Bringing Down the House Week 6

In the chapters that i read the blackjack team was becoming more and more successful now that Kevin had gotten promoted to Big player alongside Fisher and Martinez. Kevin begins to fall in love with Vegas and says that he is now living a double life. He has a girlfriend back at MIT but i forgot her name and he has trouble keeping the Vegas secret from her and everyone else. Every weekend he come home with like 10000 and has to hide it in his dorm room. He has so much money that he has to pay everything in 100 dollar bills in order to get rid of all of them. He buys a bunch of cool expensive things like a huge tv and a brand new snowboard and other things like that. Since he is buying so many nice things his girlfriend and family get suspicious and think that hes dealing drugs. He brings his girlfriend to see his parents over thanksgiving and then tries to tell his dad about card counting but doesn't have the balls to do it. His father grew up in china and had a really hard life at a young age and had to over come a lot so his dad would be mad if he thought he was cheating or stealing or whatever so hes worried to tell him. Kevin also meets a cheerleader for the Rams i think who is a very very very hot girl and i think he cheats on his girlfriend a lot(it doesn't really say). At the end of this section that i read they kick out Mickey because Martinez Fisher and Kevin have gained enough money to fund the team without the financial help of Mickey. Mickey takes it sort of well but also gives them advice which seems kind of ironic because it seems as if later on in the book he will mess it up for them or something like that.

Bringing down the house week 5

One thing that i find that is really cleaver is the way that they set up their system once they are in the casino. First, all of the spotters come in one by one with 5 minute increments inbetween each other as to not create suspicion. Each spotter chooses a table to sit at and they do not raise or lower their bets at all they keep it all the same because the spotters are not their to make money, they are there to figure out the count and then give the Big player or the gorilla a sign to come in and play that table when the count is high. A high count consists of basically anything in the teens and then 12 11 10 9 are still pretty good as well. The sign that the spotters give the big players and the gorillas for them to come and play that table is that they cross their arms and put them behind their back. When the Big players get to the table they have to know how good of a count they are playing with so that they can keep the count going in their head, and also they need to be able to know how much to bet so in a very clever scale they made a system to tell the big players what the count is. The spotter will make a remark/comment/question/etc. with one of the following words to tell the big players the count. Tree-1 because 1 looks like a tree. Switch-2 because a switch is binary. Stool-3, 3 legs. Car-4, 4 wheels. Glove-5, 5 fingers. Gun-6, 6 bullets. Craps-7, lucky seven. Pool-8, 8 ball. Cat-9, 9 lives. Bowling-10, 10 pins. Football-11, 11 looks like goalposts. Eggs-12, a dozen. Witch-13, witch number. Ring-14, 14 carrot gold. Paycheck-15, get payed on the 15th. Sweet-16, sweet 16. Magazine-17, name of the teen magazine. Voting booth-18, age you can vote.

Bringing Down the House week 4

In these chapters Kevin starts to play with the blackjack team and Kevin starts out as a spoter. Kevin is still clueless on how much they will actually be making from this so he is surprised to hear that from his 6 hour shift, the team made 38,000$, which means that he made 2,500$. The majority of the money goes to Mickey and the other investors which does include Fisher and Martinez who have kind of upgraded to small investors in order to make more money for their work. Fisher and Martinez are the big players which makes their jobs the highest risking and they should be paid a whole lot more money, more money then even the investors who shouldnt even be their considering that Fisher, Martinez and the others have enough funds to fund their own team without Mickey or the investors. Mickey is a useless coach of the team and makes well over 50% of the money, and he never even plays a single hand for the team because of how dangerous to the casinos he is. Just to try it out the team(Martinez and Fisher) allow Kevin to be something more then just a spotter on his 2nd night of blackjack, but instead of being a big player they allow him to be a Gorilla which is where you wait for the count to be high and then just throw your chips in without thinking until the count is low, which is differant then a big player because a big player would split, double down, vary his bets based on the complex formula that they have. One thing i learned which i think would really give the counters an advantage is playing more then 1 hand at a time at one table. I had no idea that you were able to do this, but if the count is high it would be very beneficial to have a bunch of hands going.