I Lost My Job And Needed To Support My Family. This Is How I Beat The Casinos To Win Nearly $1 Million.

My career in card counting began in a church lobby. A casual conversation led to a meeting which led to joining a team of card-counting parishioners, and together we beat casinos at the game of blackjack from coast to coast for seven years, banked by investors for a million dollars. Casinos would eventually label me the “most notorious card counter in America.” No wonder I had to start wearing disguises.

In 2004, I was fired from my copy editor job. My wife and I had a 2-year-old at the time, and had just found out another was on the way. Maybe I should have suspected something was up. My desk had moved four times in four months, most recently into a storage closet.

Just as I started my job hunt, my car died on the side of the freeway on the way to an interview. This was the car my wife and I drove from our Texas wedding to a new life in Seattle, Washington. This was the car we’d driven home from the hospital when our son was born. I watched the salvaging company truck tow it away.

I happened to read a book called “Bringing Down the House,” which told the story of a team of MIT students who bested casinos by using counting strategies at blackjack. The game was beatable and doing so was completely legal. Players gained an advantage by using simple math. Card counting — what if?

I didn’t tell anyone I was looking into card counting, which was well enough. I had trouble finding any reliable information. I tracked down some rudimentary charts. I made a few flash cards, crammed numbers into my brain as best I could, and off I went to the casino. I happened to win, and took a crisp new 100-dollar bill to church to pay off a debt to a friend, but also to do a little bragging about how I had won it. I was waiting for Jim’s