestly. It's very rare, but sometimes I want to move this casino session to be after another one in the narrative for a very specific reason. But even that makes me a bit uncomfortable because I just want to stay really true to the thing.

• 1:34:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have to decide if it's like a security thing, a business thing, or if it's just like a storytelling thing. And it's like, all right.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:34:30Speaker 02

  If it's just going to make the story better, maybe not. But if it's going to get us banned from a whole chain of casinos before we actually fly out there to do it, then maybe we're releasing this one earlier.

• 1:34:38Speaker 03

  Some of the stuff that surveillance tell me is so juicy and it's, I write it into the video and then I send them the script and they tell me that I can't do it. And I just cut it. It really hurts my heart because sometimes it's the most interesting thing to me. And without that, it's going to look like, why did Stephen do this weird thing?

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:54Speaker 03

  But I just take that here because it's not, it'd be disrespectful to do that.

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah, that's funny because I was going to just ask you like, what's the next thing you can't put in a video? And it's going to be all that insider info that just.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  Will get somebody fired if they.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  Sometimes I will tell slightly fictional story around that, that is keeping the truth of what happened whilst protecting the identity of the people involved.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  I think that's fair.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I might say a friend of mine suspected this could be happening when in reality surveillance told me this was happening.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  Might be a thing, but I really just try and keep it true to the actual thing.

• 1:35:24Speaker 02

  Are you worried that eventually, like we said before, AI facial recognition is going to make it impossible for you to disguise yourself? So who, who are you without the chase, without this, you know, what are you going to do?

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  It's weird because there's nothing else I've come across in life that scratches the itch that card counting has. It's like being a career criminal when you're not doing anything illegal and arguably it's, it's morally neutral, I would say. So it is going to be a bit of a hit when I can't do that anymore. I've been quite slow at producing the content, so I film more trips than I actually publish. Well, I publish them all, it just takes me a while. So I'm maybe a few years ahead or behind on content, depending on how you look at it.

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  That's good, then you'll have a runway.

• 1:36:02Speaker 03

  I have some time to pivot or at least to accept this is my 15 minutes of fame and then I go and do something else.

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  Honestly, I'm just very grateful that I get to do this at all. It feels very surreal to me. And once again, I don't know if this just sounds overly corny, but genuinely there's probably not a day that goes by where I'm not like sat going, I get to do this, this is my life, I get to make the show that people like, and I get to go and do this adventure. And I feel really, really just appreciative that I get this little pocket in my life where I get to do it.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  If you want to have kids though, you can't be flying around to Bahamas and Vegas all the time doing this.

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, when you've got a family, it's so tough. I don't have kids, so it's not an issue for me, but.

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  If you have a partner, if you're married, if you've got a kid, the whole thing is going to be so much on hard mode.

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:42Speaker 03

  And I would encourage those people to maybe think about it part time. If you're someone that travels for a living, like you do speaking or whatever, or it's something that requires a lot of travel, then it's great to go, well, actually, when I have to be in San Francisco, are there casinos around? And then you can go do that. I think that's much healthier as well psychologically, because those swings of the wins and losses, much like I guess day trading or whatever. It's not great for your brain.

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  Makes a great hobby, makes a iffy career.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  For sure.

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, that makes sense. Stephen, thank you so much. Super interesting.

• 1:37:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  Your body fights microscopic cancers before you know they're there, but what happens when its defenses slip? Here's a preview with Dr. William Lee.

• 1:37:22Speaker 06

  I'm a researcher as well as a physician, so being a doctor and a scientist gives me an unusual lens. It turns out the actual new biology of cancer, we're actually forming cancers in our bodies all the time. The fact of the matter is, is our bodies are made of about 40 trillion cells. Those are the building blocks of our body. These cells have to copy themselves over and over and over again, over the course of our lives. 40 trillion cells copying and pasting each other. Do they make an error? And the answer is yes. That's how we understand cancers can actually form. So they sit there abnormally until our immune system wings by, finds them and then knocks them out. And that's actually the key.

• 1:38:07Speaker 06

  Most of this stuff gets taken out by our body's health defenses. Meaning that when our defenses are working well, these kinds of things are going to get taken out. We're not going to be worried about them. And so our health is a result of our body's defenses firing on all cylinders from the day we're born until our very last breath. Having your shields down is really the problem. The diagnosis of cancer is still a big deal, but we are beginning now to see the end of cancer with treatments that are actually able to take very advanced cancers and literally dry erase them. The developments are happening so fast now. I never thought in my career I would see stage four cancer going to stage zero and it's happening.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  To hear which foods can help and which health trends could backfire, check out episode 1357 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Dr. William Lee.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  A good decision can lose money and a terrible one can pay off. The danger is learning the wrong lesson from either one. Judge the process, understand the downside and don't let one lucky win convince you that you've outsmarted the game. All things Stephen Bridges on the website, advertisers, deals, discounts and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well, still free over at sixminutenetworking.com. And this show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadusid Louskas, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  So if you know somebody who's interested in gambling, card counting, casinos, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on this show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

• 1:40:01Speaker 00

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5, only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promoting pricing may be lower than meal pricing.