Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T

 

THE FREE PRESS  

A Division of Simon & Schuster Inc.  

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New York, NY 10020 

Copyright © 2002 by Ben Mezrich  

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in  any form.  

The names of many of the characters and locations in this book have been  changed, as have certain physical characteristics and other descriptive details.  Some of the events and characters are also composites of several individual  events or persons.  

THE FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.  Designed by Dana Sloan  

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data  

Mezrich, Ben.  

 Bringing down the house: the inside story of six MIT students who took  Vegas for millions/Ben Mezrich.  

 p. cm.  

1. Cardsharping. 2. Gambling—Nevada—Las Vegas. 3. Gamblers— Massachusetts—Boston—Biography. 4. Massachusetts Institute of  Technology—Students—Biography. I. Title.  

GV1247 .M49 2002  

364.1’72’0922—dc21  

[B]  

2002072218  

ISBN 0-7432-5084-2  

Visit us on the World Wide Web:  

http://www.SimonSays.com

Contents  

Acknowledgments  

One  

Two Boston, Present Day 

Three Boston, June 1994 

Four Atlantic City, June 1994 

Five Boston, September 1994 

Six Boston, October 1994 

Seven Boston, October 1994 

Eight Las Vegas, Present Day 

Nine Thirty Thousand Feet, November 1994 Ten Las Vegas, November 1994 Eleven Weston, MA, Thanksgiving 1994 Twelve The Double Life, 1994–95 Thirteen Chicago, May 1995 

Fourteen Boston, June 1995 

Fifteen Foxwoods Casino, Present Day Sixteen July 1995 to October 1995 Seventeen Boston, Halloween 1995 Eighteen Boston, November 1995 Nineteen Las Vegas, Present Day 

Twenty Las Vegas, Fall 1997 

Twenty-One Boston, Fall 1997 

Twenty-Two Las Vegas, Present Day Twenty-Three Boston, Valentine’s Day 1998

Twenty-Four Las Vegas, President’s Day 1998 

Twenty-Five The Bayou: Shreveport, LA, 1998 Twenty-Six Boston, Spring 1998 

Twenty-Seven Boston, Spring 1998 

Twenty-Eight Boston, Spring 1998 

Twenty-Nine Boston, Spring 1998 

Thirty Las Vegas, Memorial Day 1998 

Thirty-One Boston, June 1998 

Thirty-Two Las Vegas, Hard Rock, Present Day How to Count Cards and Beat Vegas An Essay by Kevin Lewis About the Author 

Acknowledgments  

M y deepest thanks to Dominick Anfuso and Leslie Meredith, my spectacular  editors at Simon & Schuster. Thanks also to Dorothy Robinson for keeping  me focused throughout the editorial process. I am indebted to David Vigliano,  my superb agent, as well as Mike Harriot and Jason Sholl at Vig’s agency.  Thanks to Brian Lipson at Endeaver for shepherding the project through the  Hollywood machinery, and to Jay Sanders at Eagle Cove Entertainment for  truly understanding what this book is all about.  

Furthermore, this book could not have been written without the incredible  support and expertise of my card-counting friends here in Boston. Thank you  for introducing me to a side of Las Vegas most people never get to see.  

As always, I am grateful to my parents and brothers for their continued  support. And to Tonya Chen: Beautiful, you glow like neon in my eyes.  

One  

It was ten minutes past three in the morning, and Kevin Lewis looked like he  was about to pass out. There were three empty martini glasses on the table in  front of him, and he was leaning forward on both elbows, his gaze focused on  

his cards. The dealer was still feigning patience, in deference to the pile of  purple chips in front of the martini glasses. But the other players were  beginning to get restless. They wanted the kid to make his bet already—or  pack it in, grab the ratty duffel bag under his chair, and head back to Boston.  Hell, hadn’t he won enough? What was a college senior going to do with  thirty thousand dollars?  

The dealer, sensing the mood at the table, finally tapped the blackjack shoe.  “It’s up to you, Kevin. You’ve had a hell of a run. Are you in for another  round?”  

Kevin tried to hide his trembling hands. Truth be told, his name wasn’t really  Kevin. And he wasn’t even slightly drunk. The red splotches on his cheeks  had been painted on in his hotel room. And though thirty thousand dollars in  chips was enough to make his hands shake, it wasn’t something that would  impress the people who really knew him. They’d be much more interested in  the ratty duffel bag beneath his chair.  

Kevin breathed deeply, calming himself. He’d done this a hundred times, and  there was no reason to think that tonight would be any different.  

He reached for three five-hundred-dollar chips, then glanced around,  pretending to look for the cocktail waitress. Out of the corner of his eye, he 

saw his Spotter. Red-haired, pretty, wearing a low-cut blouse and too much  makeup. Nobody would have guessed she was a former MIT mechanical engineering major and an honors student at Harvard Business School. She was  close enough to see the table but far enough away not to draw any suspicion.  Kevin caught her gaze, then waited for her signal. A bent right arm would tell  him to double his bet. Both arms folded and he’d push most of his chips into  the betting circle. Arms flat at her sides and he’d drop down to the lowest  possible bet.  

But she didn’t do any of these things. Instead, she ran her right hand through  her hair.  

Kevin stared at her, making sure he had read her right. Then he quickly started  to gather his chips.  

“That’s it for me,” he said to the table, slurring his words. “Should have  skipped that last martini.”  

Inside, he was on fire. He glanced at his Spotter again. Her hand was still deep  in her red hair. Christ. In six months, Kevin had never seen a Spotter do that  before. The signal had nothing to do with the deck, nothing to do with the  precise running count that had won him thirty thousand dollars in under an  hour.  

A hand in the hair meant only one thing. Get out. Get moving. Now.  

Kevin slung the duffel bag over his shoulder and jammed the purple chips into  his pockets.  

The dealer was watching him carefully. “You sure you don’t want me to color  up?”  

Maybe the man sensed that something wasn’t right. Kevin was about to toss  him a tip when he caught sight of the suits. Three of them, coming around the  nearest craps table. Big, burly men with narrow eyes.No time for niceties.  

“That’s okay,” Kevin said, backing away from the table. “I like the way they  jiggle around in my pants.”  

He turned and darted through the casino. He knew they were watching him  from above—the Eyes in the Sky. But he doubted they would make a scene.  They were just trying to protect their money. Still, he didn’t want to take any  chances. If the suits caught up to him—well, everyone had heard the stories.  Back rooms. Intimidation tactics. Sometimes even violence. No matter how  many makeovers the town got, deep down, this was still Vegas.  

Tonight Kevin was lucky. He made it outside without incident, blending into  the ever-present flow of tourists on the brightly lit Strip. A minute later, he 

was sitting on a bench at a neon-drenched cabstand across the street. The  duffel bag was on his lap.  

The redhead from inside dropped onto the bench next to him, lighting herself  a cigarette. Her hands were shaking. “That was too fucking close. They came  straight out of the elevators. They must have been upstairs watching the whole  time.”  

Kevin nodded. He was breathing hard. His chest was soaked in sweat. There  was no better feeling in the world.  

“Think we should quit for the night?” the girl asked.  

Kevin smiled at her.  

“Let’s try the Stardust. My face is still good there.”  

He put both hands on the duffel bag, feeling the stacks of bills inside. A little  over one million dollars, all in hundreds: Kevin’s bankroll, partially financed  by the shadowy investors who recruited him six months before. They had  trained him in mock casinos set up in ratty apartments, abandoned  warehouses, even MIT classrooms. Then they had set him loose on the neon  Strip.  

Most of his friends were back at school—taking tests, drinking beer, arguing  about the Red Sox. He was in Las Vegas, living the high life on a million  dollars of someone else’s money. Sooner or later, it might all come crashing  down. But Kevin didn’t really care.  

He hadn’t invented the System. He was just one of the lucky few smart  enough pull it off… 

Two  

Boston, Present Day  

T wenty-five thousand dollars in hundreds, strapped to each thigh. Another  fifty thousand in a Velcro bag taped to my chest. Fifty thousand more stuffed  into the pockets of my jacket. A hundred thousand nestled against the small of  my back.  

I felt like a cross between the Michelin Man and a drug dealer. Bulging and  nervous, I pushed through the revolving glass door and entered Logan Airport.  Refrigerated air smacked me full in the face, and I paused, getting my  bearings. Terminal B was bustling with college kids fleeing town for the long  Memorial Day weekend: backpacks, baggy jeans, baseball caps, duffel bags.  Everyone moving in every direction at once, the unchoreographed ballet of a  modern American airport. I took a deep breath and joined the flow of people. 

I kept my eyes low, watching my scuffed dark loafers pad across the tiled  floor. Act casual, think casual, be casual… I tried not to think about the new  BMW strapped to my back. I tried not to think about the down payment for a  two-bedroom condo nestled in my jacket pockets. I concentrated on looking  like everyone else; maybe not a college kid, but perhaps a grad student, a  teaching assistant—someone’s older brother here to help with the luggage.  Just part of the cacophony, a statistic in Logan’s weekly FAA report. Act  casual, think casual, be casual… 

Suddenly, the modern equivalent of Stonehenge loomed in front of me: two  airport metal detectors standing side by side, flanked by waist-high conveyor  belts continuously feeding into boxy steel X-ray machines. My pulse rocketed  as I mentally checked myself. No bills hanging from my sleeves, no glimpses  of green sticking out through the buttons on my shirt. I stepped into line  behind a pretty brunette in low-riding jeans, even offering to help her hoist an  oversize, sticker-covered suitcase onto one of the conveyor belts. Act casual,  think casual, be casual… 

“Next.” A tall African-American woman in a grey Logan uniform beckoned.  There was a name tag on her right lapel, but I couldn’t make out what it said  because of the sweat stinging my eyes. I blinked rapidly—but casually—and  stepped forward through the disembodied door frame. The invisible rays  

sliced and diced my entrails in search of metal. Just as I started to breathe  easier, a high-pitched mechanical scream tore through the dead air. I froze.  

The woman with the name tag pointed me back through the machine. “Empty  your pockets of any metal objects and try again.”  

My throat constricted. My hands jerked instinctively toward the bulges  beneath my jacket. Above the stacks of hundred-dollar bills, I felt something  shaped like an enormous suppository.  

Shit. I had forgotten about my cell phone.  

My fingers shook as I reached into my coat and fumbled for my Nokia. I  could feel the woman’s eyes on me. If she asked me to take off my jacket, I  was dead. She’d see the bulges and all hell would break loose. I’d spent the  past six months researching stories involving attempts at sneaking undeclared  fortunes through airport-security checkpoints, and I knew all about customs  law.  

The security agents can detain you for forty-eight hours. They drag you to a  windowless room, sometimes handcuff you to a chair. They call in agents  from the DEA and the FBI. They confiscate your stake, sometimes without  even giving you a receipt. It will take lawyers and letters and appearances in  court to get the money back. Maybe six months, maybe a year. Meanwhile,  the IRS will descend on you like grey-suited locusts. It will be up to you to  prove you weren’t planning to trade the cash for little bags of fine white 

powder. Because to customs agents, money smells like cocaine. Especially  hundred-dollar bills. I’ve read that 95 percent of the hundred-dollar bills in  circulation have minute traces of cocaine embedded in their fibers. That  means those specially trained customs dogs can sniff out a professional  blackjack player faster than they can spot a drug courier. To the dogs—and  the customs agents—they both smell the same.  

Fear soaked my back as I handed the woman my cell phone. She looked at it  like she’d never seen one before. She turned it on, turned it over, then handed  it back. Behind me, a kid in a tie-dyed sweatshirt tried to shove a potted plant  

onto the conveyor belt. The woman with the name tag rolled her eyes. Then,  thankfully, she waved me past.  

“You’re okay. Have a nice flight.”  

I was barely breathing as I stumbled toward my gate. America West, flight 69.  Boston to Vegas direct, the Friday-night neon express. A line of people had  already formed by the check-in desk; boisterous, drunk, mostly male, palpably  eager.  

Kevin Lewis was waiting quietly near the back of the line. I spotted him  immediately. Tall, athletically built, but with a slight, shy stoop to his  shoulders. Dark hair, dark eyes, a wide, boyish face beneath a mop of dark  hair. Vaguely ethnic, but beyond that, indeterminate. His roots could have  been Asian, Latino, even Italian or Russian. Like me, he was older than most  of the college kids boarding the flight, but he easily fit in with the crowd. He  could have been twenty-one, twenty-six, or thirty-five. Wearing a jeans jacket  and a baseball cap, he could have passed for a BU frat boy. In a suit and tie,  he would have blended in on Wall Street. At the moment, he was wearing an  MIT sweatshirt and baggy shorts. The classic MIT stereotype, right out of his  parents’ dreams.  

He saw my flushed cheeks and smiled. “That’s what it felt like. Every day.”  

The bravado seemed incongruous with the shyness in his shoulders. In many  ways, Kevin was the classic MIT stereotype. His résumé was perfect: a math science whiz kid who’d graduated at the top of his class from Exeter, the  exclusive New Hampshire boarding school. An electrical-engineering major  with an incredible affinity for numbers, a straight-A student who’d covered all  the premed requisites—partially to appease his father, partially because the  challenge excited him.  

But Kevin’s résumé didn’t tell the whole story. There was another side to his  life, one written in neon signs and purple casino chips.  

In Boston he’d earned straight A’s at MIT. 

In Vegas he’d partied with Michael Jordan, Howard Stern, Dennis Rodman,  and Kevin Costner. He’d dated a cheerleader from the L.A. Rams and gotten  drunk with Playboy centerfolds. He’d been chased off of a riverboat in  Louisiana and watched a teammate kicked out of a Las Vegas casino. He’d  narrowly escaped being thrown into a Bahamian jail. He’d been audited by the  IRS, tailed by private investigators, had his picture faxed around the globe by  men with shadowy reputations and guns holstered to their waists.  

Along the way, he’d amassed a small fortune which he kept in neat stacks of  Benjamins in a closet by his bed. Although nobody was quite sure how much  money he had made, it was rumored to be somewhere between one and five  million dollars. All of it legal, none of it spawned from his perfect,  stereotypical résumé.  

Shy, geeky, amiable Kevin Lewis had led a double life for nearly four years.  Now I was going to tell his story.  

“The Velcro’s starting to itch” was all I could think to say as I shook Kevin’s  hand. “There’s got to be an easier way to carry your stake.”  

He grinned, his head cocked to one side. “Sure. Fake umbrellas. Phony laptop  computers. Plaster casts and hollow crutches. We went through a gadget  phase. You know, James Bond kind of stuff. But hollow crutches are a lot  harder to explain to the FBI than Velcro.”  

If there hadn’t been a quarter million dollars taped to my body, I’d have  thought he was joking. But Kevin was dead serious. He was keeping his part  of our bargain, disclosing the secrets no one on the outside had ever heard  before.  

I met Kevin Lewis nearly seven years earlier, in a local Boston bar. I had  graduated from Harvard a few years before he left MIT, and we shared a few  mutual friends as well as a few minor interests: sports, late nights at college  pubs, widescreen TVs. I was a fledgling writer at the time of our introduction,  just about to publish my first novel. As far as I knew, Kevin was employed by  some sort of computer software firm, something he had never explained in  detail—probably because I had never been interested enough to ask.  

Kevin seemed too much the typical MIT grad: a true engineer at heart. As my  writing career began to take off in the years that followed our first meeting,  we rarely crossed paths. It was almost six years later that we ran into each  other at a Super Bowl party in an apartment located a few blocks from  Fenway Park. Kevin had just flown in from a “business” trip to Las Vegas.  During the game’s half-time show, I found myself alone with him in the  kitchen. After a quick exchange of pleasantries, he surprised me by lowering  his voice and beckoning me in close: “I’ve got a great story for your next  book,” he began. 

I immediately thought about edging toward the exit. Like every other writer, I  had heard this opening a thousand times in my career. Everyone had a story he  believed worthy of a best-seller; for me, reality was rarely interesting enough  to take the place of fiction.  

But as Kevin began to open up to me, I felt the hair rising on the back of my  neck. Unlike the thousands of other cocktail party stories I had heard, Kevin’s  tale had all the elements of a high-concept, cinematic thriller—but it was real.  Everything Kevin was relating to me had actually happened. He had lived it,  every minute of it, and he was willing to let me get it all down on paper.  

“Why?” I had asked, amazed.  

Kevin never answered my question directly. Over time, I’ve tried to piece  together an answer of my own.  

Kevin had been part of something incredible. He and his friends got away  with one of the biggest schemes in Vegas history—and nobody knew a damn  thing about it. Telling the story was his way of reliving the experience in a  public forum. It was a way for him to prove to himself and to anyone who  cared that it had actually happened.  

More than that, it was a way for Kevin to come to terms with the choices he  had made, the decisions that had led him to his double life. Many of those  choices might have seemed immoral to the outside world. By telling his story,  Kevin could explain himself to those who believed that what he did was  somehow wrong.  

In other words, his story was part boast, part confession. For me, this was too  good a story to pass up.  

As the Super Bowl played on in the other room, Kevin made me an offer. He  promised to tell me everything, to give me access to his contacts and his  lifestyle. He promised to teach me his system and show me the key that could  unlock the casino’s coffers.  

In return, I would give him his moment.  

The deeper I delved into Kevin’s double life, the more I realized how far I had  come out ahead in our bargain. When I finally sat down to put the words onto  paper, Kevin’s story flashed by my eyes in Technicolor as bright as a Vegas  marquee… 

Three  

Boston, June 1994  

I n the beginning, there was sushi. 

Five neat little rows lined up across the glass coffee table like a battalion of  squat, brightly-colored soldiers. Above the battalion, the strong scent of  seaweed and raw fish spread out in a fog to fill the cramped, seventies-era  high-rise apartment. Beneath the table stood a pyramid of discarded cardboard  cartons from Toyama, the late-night Japanese dive located a few blocks away  in Boston’s moderately European Back Bay. The dive wasn’t a favorite but an  expedience, one of the few restaurants open past midnight on a Sunday in a  city that still clung to antiquated blue laws and Puritanical facades—despite  playing home to one of the largest, rowdiest college-age populations on earth.  

The sushi was part of a weekly routine. As usual, it was well after two in the  morning, and Kevin Lewis was crashed out on the worn futon in the middle of  the sparsely furnished living room. The TV was on with the sound turned  down, and Kevin was half asleep. His body ached from two hours at the MIT  gym, and his mind was numb from a long day spent sequestered in a  chemistry lab at one of Boston’s top hospitals. It was two months into the  summer after his junior year, and he had spent so much time surrounded by  test tubes, he was beginning to identify them by name. The daily grind at the  lab was made worse by the fact that he no longer had any interest in medicine  as a career; he just hadn’t figured out how to break the news to his parents.  His father was still trying to convince him to quit the MIT Swim Team so he  could spend more time on his research. More time with the goddamn test  tubes.  

Kevin had just turned twenty a month before and he was old enough to make  his own decisions about the direction of his life. But like most twenty-year olds, he had no idea where he was heading. He knew only where  he didn’t want to end up. It was 1993, the dawn of the Internet revolution;  many of his MIT classmates were already conceiving start-ups in their dorm  rooms, conspiring to turn the high-tech skills that had made many of them  pariahs in high school into launchpads for their billion-dollar dreams. The kids  who weren’t dissecting microprocessors in their bunk beds were set to ride the  tried-and-true waves of Wall Street. Venture capital, investment banking, tech  consulting—MIT, along with Harvard and the other Ivies, was one of the main  feeders to the vast money-making machines fueling the revolution. If the  eighties had made greed acceptable, the nineties had elevated it to an art form.  

Medicine, academia, science for science’s sake—these were not compelling  choices in the tornado of options swirling around a campus such as MIT. But  unlike many of his classmates, Kevin didn’t see himself being satisfied by a  life on Wall Street or a smoke-and-mirrors sojourn into Silicon Valley. He  didn’t think of himself as some sort of saint: He was as addicted to the notion  of unfettered greed as the kid on the next bunk over. He just hadn’t yet found  his drug of choice.  

At the moment he didn’t want to think about his future, or his father, or the  test tubes in his lab. He just wanted to sleep. But the sushi waged war with his 

senses. He reluctantly opened his eyes and watched as his friends descended  on the coffee table.  

Christ, the jackals.  

He was immediately struck by the contrast in physical geometry. Jason  Fisher’s hulking form cast a boxy shadow over the rows of sushi. Six foot one,  two hundred and twenty pounds, Fisher was built like a heavyweight boxer.  His shoulders were huge, his head square, and the muscles beneath his MIT T shirt rippled like a plastic trash can left out in a heat wave. Kevin had met  Fisher in the gym after bravely offering to help the former MIT student load  plates the size of manhole covers onto the bench press. He had been surprised  to learn that Fisher, several years older, was a similar mix of ethnicities; part  Chinese—you could see it in his eyes, narrow drops of oil beneath a ridged  brow—part Brazilian. Two days later, Fisher introduced Kevin to his cohort  and roommate, Andre Martinez. Slicked-back hair, flashy silk shirt, shark  tooth necklace, bushy eyebrows, and impossibly wide teardrop eyes. Martinez  was barely five foot four and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and  thirty pounds. But his reputation more than made up for his size. Kevin had  been hearing rumors about Martinez since freshman week.  

The standout genius at a school filled with geniuses, a kid so smart he had  scared the math professors into accelerating him to graduate-level courses on  his third day on campus. Whiz Kid, Boy Wonder, the pride of MIT—until,  one week into his sophomore year, Martinez had suddenly left school. In the  six months they’d known each other, Kevin had never asked why—and  Martinez had never volunteered.  

“I think it’s awake,” Martinez said now as he flipped a piece of sushi into his  mouth. “Jab it with a chopstick to make sure.”  

Fisher complied, poking Kevin in the forehead. Kevin grabbed for his wrist,  knocking a sushi roll across the living room. Martinez laughed a little too  loudly, and Kevin realized they were both drunk. Less than an hour ago,  Fisher and Martinez had landed at Logan, and it looked as though they went  through most of the beverage cart during the five-hour flight. Kevin tried to  hide his distaste. It had been like this all summer. The two of them gone every  weekend, then spending the week sleeping late and drinking early—and  dropping in on Kevin without regard to the hour. They never went to work,  never seemed to do anything at all, while Kevin slaved away in the lab.  

“A couple of slackers,” Kevin said, shoving two rolls of sushi into his mouth.  He was channeling his dad, and it bothered him. Why should he care how his  friends spent their time?  

“We choose to think of ourselves as emancipated,” Fisher said. “We’re  working our way up to slacker.” 

Kevin shook his head. Everything was a joke to them. They existed entirely in  the present, no responsibilities, no conscience. Kevin couldn’t imagine living  like that. Everything in his life had always been planned out. Exeter, MIT, his  

part-time job at the lab. Even with the plans, he agonized over every step.  Fisher and Martinez didn’t agonize over anything. They didn’t seem to have a  future, and they didn’t seem to care.  

Neither of them had even graduated from MIT; both had simply left. At least  Fisher’s reasons had been noble; his sister, Josie, had been injured in a car  accident, and he had dropped out to help with her recovery. Since then he had  been hanging out with Martinez full-time. “Hanging out” was a good way of  putting it, because neither of them had ever held a job, set an alarm, or worn a  tie.  

And yet the money never seemed to run out. In fact, they had enough money  to travel to Las Vegas nearly every weekend. Why Vegas— almost always Vegas—Kevin hadn’t yet figured out. He had never been there  himself, had only read about the “city of sin” in paperback novels and seen it  on prime-time TV. Although the bright neon lights and massive resorts were  compelling enough, he couldn’t imagine vacationing in the same spot over  and over again. Throw in a few topless showgirls, and it made a little more  sense. But Fisher and Martinez weren’t exactly casanovas. Neither of them  had kept a steady girlfriend longer than a carton of sushi lasted in the  refrigerator.  

“If I didn’t know any better,” Kevin grunted, reclining back onto the couch.  “I’d think you guys were selling drugs.”  

“White slavery,” Martinez responded, fighting Fisher for the last piece of fish.  “You’re just lucky you’re a Chink like the rest of us.” He crossed his eyes.  His mother was from Singapore, his father from Cuba. His family tree was  made up of so many different races, you needed a pie chart to buy him a  birthday present.  

“Seriously,” Kevin said, his eyes half closed. “What the hell do you guys do  on the weekends? You’ve been gone every Friday this summer. Not that I’m  complaining. The only problem is that you keep coming back.”  

Fisher started clearing the coffee table, using the sleeve of his sweatshirt to  catch the crumbs. Martinez seemed suddenly interested in a smudge on the  seam of his silk shirt.  

“I guess it’s ‘need to know,’” Kevin surmised.  

Martinez looked at Fisher, who shrugged. Martinez reached into his back  pocket and tossed something onto the table. It landed with a soft thud. 

Kevin’s eyes widened. A stack of bills about two inches thick bundled  together by a strip of colored tape. Kevin reached for the stack and saw that  the top bill had a picture of Benjamin Franklin in its center. A warmth moved  through his cheeks as he fanned through the rest of the stack. Hundreds, all of  them. He wasn’t Rain Man, but he could count. A hundred hundreds. Ten  thousand dollars.  

He was wide awake now. “What are you guys into?”  

Fisher smiled. There was mischief in his narrow eyes. “Why don’t you come  with us next weekend?”  

Kevin couldn’t stop fanning the stack of hundred-dollar bills. He had never  seen this much money in his life. They could pay their whole summer rent  with the stack and have enough left over for sushi every night.  

“To Las Vegas?”  

Martinez held out his hand, gesturing for the cash. “Not Vegas. Atlantic City.  The Holyfield fight at the Tropicana, Saturday night. A friend of ours is  hooking us up.”  

Kevin had never been to a professional boxing match. He’d heard that the  tickets for a Holyfield fight were almost impossible to get. Not only were his  two slacker buddies hooked up, but Martinez was walking around with ten  thousand dollars in his back pocket. Kevin felt like he was on the threshold of  something he couldn’t define. The mystery of his friends’ carefree existence  was about to be revealed.  

Kevin knew what his father would say. “I’m supposed to be in lab on  Saturday.”  

Fisher gave him a patronizing look. “Take a day off. The test tubes will be  there when you get back.”  

Kevin didn’t like Fisher’s tone. Fisher could be a jackass—it went hand in  hand with his size. His words felt like a macho challenge. But  Kevin was curious. He’d been following a straight line all of his life. Nearing  his last year at MIT, he was on the cusp of a time of confusion, searching for a  future that was both satisfying and compelling. Maybe Fisher and Martinez  could show him something more fulfilling than the world which had been  painted for him. And bottom line—he’d always dreamed about seeing  Holyfield fight.  

What did he have to lose?  

Kevin tossed Martinez the stack of hundred-dollar bills. “Do we have good  seats?” 

Four  

Atlantic City, June 1994  

F ive days later, Kevin exited Newark Airport through an automated tornado  of revolving glass, just as a Mercedes limousine slid to a stop in the passenger  pickup lane in front of him. He had to shield his eyes as the bright sunlight  flashed off the car’s sleek black curves, and he glanced back toward Martinez,  who was working his way through the revolving door behind him. Martinez  already had his sunglasses on, a wide smile on his narrow face. The crazy fuck  still looked drunk, though it was nine A.M. and they had spent the past hour  circling ten thousand feet above northern New Jersey.  

Martinez moved next to Kevin on the sidewalk, slinging his backpack over  one shoulder. “So, how do you like our ride?”  

Kevin raised his eyebrows. He turned back toward the limo. “That’s for us?”  

He watched the rear passenger door swing open. An unusually tall man in a  slick grey suit uncoiled onto the sidewalk, pausing to adjust a jet-black  ponytail against the nape of his neck. The man caught sight of Martinez and  sprang forward, hand outstretched.  

“Welcome back, Mr. Kim.”  

Kevin stared as Martinez shook the man’s hand. Mr. Kim? There was a jangle  of metal emitting from the man’s wrist, and Kevin glimpsed a tacky gold  bracelet wound around an even tackier gold watch. The man’s face was  smooth and tan, his eyes set close together above a sharply tapered nose. His  expression was somehow obsequious and terrifying at the same time.  

“And this must be your friend,” the man continued, still vigorously pumping  Martinez’s hand. “I’m Dino Taratolli. I’m Mr. Kim’s host at the Tropicana.  Any friend of Mr. Kim’s is a friend of our casino.” 

He gestured toward the limo, then took Martinez’s backpack off of his  shoulder and galloped toward the trunk. When he was out of earshot, Kevin  grabbed Martinez by the elbow. “Mr. Kim?”  

Martinez laughed, leading him forward. “Oh yeah. I forgot to tell you. I’m  Robert Kim this weekend.”  

Kevin followed Martinez into the cool leather interior of the car, quickly  noting the crystal-appointed minibar and the twenty-inch television mounted  on the rosewood divider that separated them from the unseen driver.  

“You’re Robert Kim. And who am I?” 

“You’re still you. But we’re both Eurotrash millionaires.”  

Kevin wasn’t thrilled that the weekend was starting with invented identities.  His suspicion that his friends were into something illegal was only growing  stronger. But he decided to play along. They were sitting in a limo with a TV  and a minibar.  

He heard the trunk slam shut, then glanced back at the airport terminal. The  sidewalk was nearly empty; it was a Saturday morning, and you had to be  crazy or drunk to fly to New Jersey on a Saturday morning. Or a little of both.  

“And what about Fisher? Where the hell is he?”  

Fisher had headed to the bathroom right after they had exited the airplane.  Kevin had assumed he’d meet them outside, but he hadn’t yet appeared.  

“He’s going to meet us later,” Martinez said. “He had to make a phone call.”  

Kevin felt a nervous shiver move through him. He’d expected the weekend to  be an adventure, but he had to ask himself: How well did he really know these  guys? He’d met them just four months ago. Before that, he’d known them  only by reputation. Two college dropouts with mysterious means of income  and nonconformist lifestyles. Warning bells were going off, but Kevin was  doing his best to ignore them. He reminded himself that he was there to see  the fight, maybe get in a little gambling. Besides, the warning bells had been  installed by his parents. Maybe it was time Kevin started to take some risks  with his life.  

“So Fisher’s not taking the limo with us?”  

“He’s got his own ride,” Martinez said, falling silent as Dino Taratolli climbed  into the seat next to him and shut the passenger door. The lanky man tapped  on the rosewood divider with two ringed fingers, and the limo pulled away  from the curb.  

The scenery outside was mostly highway, chemical plants, and industrial  warehouses, so Kevin had little to distract him from the two wild cards seated  across from him. It was obvious that Martinez and the casino employee had  spent a fair amount of time together. From what Kevin could gather through  their staccato patter, Dino had been Martinez’s host—that word again,  pregnant with meaning Kevin didn’t pretend to understand—at Caesar’s  Palace in Las Vegas until six months ago. Then Dino had been bought out by  the Tropicana in Atlantic City and had brought many of his high rollers with  him.  

Evidently, Martinez—or Kim, as Dino knew him—was one of these high  rollers. Certainly, Martinez seemed to have the jargon down pat. It was as  though he and the host had a private vocabulary, rife with words like comp, 

whale, action, and RFB. After twenty minutes, Kevin couldn’t stifle his  curiosity any longer.  

“What exactly does a host do, anyway?”  

Maybe a little blunt, but it seemed like a good place to start. Martinez didn’t  seem to mind the interruption—it gave him a chance to take a closer look at  the minibar. Dino offered a smile, not exactly condescending, but it was  obvious he had pegged Kevin as a sidekick, nothing more.  

“We do whatever it takes. We make your stay as pleasant as possible. We  bring the big players to our casino—and we make sure they keep coming  back.”  

Simple enough. Maybe Kevin was making an idiot of himself, but he had been  brought up by a scientist and born with an engineer’s mind. He liked to ask  questions, and he liked to be thorough.  

“And what’s a big player?”  

Martinez had a bottle of vodka in one hand and was searching for orange juice  in the refrigerator beneath the bar. If he was concerned by the conversation, he  wasn’t showing it.  

“That depends on the casino,” Dino answered. “Usually, there’s a sliding  scale. If you’re betting twenty-five dollars a blackjack hand—or a roll of the  dice, a pull on the slots, a spin of the roulette wheel—you get a special room  rate and a smile from the desk clerk. Seventy-five bucks a hand, you might get  a free room. A hundred and fifty, maybe RFB—that’s room, food, beverage.  But if you’re a high roller—betting five, ten, twenty thousand a stay, you’re  going to get the full treatment. A ride from the airport. A bucket of  champagne waiting for you next to your Jacuzzi. And a guy like me to make  sure everything runs smoothly.”  

Kevin whistled. Five to twenty thousand dollars a trip. His slacker buddies,  sleeping until noon every day. Blowing five grand in Vegas every weekend.  Maybe they had rich uncles he didn’t know about. Or a stash of cocaine under  the sink.  

“So the hosts seek out the high rollers,” Kevin said, “give ’em free stuff to  keep them at the casino. When you move casinos, you take your players with  you.”  

Dino nodded as Martinez fixed himself a screwdriver. “That’s the idea. Each  one of my high rollers understands the sort of service I can provide. Whatever  it takes, I’ll keep them happy. And who knows, maybe they’ll hit it big, turn  into a real live whale. Right, Mr. Kim?”  

Martinez looked up from his drink. “A great white one, Dino.” 

Outside the window, the industrial warehouses had given way to cottage styled houses packed closely together. Beyond the houses, Kevin saw the  bridge linking them to the ten-mile sandbar that housed the largest gambling  center west of Nevada.  

Growing up on the East Coast, Kevin shared the common “local” view of  Atlantic City: an experiment that had never quite lived up to its expectations.  In the late seventies, the necklace of casinos along the country’s most famous  boardwalk had opened its doors to much hype, but the dream of a Vegas of the  East had never quite materialized. Despite the fact that the casinos themselves  had intermittently flourished, the surrounding city had deteriorated in rapid  fashion. Over the past two decades, Atlantic City had become a textbook  case against legalized gambling in urban centers.  

The much-published hype/hope was that the casinos would create jobs and  bring in a high-class tourist population from nearby Manhattan. But despite  private investment of more than six billion dollars, the area surrounding the  

casinos never experienced the expected economic resurgence. Speculation in  properties and the demolition of existing buildings to make way for the casino  hotels led to abandoned structures and the closure of nearly 35 percent of the  city’s existing businesses. Unemployment surged and crime tripled, while 25  percent of the city’s population left for greener pastures.  

Atlantic City had the glitz and glamour—weighed down by crime and  poverty.  

As the limousine rolled across the bridge to the sandbar, Kevin tried to smell  the ocean. All he got was car leather and exhaust.  

“What’s a whale?” he asked finally.  

Martinez clinked his glass against the window. “A whale is someone who can  lose a million dollars at cards—and not give a damn.”  

High rollers don’t take cabs from the airport. They don’t carry their own bags.  They never wait on check-in lines. They stay in rooms with Jacuzzis, circular  leather couches, wide-screen televisions, and views of the beach. And  evidently, they wear whatever the hell they want, no matter how ridiculous  they look.  

Martinez came out of the bathroom in an electric-blue shirt and matching  jeans. He had exchanged his sneakers for shiny leather designer boots, and his  hair was slicked down with so much mousse that the outline of his skull was  visible. The effect was disorienting—actually, in a way it was orienting. With  the hair and flashy outfit, Martinez looked more Asian than Latino; he easily 

could have passed for a rich kid from Korea or Japan on his way to a trendy  disco.  

Kevin laughed out loud, his feet up on the glass coffee table in the center of  the lavish living room. The suite was bigger than any hotel room he had ever  seen before; two thousand square feet, with wide picture windows and plush  

cream carpeting. The windows overlooked the boardwalk, and from twenty  floors up, the beach was so beautiful it was hard to believe they were in New  Jersey.  

“Nice duds,” he commented. He was still wearing shorts and a sweatshirt. He  had an oxford shirt and khakis in Martinez’s backpack, but he hadn’t planned  on changing until they were on their way to the fight. “Does the casino have  some bizarre dress code I should know about?”  

Martinez ignored the query. He was busy fishing around the inside of his shirt  with both hands, and Kevin wondered if he was looking for his sunglasses.  Certainly, they’d finish the look. Then he heard the distinct rip of Velcro, and  Martinez’s hands reappeared.  

Kevin’s heart thumped as he saw the roll of bills. At least four inches thick,  twice as large as the roll Martinez had shown him back at their apartment.  And again, the visible bills were hundreds. As much as twenty grand taped  inside his shirt. Had Martinez worn the money on him the whole trip from  Boston? Through airport security, through the metal detector—shit, the kid  hadn’t even raised a sweat.  

By now, Kevin was beginning to realize that Fisher and Martinez were, at the  very least, serious gamblers. Was it possible that they had made all their cash  playing casino games?  

He knew there were people who made a living at cards—hell, there’d been  movies about it, books, even newspaper articles. But he understood from what  he had read that professional gamblers usually just eked out a living, playing  carefully for tiny odds. Wads of cash and huge VIP suites were for people  who lost—not for those who won. Unless Martinez had gotten lucky at a slot  machine, how did he and Fisher support all those weekends in Las Vegas?  Why was a guy like Dino Taratolli whisking them past the registration desk  and up into a suite like this?  

Kevin was dying to know the truth. “That’s quite a stake. It’s going to be fun  watching you drop it at the tables. What do you play? Craps? Poker?”  

Martinez smiled, jamming the stack of bills into his shirt pocket. “Blackjack.  It’s the only game worth playing.”  

Kevin rose from the couch. Blackjack? He would have guessed poker. It  seemed more Martinez’s style. He was crafty, smart, and judging from his 

shifting appearance, quite a chameleon. Kevin would have thought those skills  to be best utilized in a game where you faced off against other players.  Blackjack, you played against the house; really, it seemed like you played  against the cards. What good was personal style in a game like that?  

“Okay, blackjack. But shouldn’t we wait for Fisher?”  

They’d been in the suite for twenty minutes. Kevin wondered what was taking  Fisher so long. Probably stopped at the hotel gym for a few bench presses.  

“Don’t worry about him,” Martinez answered. “We’re here to have fun.”  

Kevin started to protest, then thought better of it and acquiesced. Fisher was a  big boy. There was obviously some reason he was dragging behind. Worst  case, they’d meet up before the fight. Kevin hadn’t seen the tickets yet, but  Martinez had promised him that the seats were so close, he’d need a raincoat  to keep himself from getting drenched with blood and sweat.  

“There’s nothing more fun than watching a guy in a shirt like that lose some  money,” Kevin joked. “So let’s hit the tables.”  

Martinez shook his head. “First, we check out the pool. The showgirls hit the  pool early. Then we attack the buffet. Can’t play on an empty stomach.”  

He looked back at Kevin, patting his bulging shirt pocket. “And then we’re  gonna kill the tables.”  

It was two in the afternoon by the time they stepped over the threshold of the  casino floor, and Kevin was feeling mildly lethargic, the result of a heavily  laden VIP buffet and forty minutes on a lounge chair in a private pool cabana.  He hadn’t seen any showgirls, but he had been lucky enough to watch an  extremely pale family from Passaic play water volleyball against a group of  Japanese tourists.  

The floor was crowded, equal parts tourists in shorts and T-shirts wandering  in from the boardwalk and well-heeled weekend warriors from Manhattan,  some in suits and ties. Despite the fiercely air-conditioned ventilation, the air  stung with a blend of sunscreen and cigarette smoke. Kevin and Martinez  paused at the entrance, getting their bearings. Slot machines fanned out on all  sides, the blinking lights and spinning wheels wreaking havoc on Kevin’s  senses. The tables were spread out across the center of the long floor,  blackjack felts and craps stations intermingled with roulette and stud poker.  Crowds three people deep gathered around each of the tables, and Kevin  didn’t see a single free stool. For a moment he wondered if they’d even get to  play. Then Martinez pointed at a raised section of the floor, separated from the 

main tables by three steps and a velvet rope. There were a dozen tables behind  the rope, and only a smattering of players.  

“High-stakes room,” Martinez said. “Usually I like to play the main floor, but  there are too many civilians here today.”  

Kevin followed Martinez toward the high-stakes tables, winding through the  crowd. The crush of “civilians” energized him; so many smiling, laughing  people, so much gambling adrenaline flowing through the room. He found it  hard to catch his breath.  

When they reached the steps to the quieter tables, Martinez yanked the stack  of bills out of his shirt pocket and casually split it in half. “You’ve played  blackjack before, right?”  

Kevin looked at the bills in Martinez’s hand. Sure, he’d played before—a few  times on vacation with his family, once or twice at Foxwoods, the Indian  casino in Connecticut. But the most he’d ever bet on a single hand was five  dollars, and the most he’d ever risked in a night was a few hundred. He wasn’t  stupid, he knew that the house had an edge at the tables. Every player is a  loser eventually. He’d gambled a few times for fun, but never seriously.  

“I’m no expert, but I won’t make a fool of myself.” 

Martinez pointed toward the nearest empty table. A frizzy-haired dealer in a  dark blue shirt was standing behind the horseshoe-shaped felt, hands behind  her back. Six decks were spread out on the table in front of her, faces up. The  empty plastic shoe—rectangular, two feet long, uncovered—sat waiting,  hungry for their action.  

“So you know basic strategy.”  

Kevin shrugged. He knew how the game was played. The dealer dealt you two  cards, you added them together and tried to get closest to twenty-one without  going over. If you wanted another card, you pointed at the table. If you  wanted to stand, you waved your hand. If you got over twenty-one, you  busted, and the dealer took your money. If you hit twenty-one on your first  two cards—a blackjack—the casino paid you one and a half times your bet.  The player went first, the dealer second. The dealer’s play depended on the  casino, but usually he would hit until his cards added up to seventeen—or  until he busted. When you got pairs of the same card, you could split them and  have two bets going on separate hands. Again depending on the casino, you  could double your bet—double down—on your first two cards, taking a single  card in the hopes of beating the dealer for more money. The rules were fairly  simple, as card games went. But the strategy seemed tricky, and Kevin was by  no means an expert. 

“I know the books say you’re supposed to keep on hitting until you get  seventeen, if the dealer’s showing a high card. When the dealer shows a weak  card—maybe a five or a six—you usually stick with your first two cards. And  I know you double down on an eleven, hoping to draw a face card for a  twenty-one.”  

“That’s a start,” Martinez said. He extended his hand, offering Kevin half of  the bills from his stack. Ten thousand dollars, cash.  

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Kevin asked.  

Martinez waved the money at him. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right next to you. I’ll  let you know when you’re making a mistake.”  

Kevin’s cheeks burned as he took the bills and followed Martinez to the  table. Christ, this beats sitting in the lab.  

Kevin lowered himself onto a stool next to Martinez and watched as he peeled  twenty bills off his roll and laid them on the felt. Kevin carefully did the same  and waited nervously as the dealer counted out twenty black chips for each of  

them. Then she swept the cards off the table and began to shuffle. Her hands  danced gracefully through the choreographed ritual shared by blackjack  dealers the world over. By the time she rolled the deck, aiming it at Martinez  for the cut, Kevin was bouncing off his stool.  

Here we go. He moved a black chip onto the betting circle in front of him. He  would have liked to have started lower, but the table minimum was a hundred.  He noticed that Martinez had started with two chips. His friend seemed  completely calm, smiling as he made small talk with the dealer. Her name was  Brett, she was from Delaware, she had two kids and an ex-husband, and no,  she’d never been to Korea. Kevin didn’t think Martinez had ever been to  Korea either, but what the hell, it made for good conversation.  

After the first few hands, Kevin’s nerves settled, and he began to enjoy the  highs and lows of gambling. Hand by hand, the chips lulled him into  forgetting how much money he was playing with; instead, he concentrated on  making the right plays. He’d never studied any books on basic strategy. But  he knew about BS from a television special he had seen on cable: a framework  of proper plays based on what the dealer was showing, developed first—in a  flawed but thorough form—by four army engineers who played tens of  thousands of hands and published their results in the September 1956 edition  of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. BS was then  thoroughly reworked in the early sixties by a UCAL and visiting MIT math  professor named Edward Thorp, then tweaked numerous times over the years  by experts with access to IBM computers. Kevin had never bothered to study  basic strategy because he gambled only occasionally—and he wasn’t really  sure how much of a difference it made, anyway. Was skill really that much of  a factor in blackjack? Didn’t it all boil down to a matter of luck? 

Martinez obviously took basic strategy extremely seriously. Whenever Kevin  paused, trying to figure out whether to take the next card or stand, Martinez  was ready with quick advice. The dealer didn’t seem to care; in fact, she lent  her own expertise. Kevin usually deferred to Martinez, since it was his money  they were going to lose.  

As for Martinez, he played smoothly, barely looking at his cards, tossing chips  into the betting circle with seeming abandon. He kept his bets around two  hundred dollars, but every now and then he jumped up to five hundred, and  once he even laid down a thousand dollars at once, getting lucky with a pair of  kings. He never celebrated when he won, never complained when he lost. In  fact, he didn’t seem that interested in the game at all.  

His play seemed to follow BS, except for a few noticeably odd executions.  Once, with a two-hundred-dollar bet on the table, he hit on a sixteen against a  dealer’s two. Luckily, he drew a two for an eighteen to win the hand. Another  time he doubled on an eight, managing to draw an ace. Toward the end of the  shoe, he began raising his bet, taking advantage of a hot streak of good hands.  Kevin began to win himself, drawing three hands of face cards and ending  with a natural twenty-one. He was grinning at his good fortune when the  plastic shuffle card came out, signaling the end of the shoe. The dealer raised  her hands, announcing that it was time to shuffle up.  

“That went well,” Kevin said. It looked like he and Martinez were up a few  thousand dollars. Most of it was stacked in front of his friend, but at least five  hundred dollars of pure profit was in front of him. It was the most he’d ever  won in his life. He thought it was time to get a drink and celebrate. He was  about to search for a cocktail waitress when he noticed Martinez trying to  catch his eye.  

As the dealer rolled the cards into a tall pile, preparing to shuffle, Martinez  leaned toward Kevin, lowering his voice. “You see that last run of cards?”  

“We got really lucky. A lot of high cards. Kings, queens, a couple of aces. We  both did pretty well—”  

“Actually,” Martinez interrupted, “it was nineteen face cards and three aces  set among eight unremarkable lows.”  

Kevin stared at him. He hadn’t noticed Martinez paying such close attention  to the cards; he hadn’t written anything down or whispered to himself.  

“So?”  

“So you know that right now, near the top of that stack of unshuffled cards,  there’s a string of predominantly high cards, about thirty deep.” 

Kevin looked at the stack, watched as the dealer split it into two equal-size  piles. In a few seconds the rituals of her shuffle would begin, the cards cut  together again and again until they were thoroughly mixed.  

“I’m not sure I follow you.”  

Martinez sighed, impatient. “You’re aware that high cards favor the player,  right?”  

Kevin remembered the television special. “Sure. Because the dealer has to hit  up to sixteen, with more high cards, she’ll bust more often.”  

“That’s one reason,” Martinez interrupted again. “There’s also a higher  chance of hitting blackjack, which pays one and a half times your bet. And  there’s a better chance of drawing into a double down. There are other  reasons, but those are good enough for now.”  

He paused, jutting his chin toward the dealer, who had finally begun to shuffle  the cards together. “So if you knew that a run like that was about to come out  of the deck, couldn’t you take advantage of the situation? Raise your basic  bets, change your strategy a little, win a lot of hands with a lot of money on  the table?”  

Kevin squinted. In theory that made sense. But the stack of high cards had  already come and gone.  

“If you knew that sort of run was coming. But she’s shuffling the cards.”  Martinez smiled. “Right in front of us.”  

Kevin realized that Martinez had been watching the dealer shuffle while they  were whispering back and forth. Kevin shook his head. Martinez had to be  joking.  

“There’s no way you can track those cards.”  

“There isn’t?”  

Martinez recentered himself on his stool, still watching the shuffle. Kevin  continued to stare at him.  

A few minutes later the dealer finished, letting Martinez cut. Then she  restacked the cards in the shoe and began to deal. Hand after hand, the play  went by quietly, and both Kevin and Martinez remained about even with the  house. As the shoe reached the halfway point, Kevin began to relax, assuming  that his friend had indeed been screwing with him. He put another hundred on  the betting circle—and watched as Martinez suddenly raised his bet to a  thousand dollars. He coughed, and Martinez looked at him, then smiled at the  dealer. 

“Feeling the lucky spirits, Brett. In Korea we listen to our spirits.”  

She laughed, dealing out the cards. Both Kevin and Martinez drew twenties,  kings and queens. The dealer drew sixteen, then busted with a ten.  

That was just the beginning.  

Over the next four rounds, there were twelve face cards and two aces.  Martinez won nearly six thousand dollars, and even Kevin made a killing,  winning three hundred more.  

After the shoe emptied out, Martinez scooped up his chips and stepped back  from the table. Kevin followed him, his head spinning. When they had passed  out of the high-stakes area, he grabbed Martinez by the shoulder.  

“How the fuck did you do that?”  

Martinez signaled a passing cocktail waitress, taking two vodka martinis off  of her tray. After tipping her a five, he turned to Kevin.  

“It’s not magic. Just math. It’s called shuffle tracking. It’s a basic probability distribution exercise. You can even calculate the percentage of low-card  infiltration into the run, caused by the dealer’s shuffle. After that, it’s just a  matter of practice. Really good players can track a group of fifteen cards  through a six-deck shuffle without breaking a sweat.”  

Kevin sipped his martini, amazed. Martinez was right, of course. It was more  math than magic. But it was still incredible to watch. Altogether, they had  made close to ten thousand dollars—in under an hour. And it hadn’t been  simple luck. Martinez had truly tracked that dealer’s shuffle.  

“I’ll explain more later,” Martinez said, pushing forward through the crowd.  He was heading toward another blackjack table situated at the edge of the  main floor. There were two overweight women sitting next to each other on  the last two stools, watching the play. Across from them, in the first-base  position, was a familiar, bulked-up shape with dark pinpoint eyes and a crew  cut. Fisher had finally arrived.  

As they approached the table, Martinez touched Kevin’s arm.  “There’s one other thing. When we reach Fisher, act like we don’t know him.”  Kevin rolled his eyes.  

“Okay, Mr. Kim.”  

“I’m serious,” Martinez said. “Just stand behind the table and watch. I  promise, it will be a good show.” 

From the moment they arrived at the table, Kevin could see that Martinez had  been telling the truth. The two overweight women were jabbering to each  other in loud voices about “the damn fool” sitting across from them. As Kevin  watched, Fisher made some of the strangest blackjack plays he’d ever seen.  For the most part, he kept hitting like a madman, taking as many cards as he  could—even busting with four cards after hitting on a seventeen. After each  hand, the two women chided him for making such obviously stupid moves.  

“What the hell is he doing?” Kevin whispered to Martinez. “Trying to lose?”  

Martinez shook his head. “Look at how he’s betting. Just ten dollars in the  circle. He doesn’t care about these hands. He’s playing a part, trying to  establish himself as a wild player. At the same time, he’s running the cards,  counting down based on the deal. He’s trying to control the deal so that a  specific card is dealt to him.”  

Kevin narrowed his eyes. “A specific card? What do you mean?”  

“He’s sitting at first base—the closest seat to the dealer. Sometimes, with  some dealers, you can see the bottom card when they roll the deck after the  shuffle. If they let you cut the deck, you can cut to anexact point, maybe one  deck’s length—and when they stack the deck into the shoe, that card you just  saw ends up at exactly the cut point—the fifty-second card. If you’re good,  really good, you can get the dealer to deal you that specific card.”  

Kevin laughed out loud. One of the overweight women glared at him, then  turned back to the table. Kevin looked at Martinez. 

“That’s crazy. And even if you could get the dealer to give you a card you  already saw, how much difference would it make?”  

“Depends,” Martinez said, watching Fisher hit on another seventeen. “If you  saw an ace, it’s over a fifty-percent advantage. That means on average, you  bet a thousand dollars on that hand, you get more than fifteen hundred back.  How many ten-dollar hands would you lose to get one fifteen-hundred-dollar  hand?”  

Martinez paused as Fisher suddenly pushed a stack of black chips into the  betting circle. The two women went dead silent. The dealer, a tall Latino with  an earring in one ear, glanced back at a man in a suit standing a few feet  behind him in the pit—obviously his boss. The suited man looked over,  seemed to recognize Fisher, then nodded. He’d seen enough of Fisher’s play  to know that he wasn’t a threat.Another rich kid doing something stupid.  

The dealer dealt the first card to Fisher—and there it was, an ace of spades.  The two women crowed, jabbering about the crazy fool’s luck. The rest of the  cards came out: Fisher’s second card was a nine, for a soft twenty, beating the  dealer’s seventeen. 

Fisher swept up his winnings and stood, smiling at the two women. “Thank  you for your help. I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of it.”  

Then he walked right past Kevin and Martinez and headed for the pool.  

They found him stretched out on a lounge chair, hands behind his head. His  dark eyes were shielded by wraparound sunglasses, and his biceps bulged  beneath a tight white T-shirt. Martinez pulled another two chairs next to him,  and Kevin sat heavily, still bewildered by the display he had just witnessed.  He was beginning to see his two friends in a different light. He’d always  known they were math whizzes—Martinez was legendary, and Fisher  followed closely behind, having honored in molecular engineering before  leaving MIT to be with his sister. Obviously, they had decided to use their  skills in an innovative way. They had learned some fantastic card tricks, and  they had parlayed these abilities into a moneymaking scheme.  

“Now I know how you afford all those weekends in Vegas,” Kevin said,  kicking off his shoes. “Those were some pretty cool stunts.”  

Fisher adjusted his shades. “Circus acts, Kevin. Shuffle tracking and cuts.  They give you a nice advantage over the house, but they can’t be used too  often. Usually, we only pull that shit out when we’re on vacation. Walking 

around money, that’s all. The real action is a lot more consistent—and a lot  more lucrative.”  

Kevin was both intrigued and disturbed. He glanced across the pool at the sun splashed boardwalk and the postcard-perfect beach. Then he looked back at  Fisher and Martinez, splayed out on plastic chairs, cash bulging in their  pockets. He thought about how hard he’d been working—in the lab, at school,  at home. It just doesn’t seem fair.  

“So you guys cheat at cards?”  

Martinez sat up, indignant. “Absolutely not. We don’t alter any of the rules or  fuck with the nature of the game. We use our brains to take advantage of  arbitrage opportunities. Blackjack is beatable—so we beat it. We beat the hell  out of it.”  

Kevin was fairly sure it wasn’t as innocent as that. After all, Martinez had  checked into the hotel under a fake name, and they were pretending that  Fisher was a stranger they had met at the casino. But Martinez was right; what  Kevin had witnessed wasn’t exactly cheating—was it? 

He remembered something he had read in the school paper, sometime during  the first semester of his junior year. An article about a blackjack club at MIT.  Ten or fifteen kids, mostly seniors, who spent their time practicing some 

highly technical method of counting cards. But he’d always thought it was just  some campus exercise, one of the many geeky extracurriculars you saw  advertised in the student lounge. He didn’t think it had any real-world  application—that anyone had actually tried it out in a casino. And he never  would have guessed that his friends were involved in something like that. It  seemed too organized for a pair of anarchists.  

“It’s an MIT club, right? I think I read about it in the paper. A bunch of geeks  who play cards all night in the back of the library.”  

Fisher laughed. He might have been able to bench-press two-fifty, but he  knew the truth: They were all geeks. Even the jocks at MIT had aced the math  portion of their SATs.  

“Well, it started out that way. A sort of club sport, with team sweatshirts and  everything. But it’s gotten a bit bigger than that.”  

Kevin wiped sweat from his forehead. The sun was beating down on him, but  he didn’t care. He’d come to Atlantic City to see his first professional fight— and at the moment, he couldn’t even recall who was fighting. He felt like his  

friends were about to open a door, and he was eager to see what was on the  other side.  

“How much bigger?”  

Fisher raised his sunglasses, blinking his oil-drop eyes.  

“Bigger than you can imagine.”  

Five  

Boston, September 1994  

K evin’s lungs burned as he pushed his body through the water, each stroke  stretching his exhausted muscles closer to their failure point. His world had  narrowed to a tiny point of blue, just a few feet in front of his eyes. He was  totally focused, swinging his arms gracefully like his father taught him,  

chasing that arbitrary point with an athlete’s determination. All his life, he’d  been able to find this place, this mental and physical state of burn. Lap after  lap, he had been coaxing his body through his daily routine, and he’d go until  he couldn’t swim any farther.  

It was late September, and school had been in session for nearly three weeks.  Kevin’s summer had ended as uneventfully as it began; after the weekend in  Atlantic City, he returned to his test tubes and swimming. He had gained a  new respect for Martinez and Fisher, and a new fascination with their way of  life; but after the thrill of the weekend wore off, he felt reluctant to pursue the  issue. Alone in the MIT library, he’d done a little reading into blackjack 

theory—and had confirmed much of what Martinez and Fisher had told him.  The game was beatable, and there were people who made a good living  playing cards. They were called card counters, and they had developed  numerous systems to give themselves a slight edge over the casinos. But even  with this edge, it didn’t seem that a professional could ever attain the sort of  success that Martinez and Fisher had suggested was possible.  

In Kevin’s mind, there were two major problems with card counting. First of  all, your percentage over the house was too damn low. Even the most complex  systems seemed to aim at an overall edge of around 2 percent; to make any  money at all, you needed an enormous stake, and moving that kind of money  around would draw attention. Which led to the second problem: It seemed too  easy for the casinos to figure out what you were doing—and stop you from  doing it. They couldn’t arrest you, but in Las Vegas, they could kick you out  of the casino. In Atlantic City, the law was a bit different: They had to let you  play, but they could screw around with the deck, shuffle at will, change  betting limits—in short, make it impossible for you to win. In the end, card  counting was a neat parlor trick, but it just didn’t seem like a reasonably  effective way to make money. At least not the kind of money his friends threw  around.  

Which meant that either Fisher and Martinez were lying, or they had figured  out some new system that nobody else was using. Kevin didn’t put either  possibility past them. They were smart enough to have invented their own  technique. And they were crafty enough to lie convincingly about anything.  

Either way, he had finally decided it was best to put thoughts of blackjack  aside, and had gone back to the steady monotony of his life. He had finished  his work in the lab, moved back into a campus apartment when school started  up, and even begun dating a girl he met at the library. Felicia, who was five six and wore glasses, had a swimmer’s body hidden beneath MIT sweats and a  healthy, preppy upbringing. She came from a grounded family, was majoring  in engineering, and would fit wonderfully at his parents’ table next  Thanksgiving. If his father, a geologist at a British research firm, hadn’t been  in Ecuador on a geological project, Kevin would have already brought her  home for dinner.  

But he wasn’t thinking of Felicia at the moment. He was concentrating on that  pinpoint of blue. His body trembled as his legs kicked back, his hands cutting  forward, just one more lap, one more lap—  

And finally, he hit the wall—physically and figuratively. He flung his arms  over the ledge and pulled his shoulders up, resting his chin on the concrete as  he fought to catch his breath. He was so worn out, it was a full minute before  he noticed the two pairs of feet right in front of him. He looked up: Martinez  and Fisher were standing over him, grinning. 

Kevin shook water from his ears, shocked. He hadn’t seen or heard from them  in weeks. They both looked tan, though Martinez had his hair combed down  all the way to his eyes, obscuring most of his face. Neither of them seemed  uncomfortable, but they were both out of place. Martinez because he looked  like he’d never swum in anything deeper than a bathtub; and Fisher because  he had once been a part of the swim team before fate had taken him out of  school.  

But nobody else was around to greet them. It was well after nine at night, and  practice had ended nearly two hours before. The pool was deserted, the coach  already home with his family.  

Kevin pulled himself out of the water, standing on rubbery legs. “Look what  the cat dragged in.”  

Fisher shook Kevin’s hand, then wiped himself dry on Martinez’s terry-cloth  shirt. “Do you have a moment?” he asked.  

Kevin shrugged. He was tired and hungry, and there was a pizza waiting for  him in Felicia’s room. But who knew when he’d see these two again?  

“Sure. What’s up?”  

“There’s someone we’d like you to meet.”  

The classroom was located halfway down the Infinite Corridor, the long  hallway of institutionally styled rooms that ran through the center of MIT’s  main campus. Fisher and Martinez remained silent for most of the walk, and  Kevin resisted the urge to pelt them with questions. It was obvious they were  enjoying the drama, and he didn’t want to ruin their fun.  

Just as they reached the classroom, the door opened from the inside. Kevin  recognized the room from his freshman year; he’d taken multivariable  calculus and linear algebra one after the other, sitting in the same seat two  semesters in a row.  

He followed Martinez and Fisher in. The first thing he noticed was that the  window shades were pulled; the orange fluorescent ceiling lights struggled to  reach the corners, bathing the walls in strangely shaped shadows. Someone  had rearranged the wooden seats into a tight semicircle in the center of the  room, facing the blackboard. A chart filled with horizontal rows of numbers  occupied most of the board. The chart was a work in progress: an angular man  with curly, jet-black hair and a poorly fitted shirt had his back to the room, a  piece of bright blue chalk gripped in his thick fingers. He turned just as Kevin  entered.  

“Welcome to Blackjack 101, Kevin. We’re all thrilled to finally meet you.” 

Kevin turned his attention to the semicircle of chairs. Seven faces stared back  at him; a few he recognized from various classes, most he did not. Two were  classmates: a petite, pretty young Asian woman named Kianna Lam, a  transplant from Taiwan who shared his major in electrical engineering; and  Michael Sloan, a blond tennis jock who lived in the same building as Kevin. A  third he had met in physics class: Brian Hale, an emaciated but brilliant senior  who, like Kevin, was a local boy, having grown up in the nearby suburb of  Waltham. The others were four male strangers who looked to be college-aged.  Two wore glasses, and three were Asian, probably Chinese. They all had that  MIT aura about them; studious, awkward, but also slightly superior, as if each  was used to being the smartest kid in the room.  

Kevin shifted his gaze back to the man at the blackboard. Unlike the others, he  was definitely not a student. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties.  He was dark-skinned—either Persian or Latino—with a sharp, triangular face  

and pronounced cheekbones. He wore thick glasses with obtrusive plastic  frames, and his teeth were horrible. They jutted out from between his lips, and  it was impossible to tell if he was smiling or snarling. His clothes were almost  as bad as his teeth; his shirt was two sizes too small, and his jeans were  stained and frayed at the ankles, as if they had gone unwashed for a long, long  time.  

“Kevin,” Martinez said. “This is Micky Rosa. He used to teach here, back in  prehistoric times.”  

Micky nodded as his audience laughed, his hair flopping over too much  glistening forehead. Kevin watched him with a new respect; he’d seen the  name before. Two of the card-counting books had mentioned the former math  prodigy—one of the youngest MIT graduates in history, matriculating at the  age of sixteen—as a master of the sport. But the man was at least fifteen years  older than Martinez and Fisher. What was he doing in a room full of college  kids?  

“I still teach here,” Micky said, leaning back against the blackboard. Bright  blue chalk was getting all over his shirt, but nobody said anything. It was  obvious in the way they looked at him that his audience revered him. “But  now I teach for profit. For me, and for my students.”  

He waved his hands at the kids seated in front of him. “Kevin, this is the MIT  Blackjack Team. It’s been around—in one form or another—for almost two  decades. Recently, we’ve taken things to a whole new level. And we want to  invite you to come aboard.”  

Kevin opened his mouth, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked  at Martinez and Fisher. Martinez was smiling. Fisher was busy making eyes at  Kianna Lam.  

“Why me?” Kevin finally managed. 

“Because you’re smart,” Micky said. “You’ve got a good work ethic. You’re  good with numbers. And you’ve got the look.”  

Kevin pawed the floor, pensive. Obviously, Martinez and Fisher had been  cooking this up for some time. They had been feeding Micky Rosa  information about him, sizing him up for their team. The trip to Atlantic City  was a test of sorts, and he had passed.  

“What do you mean, the look?”  

Micky waved his hands again, tabling the question for later. “Kevin, we count  cards. Are you familiar with the practice?”  

Kevin nodded. “I’ve done a bit of reading on the subject.”  

“Good, good. So you must have heard of the hi-lo method of counting, right?”  

Kevin nodded again. His memory wasn’t photographic like some other MIT  kids he knew, but he retained things fairly well. He knew that the hi-lo method  dated back to 1962 and the publication of Edward Thorp’s groundbreaking  best-seller Beat the Dealer. In the book, Thorp outlined a simple counting  method that allowed players to keep rough track of the number of high cards  left in an unplayed shoe. Instead of counting individual cards, players simply  kept track of a single number, the running count. This number was added to  every time a low card came out of the deck, and subtracted from every time a  high card hit the table. The more positive the running count, the more high  cards were left in the deck—giving the player an advantage and inciting him  to raise his bet. When the running count went negative, the player lowered his  bet, expecting to lose more hands. Depending on the initial stake and the  number of hands played, a player could reap a positive advantage with very  little effort.  

“Well,” Micky said, stepping away from the blackboard. Chalk dust sprinkled  the floor behind him. “You must also realize that the standard hi-lo technique  of counting has a few major flaws.”  

Kevin had already gone through this in his head, after his trip to Atlantic City.  

“I can think of two,” he said, feeling the need to impress. Everyone in the  room was looking at him—a sensation he enjoyed. “The percentage  advantages are usually so small, you need an enormous stake to make any real  money. And it’s too easy a technique to spot. To take advantage of the highs  and lows, you have to drastically raise and lower your bet. It’s simple for them  to catch you just by watching your bet.”  

Even Fisher looked impressed. Micky’s lips shifted back, showing all his  frightening teeth. 

“We’ve developed a system that takes care of both these problems,” he said.  “We’re going to hit Vegas—hard—and we’d like you to come along.”  

Kevin looked around the room at the cabal of young blackjack players. When  it was just Martinez and Fisher, it seemed seedy but manageable. Two  rebellious geniuses siphoning money from the casinos. But this was  something else—organized, calculated, put together by a charismatic adult  with bad teeth and a brilliant pedigree.  

“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “It sounds kind of shady.”  

“Shady?” Martinez broke in. “We’re freedom fighters, Kevin. We liberate  money from the hands of the oppressors. We’re Robin Hood, and the casino is  the sheriff.”  

“And you give all the money to the poor when you’re finished?”  

“We give most of it to Toyama in exchange for sushi,” Fisher said. “And  Kianna spends the rest on shoes.”  

Kianna tossed a crumpled piece of paper at Fisher’s head. Then she turned to  Kevin and said, “Seriously, the casinos have been screwing people over for  years. The games are set up to give the house a hefty advantage. Anyone  stupid enough to sit down and play is paying for all that neon, all those free  drinks. If anybody’s cheating, it’s the corporations that own the casinos. They  set up the rules so that they always win.”  

“Almost always,” one of the other three Asians added.  

Kevin thought about what Kianna had said. “So you have a system that really  works?”  

Micky nodded, his hair flying everywhere. “Blackjack is beatable. Unlike just  about everything else in the casino, it’s a game with a memory. It has a past— the cards already drawn; and a future—the cards still to come. If you’re smart,  you can use this to put the odds in your favor. Thorp proved it forty years ago.  

We’ve been following his example for decades. And there’s nothing illegal  about it. You can call up the Nevada Gaming Commission yourself.”  

Kevin still felt uneasy. Even if it was legal—it seemed wrong. But it also  thrilled him—deep down, in that part of his personality he usually kept buried.  He knew his father would never approve. But his father was in Ecuador for  the next two months. He’d never have to know.  

“What can they do to you,” Kevin asked, “if they catch you?”  

Micky shrugged, waving his hands for the third time. It was a strange  mannerism, regal and schizoid at the same time. 

“They can ask you to leave. And you know what you do? You get up and  leave. Because there’s another casino across the street. And another one a  block away. And another on a riverboat in the Midwest, and another on an  

Indian reservation in Connecticut. Pretty soon there will be casinos in every  city on earth. Ripe for the taking.”  

Kevin touched his lips. “How much money can we make?”  

Martinez clapped a hand on Kevin’s back. “Now you’re talking my  language.”  

“Our group is made up of investors and players,” Micky answered. “Martinez,  Fisher, and myself—along with a few others who wish to remain behind the  scenes—fund the team at the moment. Kianna, Michael, Brian, Chet, Doug,  Allan, and Jon here are our present roster of players. The team’s investors are  guaranteed a certain return based on the amount of time the team gets to  play—at present, our return is set at twelve percent. Beyond that, player pay is  based on expected return per hand. Not actual return; it doesn’t matter if luck  swings one way or another, if you hit a losing streak or a winning streak. You  earn what our charts say you’re supposed to earn, based on perfect application  of our system.”  

Kevin tried to digest what Micky was telling him. Investors earned 12 percent  of their investment—12 percent, not 2 as he had read in the card-counting  literature—and players earned cash based on how many hands they played,  regardless of whether they won or lost. It sounded impressive. Still, he wanted  something more concrete. He turned to Fisher.  

“How much money have you made doing this?”  

Fisher glanced at Micky, who nodded. “Martinez and I have made more than a  hundred grand each in the past six months. When we started, we were just  players. Now we’ve got a piece of the action.”  

Kevin whistled.  

A hundred thousand each.  

Playing cards.  

“Okay,” Kevin said. “I’m game.”  

“Wonderful,” Micky said. “First there’s something you need to do.”  “What’s that?” Kevin asked.  

Micky offered a smile or a snarl.  

“You need to pass the Test.” 

Six  

Boston, October 1994  

K evin had to pass three tests, actually.  

Or a single test split into three parts, each corresponding to a different playing  role on the MIT team. After the class ended, Martinez explained the details  during the short walk across the Mass. Ave. Bridge to Felicia’s apartment  complex.  

“When card counting was first developed, the idea of team play hadn’t yet  evolved. Bald white guys with glasses huddled over blackjack tables, eking  out their tiny two-percent advantage by estimating how many highs were left  in the deck. Sure, over time you could make money. But sooner or later the  casino would spot you and burn you out. Once you were burned out of all the  casinos in town, you were finished, extinct. A dinosaur.”  

Kevin smiled, his wide face lit by the Boston skyline on the other side of the  Charles. Ahead, the low town houses of the Back Bay squatted beneath the  twin shadows of the Prudential and the Hancock. “You get burned out, you  become a dinosaur. Cute. So how does team play work?”  

“Division of labor,” Martinez responded. “The team is divided into three types  of players. You’ve got your Spotters, your Gorillas, and your Big Players.”  

Kevin watched a bus rumble down Massachusetts Avenue, headed toward  Harvard Square. “Fisher’s obviously a Gorilla.”  

Martinez ignored his comment. “Everyone who joins the team starts off as a  Spotter. A Spotter’s job is to find a good table with a hot deck, then call in  either a Gorilla or a Big Player. On most blackjack teams, Spotters do this by  back counting. They stand around the casino, looking over players’ shoulders,  counting the cards as they come out of the deck. We’ve innovated a bit on  this—because back counting is too damn obvious. Walk around any casino in  Vegas, you’ll spot the amateurs trying to back count. Sooner or later, they end  up getting caught.”  

“But you guys don’t get caught?” Kevin asked.  

“We do it a little differently. Our Spotters sit at the tables, playing the  minimum bet as they count. Nobody suspects them because they’re just like  everybody else. Losing a bit, maybe getting lucky—but never varying their  bet. When the count goes good, the Spotter signals a call-in. Then the Gorilla  or the Big Player sidles over to the table, and the real fun begins.” 

They reached the other end of the Mass. Ave. Bridge and stopped at the  intersection. A group of rowdy frat boys waited on line at a dive bar across the  street; Kevin could smell the dollar drafts contaminating the cool fall breeze.  

“Gorilla play is the next step after Spotting. A Gorilla is just a big bettor. It’s  more acting than anything else. He gets called into a hot deck, stumbles over  like a drunk rich kid, and starts throwing down big money. He doesn’t think  for himself—he lets the Spotter tell him when the deck goes bad. He’s just a  

Gorilla, brain-dead. But depending on how high the count is when he’s  signaled in, his percentage advantage can be staggering. He doesn’t count, he  just bets and bets and waits for the seated Spotter to signal him that the run of  good cards is over. Then he gets up and wanders off in search of his next call in.”  

Kevin felt a sense of wonder. He was beginning to understand. Individual card  counters had to wait for the deck to get good; then they would raise their bet.  With Gorilla play, you were betting only when the deck was good. You’d win  most of the time, and nobody would be able to peg you as a counter—because  you weren’t counting.  

“And a Big Player?”  

“A Big Player,” Martinez said as they crossed the street, “does it all. It’s  acting and counting and betting, it’s tracking the shuffle and cutting to aces.  It’s the toughest role and the most important. You carry the big money, and  you get yourself known by the casino personnel. They comp you the big suites  because you’re betting a thousand dollars a hand. You get called in by the  Spotters, but then you take over the play. You do things the Gorilla can’t, like  raising the bet as the deck gets better—but you have to do it with style, so the  casino doesn’t nail you. You have to look the part.”  

Kevin thought about what Micky had said when Kevin had asked why they’d  chosen him: you’ve got the look. Did they mean he was capable of being a  chameleon, like Martinez? Or that he was partially Asian, like most of the  team? He wasn’t an actor, he’d never tried to play a part before. Maybe  Martinez and Fisher saw something in him that he did not.  

“So you have three tests to take,” Martinez continued. “First, you need to  master basic strategy and a simple count—the tools of the Spotter. Then you  need to learn how to use counting indexes to vary your play—and your  betting—based on the count. That’s good enough for Gorilla play. Finally,  you’ll have to pass the last exam. That’s a full-scale test in a casino  environment, where you’ll take on the role of the Big Player.”  

“Where do you get a ‘casino environment’?” Kevin asked.  

Martinez smiled. “You just worry about the cards. We’ll handle the rest.” 

That night, after a short visit with Felicia to apologize for missing dinner,  Kevin sat on the floor of his bedroom, dealing to himself from a pile of cards  six decks deep. At first he was simply practicing basic strategy. Micky Rosa  had given him a booklet full of BS charts, which he had memorized while  eating pasta in front of the television.  

Kevin hadn’t found the charts intimidating; he had spent most of his life  submerged in complex math formulas. His father had quizzed him, even as a  kid, on the basics of physics and chemistry. Unlike much of higher physics,  basic strategy coincided with common sense.  

Contrary to what many novices believed, the goal of blackjack was not to get  the best hand possible; it was to beat the dealer’s hand. The key to basic  strategy was to understand that the dealer’s advantage was based entirely on  the fact that he drew after the player. Everything else in the game favored the  player. The dealer was constrained by the house rules, which meant he was  usually forced to hit until he either reached seventeen or busted. Therefore, the  player’s strategy was to try to calculate what the dealer’s most likely hand was  going to be, and then draw until his own hand was higher. If the dealer was  most likely to bust (and the dealer normally busted 28 percent of the time), the  player simply needed to stand on any two cards over eleven.  

The player’s calculations were based on the information he had available:  what the dealer had showing. If the dealer had a strong card showing—like a  ten or an ace—then the odds were high the dealer had a good hand and  wouldn’t need to take a third card. That meant the player had to keep hitting  until he had a strong hand for himself. If the dealer had a weak card  showing—like a six—he would most likely take a third card from the deck.  Therefore, his odds of busting were high, and it made sense for the player to  stand.  

Proper strategy became a bit trickier when it came to splitting pairs and  doubling down, the two moves that gave the player a chance to increase his  odds against the house by raising his bet. With splitting pairs, the player could  create two hands against the dealer’s cards. This allowed the player to double  his bet—but he was also doubling his risk. So the only proper time to split  pairs was when the dealer’s hand would be weaker than each of the players’  two new hands. A standard set of rules for splitting had been devised by  previous blackjack experts using computers running millions of virtual hands.  Kevin found it easier simply to memorize the tables than try and work them  out. The same went for the rules of doubling down, and the proper play  for soft hands—hands with an ace, which could be used as either a one or an  eleven. 

Altogether, it had taken him under an hour to get a good feel for basic  strategy. After dealing blackjack hands to himself for a few more hours, he  switched over to learning the basic running count.  

The hi-lo count was perhaps the simplest counting method one could learn.  Low cards—two through six—were assigned a point value of positive one.  High cards—ten through ace—were assigned a point value of negative one.  

When Kevin went through a deck, adding low cards and subtracting high  cards, he came out to zero. It felt foolishly simple, going through the six decks  again and again, flipping one card at a time. But it became progressively more  difficult, the more cards Kevin flipped at once. In a casino environment, he’d  have to be able to count the whole table in a matter of seconds. So he took  advice Micky had given him on his way out of the classroom: Match ’em  up. High cards and low cards canceled each other out. By seeing the cards in  pairs—or even foursomes—of matching high and low cards, he could speed  up his counting time geometrically. Pretty soon he could get through the six  decks in a few minutes.  

When he finally went to sleep, cards spun through his dreams. He was  hooked. It wasn’t just the potential for money; there were a lot of ways a kid  on the honors track at MIT could make money. It was the pure  mathematical beauty of counting that turned him on. 

Over the next few weeks, his love of counting expanded. Micky and his crew  guided Kevin through intense practice sessions, mostly sequestered in  classrooms with the window shades drawn—both for effect and to simulate  the often poor lighting one found in smoke-filled casinos. After mastering a  simple count, Kevin learned how to estimate the number of cards left in the  shoe by sight, then used this skill to turn the running count into a more  accurate number called the true count. The true count was based on the  statistical fact that the fewer cards there were in the deck, the more significant  the count became. For example, a count of positive ten—ten extra high cards  left in the shoe—had more value when there were only fifty cards left than  when there were three hundred.  

Five hours a day, seven days a week, Kevin matched high and low cards, then  divided by the number of decks left in the shoe. Over and over again until the  technique became more instinct than skill. Running count to true count, the  number then applied to the index charts lodged in his memory that taught him  how to vary his play based on the new advantage or disadvantage (derived,  again, from thousands of hours of computer analysis and decades of play by  MIT blackjack alumni).  

Midway through October, Micky, Martinez, and Fisher subjected him to the  Spotting and Gorilla tests. Both took place in Martinez and Fisher’s  apartment. Martinez dealt from a regulation shoe while Fisher counted  alongside him, making sure he got it right. By the end, Kevin was playing two  hands, calling out both the count and proper play whenever Micky tapped his 

foot. There was no betting involved yet; that would be saved for the final  exam. But he was asked to run through the Spotter’s signal list:  

“The deck’s warm,” Micky called out. Kevin folded his arms in front of his  chest.  

“The deck’s turned hot,” Fisher said. Kevin folded his arms behind his back.  “Even hotter,” Martinez added. Kevin’s hands went into his pockets.  

“I need to talk”—Kevin touched his eye. “Get over here”—Kevin lowered his  head to his folded arms. “What’s the count?”—Kevin scratched his ear. “I’m  too tired to play anymore”—Kevin rubbed his neck. “I’m getting heat from  the pit boss”—Kevin moved his hands to his forehead. “Something’s wrong,  get out now!”—Kevin ran his hands through his hair. 

When he was finished with the physical signals, Kevin was asked to repeat the  oral count signals, to be used when calling in a Big Player. These were all  simple words that could be used in a sentence, right under the nose of a dealer,  or pit boss. They seemed arbitrary at first, but they were also mnenomics:  

  

Tree: the signal for a count of +1, because a tree looked like a one  Switch: +2, because a switch was binary, on or off  

Stool: +3, because it had three legs  

Car: +4, four wheels  

Glove: +5, fingers  

Gun: +6, bullets  

Craps: +7, lucky seven  

Pool: +8, eight ball  

Cat: +9, lives  

Bowling: +10, strike  

Football: +11, because “11” looks like goalposts  

Eggs: +12, a dozen  

Witch: +13, witchy number 

Ring: +14, fourteen-carat gold  

Paycheck: +15, because you got paid on the fifteenth  

Sweet: +16, sweet sixteen  

Magazine: +17, the name of a teen magazine  

Voting booth: +18, the age you could vote  

Sometimes Kevin found it hard to think of a sentence under pressure, but  Martinez assured him that even nonsense worked in a casino, because nobody  was really listening. “This stool is killing my ass” meant the count was three,  and “I’d rather be bowling” meant the count was ten. “My room upstairs is the  size of a fucking voting booth” meant it was time to bet the mortgage.  

Exhausted after three hours of testing, Kevin collapsed on the futon while  Martinez and Fisher went out to pick up an order of sushi from Toyama. It  was the first time Kevin had ever been alone with Micky, who was seated  

awkwardly on a beanbag chair in a corner by one of the stereo speakers. He  was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and baggy shorts, dressed like a college kid,  his posture clumsy and disarming. But Kevin knew the master card counter’s  looks were deceiving. Behind the thick glasses, his eyes were piercing, and he  had one of the sharpest minds Kevin had ever known. His blackjack team was  more than a lark—it was a shrewdly planned business, run almost like a cult.  Everyone revered Micky; even Kevin found himself in awe of the man’s  abilities and charisma. When the team came together, any dispute was  immediately deferred to Micky. Every decision about the team’s structure  seemed to come directly from him. Even Kevin’s recruitment, though  obviously spurred by Martinez and Fisher, was played off as Micky’s idea.  

Kevin didn’t know how much money Micky had invested in the team, but it  was obvious that he was its de facto boss. He was the link to the past decades  of MIT blackjack, and he was guiding the future. Without him, there was no  team, just a group of overintelligent rebellious kids.  

“Kevin,” Micky said now, peering at him through those thick glasses from the  corner of the South End apartment, “I think you’re ready.”  

Kevin felt a rush of adrenaline. It was the same feeling he got when his father  approved of something he had done. His father would not have approved of  Micky, an adult who hung around brilliant kids, turning them into gamblers.  Kevin’s father never would have understood. Card counting wasn’t gambling.  It was arbitrage. 

“Saturday night,” Micky continued. “Martinez will give you the address. If all  goes well, you’ll be able to join us in Vegas at the end of the month.”  

Kevin exhaled, hungry. He wasn’t thinking about sushi.  

Saturday night he was going to take the Test.  

Seven  

Boston, October 1994  

K evin squinted through the darkness as he moved nervously down the  narrow, poorly paved alley. There weren’t any streetlights to help him  navigate between the murky puddles of unknown liquids seeping up from  beneath the cracked asphalt, nor was there any way to avoid the minefield of  broken glass that littered the curb. He was glad he was wearing his thick  Timber-land boots, though he was beginning to wonder if sneakers might have  been more appropriate for this part of town. Judging from the boarded-up  storefronts and decrepit tenement buildings that lined either side of the alley,  there was a good chance he’d soon be running for his life.  

Certainly, he’d never been this deep inside Chinatown before. This wasn’t the  quaintly ethnic, westernized row of dim sum restaurants and fortune-cookie  take-out dives that characterized the touristy zigzag of streets bordering the  financial district on one side, the theater district on the other. This was a part  of Chinatown the college kids and guidebooks never heard about. A  spiderweb of one-way streets, winding alleys, and dead ends, where nobody  spoke English and nobody looked you in the eye. It reminded Kevin of the  stories his father had told him about Hong Kong. These five square miles were  a foreign country, and despite Kevin’s Asian blood, he was the stranger here.  

Thankfully, the alley seemed devoid of life. Kevin kept his head low,  checking the numbers on the buildings with quick flicks of his eyes.  

A blue awning caught his gaze, and he stopped, one foot in a viscous puddle,  the other balanced on the curb. Beneath the awning was a small grocery store;  a row of strangled chickens dangled behind the plate-glass storefront, next to a  cardboard sign covered in Chinese writing. Beside the window was a wooden  door painted the same blue as the awning. A number was scrawled across the  center of the door in dark green ink.  

Kevin checked the number twice, then shrugged: Forty-Three Wister Street.  This was the place. He moved up the front steps and pressed a buzzer on the  door frame.  

There was a momentary pause, and then he heard shuffling from somewhere  inside. Metal scraped against metal, a latch was undone, and the door swung  inward. The grocery was to the right; directly ahead was a staircase rising 

steeply into near darkness. An elderly Chinese man in a white undershirt was  standing on the bottom step, beckoning Kevin forward. “You Kevin? You  Kevin?”  

Kevin nodded, glancing into the grocery. The place was deserted, the scent of  dead fowl overwhelming. He turned back to the man. “Yes.”  

“You follow.”  

The old man turned and started up the steps. Kevin tried to calm his heart,  then moved after him. As he rose higher into the building, he began to hear  noises drifting down from somewhere above. It sounded like a party: laughter,  clinking glasses, high heels scraping against wood. Kevin’s anxiety  lessened. How many people get mugged at parties?  

The stairway ended at another wooden door. The old man pushed through, and  a blast of orange light poured out around him. Kevin took the last few steps  and entered a long, rectangular room with low ceilings and no windows. His  eyes widened as he counted three blackjack felts, a roulette wheel, and two  craps tables, all regulation size, as if stolen straight out of a casino. There  were at least twenty people in the room, about half of them Chinese. The rest  looked to be businessmen in their thirties and forties, many of them dressed in  jackets and ties. There was a bar running along the far wall, and cocktail  waitresses in black dresses moved through the crowd, carrying trays littered  with various concoctions.  

An underground Chinatown casino. Kevin shook his head, amazed. He’d  heard that places like this existed. He searched the room and finally caught  sight of Martinez and Micky sitting next to each other at one of the blackjack  tables. His first instinct was to go over and say hello, but then he remembered  what Martinez had told him before giving him the address: This is a dress  rehearsal. Play by the team rules, or don’t play at all.  

Kevin moved quietly through the crowd. He kept his gaze on Martinez but  stayed at least ten feet away, first pretending to watch the action on the  roulette wheel, then leaning over the craps table, minding the dice. The other  gamblers didn’t even notice him; just another Asian kid wandering the room.  He kept his head low, chin almost at his chest. He didn’t even raise his eyes  when he saw Martinez fold his arms over his chest—signaling him in.  

Here we go, Kevin said to himself. He nonchalantly crossed the room and  lowered himself onto the empty stool at the far end of the table—third base.  Neither Micky nor Martinez acknowledged him. Micky was sipping a  carbonated drink through a straw lodged in a gap between two of his teeth,  and Martinez was chatting with the dealer, a grey-haired Chinese man in a  light blue jacket and khaki pants. When the man smiled, Kevin saw that his  teeth were almost as bad as Micky’s: His gums were the color of licorice. 

Kevin reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of twenties. Fisher had  loaned him the money that morning, before heading to the gym to work out.  Three hundred dollars—and if Kevin lost it all, it would come out of his first  paycheck with the team. If he failed the Test, he’d be doing Fisher’s dishes for  the next month.  

He set the money on the felt and watched the dealer exchange it for sixty red  five-dollar chips. Another Chinese man in a matching jacket also watched the  transaction from a stool set directly between the three blackjack tables. The pit  boss, Kevin surmised; Micky had given him a crash course in the casino  hierarchy a few days ago. Dealers were watched over by pit bosses, who were  controlled by shift managers, who in turn answered to the floor manager, who  kowtowed to the casino manager (the CM), who in turn bowed directly to  God—or corporate headquarters. In Vegas, that translated to some faceless  monster with a hundred million shareholders and almost as many lawyers.  Here, in Chinatown, God was probably some drug smuggler with one eye and  an ivory cane. Kevin didn’t want to think about that. He was here to play.  

As he stacked his chips in a neat pile, he used his shoulder to scratch his right  ear. Two seats down from him, Martinez shivered and said, “It’s colder than a  witch’s tit in here, Al. Don’t you guys pay for heat?”  

The dealer laughed, showing his black gums. Kevin took five chips from his  pile and placed them on the betting circle. It was only twenty-five dollars, but  it was five times his minimum unit, the proper bet for a count of thirteen. If  he’d been bankrolled, he’d have twenty-five hundred on the table.  

The cards came out, and Kevin drew a solid twenty against the dealer’s eight.  He stood, won, and adjusted the count, matching up Micky’s and Martinez’s  cards, analyzing the depth of the shoe, calculating his index and his bet  without even blinking his eyes. He leaned back on his stool, his expression  smooth. He raised his bet another chip, then called for the cocktail waitress.  

For the rest of the shoe, he played perfectly, keeping the count all the way to  the shuffle card. Throughout, he maintained an easy banter with the dealer and  the passing waitresses, joking about his luck, how his girlfriend was going to  spend it all on clothes anyway. A second shoe started up, and he played  through on Micky’s signal. By the third shoe he was up nine hundred dollars,  and the pit boss was asking him to fill out a ratings card—even Chinatown  had its comp system. He used an alias, David Chow, and had no problem  jotting down a fake address without interrupting his count. He grew more  boisterous with each hand; he wasn’t drunk, but he was playing the part,  making his cheeks red by holding his breath when nobody was looking,  throwing his chips out recklessly when he raised his bet, asking the dealer for  help adding up his cards when the pit boss was watching.  

He was putting on quite a display but, through it all, always kept the perfect  count. The casino atmosphere didn’t distract him; instead, he found the 

ambient noise bolstered his energy level. By midway through the fourth shoe,  he was enjoying himself so much, he didn’t notice the shadow closing in over  him from behind.  

He was fingering his chips when the strong arms suddenly wrapped around his  chest, yanking him off his stool. He tried to shout, but a canvas bag came  down over his head, muffling his voice.  

He felt himself lifted off the floor and half carried, half dragged across the  room. People were laughing around him—a strange reaction, he thought in the  part of his mind that was still functioning. Then he heard a door open and  close, and he was tossed in a corner. He hit the ground hard enough to take his  breath away.  

There was a moment of silence, then the canvas bag was ripped off his head.  He was in some sort of a closet. The floor was damp beneath his jeans, and the  air reeked of mildew.  

Fisher was standing over him, a wicked smile on his face.  

Kevin stared at him, shocked. “What the fuck are you doing?”  

Fisher ignored his outrage. The bulked-up dropout’s voice came out perfectly  calm. “What’s the count, Kevin.”  

Kevin blinked. He could still hear the laughter coming from outside the closet.  It was obviously a prank—but it had scared him half to death.  

“You motherfucker. I’ve got nearly a thousand dollars at the table—”  “Kevin,” Fisher repeated. “What’s the count?”  

And suddenly, Kevin understood. This was part of the Test. The casino  environment hadn’t distracted him. The pit boss, the cocktail waitress, the  dealer—none of them had taken his attention away from the cards.  

So Fisher had taken it a sadistic step further. He had tried to throw Kevin’s  concentration by brute force.  

“What’s the count,” Fisher demanded.  

Kevin glared up at him. “Craps, you fucking ape. The count is plus seven.  Now let me get my goddamn money!”  

The door to the closet swung open behind Fisher, and Martinez stuck his head  inside. Micky was next to him, and both of them were smiling. They had been  listening from outside the whole time. 

“Sorry Kev,” Martinez said as Fisher helped him to his feet. “There isn’t any  money. This was all a mock-up. The house knows us here. They don’t let us  play for real.”  

Kevin laughed out loud. “You’re kidding me.”  

Fisher squeezed his shoulder. “They let us use the place for our Test. Helps  them keep track of the local card counters.”  

Kevin rubbed sweat from his eyes. This was insane—and invigorating as hell.  He knew he had just gone through an initiation, of sorts. He was one of them  now.  

“Congratulations,” Micky said, reaching forward to shake his hand. “And  welcome aboard.”  

Kevin nodded. A strange feeling came over him as he looked into Micky’s  eyes; he felt unnerved by the fatherly sense of satisfaction he saw in the older  man’s gaze. Then Martinez clapped him on the back, bringing him back to the  moment.  

“Pack your bags, bro. We’re going to Vegas.”  

Eight  

Las Vegas, Present Day  

I couldn’t see his eyes behind the thick protective goggles, but Damon  Zimonowski’s lips were curled back, his teeth clenched together in an  expression of pure violence. His arms were extended, his impressive six-foot three body hunched slightly forward. I pressed my hands tight against my  cushioned headphones as his finger whitened against the trigger. I could  hardly believe that I was actually standing there—that this was the setting of a  background interview for my book on Kevin Lewis’s double life and not a  scene from one of my novels.  

The .357 jerked three times, the explosions rocketing through the indoor  shooting range, and Damon shouted in joy. I tried to get a look at the target at  the other end of the twenty-yard corridor, but I couldn’t see past the Plexiglas  extension that separated our two lanes.  

Damon stepped out of his shooting stance and handed the .357 to a teenager in  overalls, then yanked off his goggles to look at me.  

“Just what the world needs,” he said, grinning. “Another goddamn blackjack  book.” 

I thought about protesting, then decided to leave it alone. I wasn’t writing a  blackjack book per se, but I couldn’t explain that to Damon. My meeting with  the somewhat frightening Vegas denizen had been set up by Kevin Lewis—or  David Lee, as Damon knew him from his days as a casino host at one of the  posh monsters on the Strip. Damon was my first subject, the first name on the  list Kevin had provided me as part of our bargain. For this interview, however,  Kevin had made me promise not to mention the real thrust of my book, and  after Damon’s display with the .357, I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.  

The way Kevin had described him, Damon was the perfect research subject, a  mixture of old and new Vegas. After a brief stint in the marines, he’d moved  here from Dallas in 1974, in search of his own version of the American  Dream. He’d worked for the casinos in a dozen different capacities over the  years, clawing his way up from security guard to blackjack dealer to pit boss  to shift manager—ending up as a host at a high-profile Strip casino in the mid 1980s. Over the next decade he had moved among six different casinos before  finally deciding to get out of the gambling business altogether. Like many  other residents who had watched Vegas transform over the years, he had  realized that the city was experiencing a remarkable population explosion: the  opposite of Atlantic City, where the surrounding urbania declined as the  casinos moved in, Vegas had been in an almost constant state of boom for the  past four decades. New industries were springing up to service the rapidly  growing mecca, and in the future, the hottest action wasn’t necessarily going  to be in the gambling pits. Damon had become a developer of sorts. He now  owned a piece of the newly opened shooting range located just outside the  city, as well as a small stake in a nearby supermarket.  

The kid in the overalls took my headphones, and I followed Damon to a small  lounge area by the front door. There was a chalkboard on the wall, with gun club schedules scrawled across the slate in bright green letters. A watercooler  gurgled beneath the board, and two potted plants curled precipitously together  by a window that looked out onto the nearly empty parking lot. My rented  Geo looked clownishly small next to Damon’s mammoth four-wheel-drive  Suburban.  

“You know,” Damon continued, filling a cone-shaped paper cup with water  from the cooler, “Vegas is the fastest-growing city in the world, the last  fucking place left on earth where a bum with no skills can make a decent  living—and all anyone wants to write about is fucking blackjack.”  

In the ten minutes I had known him, I’d already grown used to Damon’s  liberal use of expletives. But under the color, he was making an interesting  point. The phenomenon of Las Vegas was much more than a card story: The  town’s growth, financial influx, architectural fluidity, and character were all  unique in human history. Where else in the world could a cocktail waitress  afford a mortgage on a house and a lease on a car? Where else could a college  dropout who parked cars for a living earn enough to send his kids to private  school? 

Kevin Lewis’s story fit into this framework because it defined an integral  moment in Vegas’s time line: His first baby steps into his double life  coincided with the relaunch of Vegas on a megascale.  

“People love to gamble,” I answered. “And they understand blackjack because  it’s simple, and it seems like it’s almost fair. People believe it’s the only game  you actually have a chance of beating.”  

Damon grunted, crushing the paper cup with his meaty hand and tossing it  into a wastebasket. “It’s not even the biggest game in the casino anymore.  Slots are more than sixty percent of the action. Blackjack was hot in the  eighties and nineties, but we’re moving into the era of machines.”  

I nodded. I had read about the advance of the machines. Now even slots were  in danger of being overrun by video poker—the Internet porn of gambling  games. Quick, addictive, and somehow satisfying, the machines ate money  faster than a New York City rental agent. But I wasn’t interested in gambling  machines.  

“It’s the nineties I’m writing about. And not just blackjack. I’m interested in  how Vegas changed, how its character was reflected in the big players of the  decade.”  

Damon crossed his arms, shrugging. “Well, on the exterior, Vegas is always  changing.”  

I could fill in the details on my own. From my research, I had concluded that  Vegas had gone through five distinct periods since gambling was legalized  with the passing of Nevada Assembly Bill 98, back in 1933. First there was  the mobster era, beginning just after World War II. Inspired by their success  in illegal gambling parlors in the Midwest, infamous Mafia figures such as  Morris “Moe” Dalitz and Bugsy Siegel moved into town. Funded in part by  two hundred and fifty million dollars of Teamster money, the mobsters built  the first major casinos—such as Siegel’s six-million-dollar Flamingo. The  Flamingo was quickly followed by the Sands, Riviera, Dunes, and Tropicana.  

In the sixties, the moderately insane tycoon Howard Hughes took over where  the mobsters left off, adding an element of corporate legitimacy to the town  through his business and political connections, while funding another building  boom. Then, in the seventies, architectural monarch Kirk Kerkorian gave birth  to the first of the huge resorts with the construction of the first MGM Grand  (later becoming Bally’s) in 1973. At a hundred and twenty million dollars,  with twenty-one hundred rooms, the casino was the dawn of the true Vegas styled entertainment complex and a precursor to things to come.  

After a brief but failed flirtation with the idea of “family entertainment”  characterized by gaudy amusement-park-styled attractions and decor, Vegas  decimated the competition from Atlantic City and emerged from the recession 

in part by reinventing itself as the world’s foremost adult amusement park.  Luring millions of conventioneers with a state-sanctioned, lax attitude toward  the sex industry, and a new focus on the consumption-oriented middle class,  the city built by gangsters became America’s premier vacation and corporate  conference destination. At the end of the eighties and the beginning of the  nineties, fueled by America’s economic boom and a lust for high living, a  massive influx of corporate money spawned the Vegas we know today: an  over-the-top world of excess and imagination.  

Beginning with Steve Wynn’s Mirage, built in 1989, Vegas picked up where  the MGM Grand of 1973 left off. Inaugurating a multibillion-dollar  construction boom, the Mirage was a six-hundred-fifty-million-dollar trip into  fantasy. From the fifty-four-foot erupting volcano out front to illusionists  Siegfried and Roy’s “Secret Garden” attached to the pool, the Mirage  reinvented the concept of the megaresort. But the Mirage was only the  beginning. On its heels came Excalibur—Camelot brought to life; the  Luxor—a massive black glass pyramid that would have made Ramses feel  right at home; the Hard Rock—a sex-charged L.A. rock club gone kitsch; and  New York, New York—the Big Apple if it had been reimagined by Disney,  with buxom cocktail waitresses instead of college kids in mouse costumes.  

Culminating in the construction of the massive Bellagio and Venetian (costing  $1.6 and $1.2 billion respectively), Vegas currently sported nineteen of the  world’s twenty biggest hotels, hosting over thirty million visitors a year,  generating five billion dollars in gaming revenue, utilizing sixteen miles of  neon tubing… 

Etc., etc., etc.  

Damon Zimonowski’s simple statement pretty much covered it: On the  exterior, Vegas is always changing. Inside, however, something about the  town was still the same. It was this dichotomy that interested me, because in  my mind, Kevin Lewis and his friends represented that very dichotomy—the  flashy, modernized exterior concealing an inner, dark core.  

“At its heart,” Damon continued, “it’s all about greed. We build the casinos  because we want to take your money. You come here because you want to  take our money. The rest is just window dressing—how we lure you in, how  you justify it to yourself when you get back home.” 

“But it’s not an even game,” I said as the sound of gunfire suddenly echoed  behind me. I glanced back, saw the kid in overalls standing in the last shooting  stall. “The casinos make sure the system is rigged in their favor.”  

Damon laughed. “That’s the nature of the motherfucker. It’s no different than  any other business. You don’t open a movie theater and let people in for free.  You charge ’em for the entertainment. That’s what Vegas does. The house’s  edge is the price of the movie ticket.” 

I had heard this line of reasoning before, from an employee of the Nevada  Gaming Commission. When you sat down to play blackjack, the casino was  providing you with an entertainment service. You paid for that service by  losing more than you won. People like Kevin Lewis were getting their  entertainment for free—and then some.  

“But the house doesn’t always have an edge,” I said, leading.  Damon watched as the kid in overalls reloaded. “Except with the cheaters.”  

“And the card counters,” I said, hoping he understood the distinction. Many  casino employees liked to blur the categories together. But legally, there was a  difference. It had been tried and won in court numerous times. Card counters  did not alter the natural outcome of the game, which was a key component of  the Nevada legal definition. Nor did proficient counters employ devices to  help them beat the house.  

“Sure,” Damon admitted. “The card counters, too. Though that’s a more  debatable issue.”  

“What do you mean?” I asked. We were getting to the goods the roundabout  way.  

“Most people who say they can count cards are full of shit. They end up losing  more than the civilians. It takes enormous discipline, dedication, and  mathematical skill. You got to be a goddamn genius to do it right.”  

I nodded. More gunshots exploded behind me, though I fought the urge to turn  around. “But there are geniuses out there. And sometimes they do beat the  house.”  

Damon rocked his impressive frame back on both heels. “I’ve met my fair  share. You heard of Ken Uston? He was the god of ’em all. Had a team back  in the seventies. Then the casinos finally wised up, kicked him out whenever  they saw him. He tried suing, saying his constitutional rights were being  violated. Didn’t fly in Vegas.”  

“Card counting didn’t end with Uston,” I said.  

“Not by a long shot. Its heyday was in the late eighties, early nineties. That’s  when everyone in America was obsessed with easy money. Smart kids were  heading off to Wall Street, law school, whatever. Even smarter kids thought  they could make more in Vegas.”  

This was the crux of Kevin Lewis’s story. By the early nineties, greed had  reached new heights, and smart kids—math majors, engineers, the Wall  Street–bound—wanted a piece of the great American pie. Some of them came  to Vegas. 

“And it drove Vegas crazy,” I finished for Damon.  

He shook his head. “It’s not as cut-and-dried as that. Card counters can be  good for business, too. They make the civilians think the game is beatable.  Some fucker writes a book about a bunch of kids who beat Vegas, and they  think they can do it, too.”  

My face reddened. Damon wasn’t working for the casinos anymore, but his  comment hit pretty close to home. I wondered if it was just luck—or if  somehow my mission had been compromised. I decided it was time to press  the topic.  

“So in their heyday, how much do you think card counters cost the casinos  every year? How much can they really win?”  

The kid in the overalls was on his way over. The writer in me imagined he  still had the .357, but I knew I was just being dramatic.  

“It’s not what they win that makes the casinos nervous,” Damon said. “It’s the  fact that they can win. Over time, nobody beats the house—that’s the cardinal  rule of Vegas. You fuck with the cardinal rule, you fuck with Vegas.”  

He winked at the kid in the overalls. “And sooner or later, Vegas finds a way  to fuck you back.”  

Nine  

Thirty Thousand Feet, November 1994  

S omewhere over Chicago, the sky went black on the other side of the glass  egg at Kevin’s shoulder. He pulled his baseball cap down low over his  forehead, concentrating on the cards splayed out on the seat-back tray. The  steady stream of cool, stale air blowing out of the plastic nipple above his  head had been keeping him awake since takeoff; he couldn’t figure out how  Martinez had been able to fall asleep so easily. The crazy fool was sprawled  out in the seat next to him, one foot in the aisle, both hands clasped behind his  head. It probably helped that he was under five-six. These seats are made for  circus folk.  

Martinez had tried to use his frequent flier miles to get them into first class,  but the flight was way overbooked. America West 69—the Friday-night neon  express—was usually pretty full, but this weekend was even worse than usual  because of the fight. George Foreman vs. Michael Moorer, a high-profile pay per-view event at the MGM Grand. Martinez had assured Kevin that the  whole city would be jumping by Saturday night. Fights made for perfect card counting conditions; crowds of drunk, raucous people filling the blackjack  pits, high-rolling celebrities drawing everyone’s attention, mammoth sports  stars throwing huge money down on foolish bets—nobody was going to 

notice a bunch of Asian kids hovering around the tables. The same went for  New Year’s, Memorial Day, July Fourth—all the major Vegas holidays.  Whenever the crowds came out, the card counters followed in droves.  

Kevin continued dealing to himself, counting the cards without really trying.  He had realized a few days ago that he no longer saw the numbers; he’d  practiced so much, counting had become pure instinct. But Micky Rosa had  made him promise that he’d continue dealing for at least two hours a day.  

Kevin finished with the shoe, then shifted his legs to try to get more centered  in the cramped seat. The heavy money belt around his waist didn’t help, nor  did the bulging plastic bags strapped to each of his thighs. One hundred  thousand dollars in hundreds, wadded into ten stacks of ten thousand each. A  fortune under his clothes—and a hell of an inconvenience. But since this was  his first trip with the team, he had been designated “donkey boy.” It was his  job to see that the stash got to Vegas intact.  

Along with the cash, there were another two hundred and fifty thousand  dollars in chips jammed into his carry-on bag. It had been nerve-racking,  shoving the bag through the X-ray machine; but Martinez had assured him  that even though some chips show up on airport detectors, the Logan security  people weren’t smart enough to realize their worth. On the inside, a five hundred-dollar chip looks the same as a one-dollar chip.  

Altogether, it was a staggering amount of money, and about half of it  belonged to Micky. According to Martinez, another quarter million dollars  was waiting for them in safe-deposit boxes spread around downtown Las  Vegas. He had explained that the six-hundred-thousand-dollar bankroll was  about average for their team; it was hard to handle much more than a million  at the tables without getting noticed, and anything less than a half a million  yielded lower returns. Martinez and Fisher had griped a bit that all they could  invest was a hundred thousand each; Micky and his “friends” hogged the rest,  giving them the most potential for profit. But it was, after all, Micky’s team.  

Repositioned, Kevin closed his eyes, trying to ignore the cold air licking his  cheeks. In his mind, he went over the brief conversation he’d had with Felicia  before leaving for the airport. He hadn’t even considered telling her the truth  about where he was going. She didn’t know Martinez and Fisher—although  knowing them probably would have just made things worse—and she  certainly didn’t know anything about the blackjack team. Over the past few  weeks, Kevin had covered up his practice sessions with lies about extra swim  team practices and a made-up linear-algebra study group. Like Kevin’s father,  Felicia wouldn’t have taken the time to understand that what he was doing  wasn’t wrong.  

Kevin felt bad about the lies, but he also enjoyed the idea of living a double  life. He touched one of the wads of hundred-dollar bills attached to his legs,  and smiled. I feel like James Bond. 

The airplane jerked through a spate of turbulence, and Kevin opened his eyes.  Martinez was finally awake, rubbing spit from his lips as he stretched his legs  under the seat in front of him. Then he elbowed Kevin and pointed at the man  seated across the aisle. The guy looked to be in his mid-forties; white, little  

John Lennon glasses, and an oxford shirt. Kevin looked more closely and saw  that he had a blackjack book open on his lap and a deck of cards in his shirt  pocket.  

Martinez sighed. “You see it every flight. Welcome to amateur hour. There’s  nothing the casinos love more than a guy who thinks he can count cards. The  dude probably bought the book at the airport.”  

Kevin laughed. “At least he’ll know basic strategy.”  

“That would be fine, as long as he stops there. But they never do. He’ll bet  five dollars a hand for an hour, maybe two. Then he’ll see a group of low  cards, and he’ll think that means it’s time to go crazy. He won’t take into  account that he’s one deck into the shoe and the face cards have been raining  like Niagara. He’ll drop three hundred dollars by six A.M.”  

Kevin knew Martinez was right. The average visitor to Vegas lost three  hundred dollars during a weekend. Primarily male, middle-aged, visiting for  three nights; spending another three hundred dollars on food, rooms, and  entertainment, in addition to three hundred for the flight. Altogether, that  blackjack book would cost him nine hundred dollars. 

“These weekend flights are the funniest thing,” Martinez continued. “On the  way out, everyone’s smiling, laughing, joking. They’re all thinking about the  great time they’re going to have and how much they’re gonna win at the  tables. The flight home is like a wake. Everyone comes home a loser.”  

“Except us,” Kevin finished for him.  

Martinez shrugged. “Sometimes we lose. But the longer we play, the more  inevitable it is that we win. The opposite goes for the peasants.”  

Kevin watched the guy across the aisle remove the cards from his shirt pocket  and deal them to himself. His lips were moving as he counted the numbers.  Kevin shook his head. If the guy really did somehow start to win, he’d be so  obvious they’d spot him in a second. And then—well, they’d ask him to leave.  Wasn’t that what Micky had said?  

“Martinez,” Kevin asked, lowering his voice. “How many times have you  been asked to leave a casino?”  

Martinez paused before answering. “Three, maybe four. I can’t go to some of  the places downtown anymore—more because of who I’ve been seen  associating with than because of my own play.” 

Kevin raised his eyebrows. “Seen associating with?” 

Martinez nodded. “You need to understand something, Kevin. From the  moment you walk into a casino to the moment you leave, they’re watching  you. You’ve heard of the Eyes in the Sky? The fisheye cameras hanging from  the ceiling in the casino pit? Well, the truth is, there are cameras like that  everywhere. In the elevators, in the restaurants, even in the hotel hallways.  And there are assholes who spend all day and all night staring at TV monitors  linked to those cameras, trying to see faces that they recognize.”  

Kevin guessed it was a bit more technical than that. He went to MIT; he knew  about the computer software that police agencies were using to match faces  with photos. He figured that with all the millions of dollars at stake, the  casinos were using similar techniques.  

“Well,” Martinez continued, “the thing is, there’s this book. It’s put together  by this detective agency hired by the casinos to catch cheaters—and card  counters, who they lump in with the rest of the bastards. Plymouth Associates,  the agency’s called. And certain notorious card counters have found their way  into the Plymouth Facebook.”  

Kevin exhaled. If he had thought it through, he probably wouldn’t have been  surprised by the idea of a detective agency hired by the casinos, or that they’d  have a file on card counters. But it made things seem a bit more serious than  Micky and the rest had let on.  

“Is your picture in the Plymouth Book?” Kevin asked.  

Martinez shook his head. “Not yet, as far as I know. Neither is Fisher’s. But  Micky’s on the first page. And if they see any of us hanging out with Micky— well, you can bet there will be trouble.”  

“You mean they’ll ask us to leave.”  

“That’s right.” Martinez was quiet for a moment, then turned toward Kevin.  “Well, they might also try and back-room us.”  

Kevin pressed his lips together. This was the first he’d heard of anything that  could happen to a card counter other than being asked to leave. At thirty  thousand feet, moving six hundred miles an hour toward Vegas with cash all  over his body—and now Martinez decided to tell him? 

“What the fuck does that mean? ‘Back-room’?”  

Martinez waved a hand, Micky-style. “Calm down. It’s really nothing. They  try to get you to come with them to a back room, usually in the basement of  the casino. It’s just an intimidation thing. If you go down there—and you’d  have to be a fucking idiot to go down there—they’ll take your picture, make  you sign something that says you won’t come back to the casino. At that 

point, you’re officially eighty-sixed; if you do return, you’re legally  trespassing and they can arrest you. But they never do. Basically, back rooming is just a bluff to scare you off.”  

Kevin didn’t like what he was hearing. He wasn’t easily frightened, but he  didn’t want to be bullied by casino thugs. “So Micky’s been back-roomed  before?” he asked.  

Martinez shrugged. “I don’t honestly know. But other counters from MIT  have been. It’s no big deal. Vegas is run by major corporations. It’s not the  mob, like the old days. It’s Hilton and Holiday Inn. You think Hilton is going  to open itself up to a lawsuit for strong-arming a card counter?”  

Kevin knew Martinez was right. The huge corporations had too much at risk  to do anything stupid. He figured he could handle the intimidation tactics.  Hell, it just added another element to the game. Another reason not to get  caught.  

“If they ask you to go to the back room,” Martinez said, “just say no and walk  away. Don’t let them take your picture. Truth is, they’ve already got a picture  of you from the ceiling camera anyway. And don’t sign anything—and  especially, don’t give up your chips. They have no right to take your chips.”  Martinez folded his arms back above his head. “Oh yeah, one other thing.”  

“What’s that?”  

“Don’t let some guy named Vinnie take you on any long drives out into the  desert.”  

Three hours later, the plane banked hard to the right, starting its descent.  Kevin pressed his face against the window, peering beneath the wing. He  couldn’t see much of anything: an ocean of sable desert, seemingly darker  than the sky. After a few minutes, he began to notice a scattering of lights,  tiny little pinpricks in the liquid sheet of black. 

Then, suddenly, a bright glow erupted, first formless, then mushroom-shaped.  In a moment, the city became visible, the amazingly bright lights of  downtown feeding into the long, radiant Strip and its mammoth hotels. At one  end, the newly opened, sleek, dark glass Luxor Pyramid, beaming light ten  miles straight into space from a forty-billion-candlepower beacon attached to  its peak—the most powerful spotlight in the world. Halfway down the Strip,  the shimmering, emerald-green MGM Grand, its main building stretching the  width of four football fields. Nearby, the Mirage, its bright red volcano  spitting flames into the sky. Then the Excalibur, Caesars, Bally’s—such an  assault on Kevin’s vision that he had to blink. An oasis of color and light, 

neon jewels sprouting in the middle of nowhere. Down there, Kevin  thought, it’s all down there.  

Then he turned away from the window and started dealing to himself one last  time.  

Ten  

Las Vegas, November 1994  

M artinez had three rooms at the MGM Grand, booked under the name Peter  Koy. Fisher had a bank of rooms at the Stardust under the name Gordon  Chow. And Micky Rosa was checked in someplace downtown, with five  rooms under three different names. Eleven rooms for eleven people, most of  them suites, all of them free. But to Kevin, it didn’t sound like they’d be  spending much time in the rooms.  

Micky explained the rules as the team gathered in a corner of the arrival gate.  It was close to midnight Vegas time—three A.M. back in Boston—but all of  them were energized. Maybe it was something in the air. It was a common  story, real or urban myth, that the casinos pumped high levels of oxygen into  their ventilation systems to keep people awake longer. Kevin wondered if  McCarran Airport had a similar policy. Even the airport bristled with blinking,  buzzing slot machines.  

“From this point on,” Micky said, addressing his monologue to Kevin, since  the rest had heard it countless times, “whenever we’re in public, we don’t  know each other. We don’t use our real names, and we never mention MIT. If  you need to go back to one of the rooms to rest, make sure you go alone. Once  we’re in the rooms, we’re okay— as far as I know, they don’t put cameras in  the rooms. But the hallways and elevators are definitely wired, so we have to  make sure we stagger our breaks.”  

He paused as a group of elderly tourists in matching sweatshirts rumbled by,  eyes glistening as they took in the nearby slot machines. When they were out  of earshot, he continued. “We’re going to play in two shifts, five of you on the  floor at a time. The first shift will start at the Mirage and go until six A.M.,  then the second shift will go from six to eleven. We’re going to avoid the day  shift—that’s when the more senior casino employees are on the floor. We’ll  resume again tomorrow night at eleven, after the fight, and go again in two  shifts until eleven A.M. Sunday.”  

Kevin nodded with the rest of them. It was a heavy schedule, but nothing he  couldn’t handle. He’d get plenty of sleep during the day.  

“Martinez will be the Big Player in the first shift, Fisher will BP for the  second. Kevin, Kianna, Michael, and Brian will spot first, the rest will spot 

second. Spotters, make sure your BP can see you at all times. Try not to look  at each other at all, and never work the same tables.”  

Kevin glanced at Kianna, who didn’t seem to be listening at all. Her dark hair  was tied back tightly against her neck, and there was a fair amount of skin  peeking out of her low-cut top. She was wearing makeup and high heels and  looked like she was going out dancing. Nobody would ever suspect that she  was here to count cards.  

Michael and Brian were next to her. Michael was wearing a polo shirt and  slacks, as if he’d just come from the tennis court. Brian was in a ratty T-shirt  and jeans with a lopsided baseball cap on his head. Neither of them seemed  nervous; this had all become routine.  

“If there’s an emergency of any kind, spread the signal and we’ll all head to  the designated meeting place. Tonight let’s make it the volcano outside the  Mirage. And remember—no back rooms, no pictures, no signatures. The law  is on our side.”  

Micky reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic card, handing it to  Kevin. Kevin was surprised to see his own face on the card. It was an  authentic California ID under the name Oliver Chen. 

“Where’d you get the picture?” Kevin asked.  

“Your MIT facebook. When we get back to Boston, you can order up some  credit cards to go with it as backup. All perfectly legit.”  

Kevin slid the card into his wallet. As he did so, he noticed that one of the  plastic bags full of cash was slipping down his leg.  

“Uh, Micky—” he started, but Micky seemed to understand.  

“Martinez and Fisher, go with Kevin into the bathroom and split up the stash.  It should be enough to cover us tonight. Tomorrow I’ll retrieve the rest from  the safe-deposit boxes.”  

He reached out with both hands, placing one on Kevin’s shoulder, the other on  Martinez’s arm. “Guys, this is going to be a great weekend. Let’s have some  fun.”  

Something in his tone made Kevin certain that to Micky Rosa, this wasn’t  about fun.  

This was business, pure and simple. 

Removing one hundred thousand dollars from beneath his clothes in a  crowded public restroom wasn’t as difficult as Kevin had imagined. After  locking himself in a stall, with Martinez and Fisher in stalls on either side, he  lowered his pants and freed the plastic bags from his thighs. The money belt  gave him a little more trouble; it had somehow twisted around to his back, and  his left elbow slammed into the stall wall as he shimmied in search of the  clasp.  

“Take it easy in there,” Martinez whispered from the next corral. “Sounds like  you’re giving birth to a monster.”  

Kevin ignored him, splitting the cash into two piles, then passing them to  Fisher and Martinez. He kept five thousand for himself, the designated Spotter  stash. Each of the other Spotters would get their five thousand from the chips  in his duffel bag, which Micky was now carrying.  

Kevin waited until Fisher and Martinez had exited the bathroom before  following. He noticed that his heart was racing; even though the secrecy was  probably unnecessary, it made him feel even more like a spy.  

When he exited the bathroom, the others were already gone. He could still see  Fisher’s wide shoulders bouncing above the rush of people moving toward  baggage claim but Martinez had vanished, his little form swallowed by the  mob of travelers. Kevin was on his own.  

It took him a good twenty minutes to find his way to the cab stand. As he  waited in line, he wondered if Martinez and Fisher had taken limos, as in  Atlantic City. Or had that just been part of the recruitment tactics? Here in Las  Vegas, things seemed much more serious. Maybe it was the presence of  Micky. You can’t fuck around when the boss is in the office.  

The taxi driver didn’t seem surprised that Kevin wasn’t carrying any bags, and  kept him awake during the short ride to the Mirage with a sob story about two  ex-wives and four ex-kids. Kevin kept the window open the whole time,  letting the warm breeze pull at the collar of his shirt. He wasn’t even sure  what time it was anymore. The five-hour flight had deposited him in a  chronological fugue state.  

The cab dropped him in front of the hotel lobby, and he took a moment to  stroll through the faux-tropical lagoon outside, admiring the huge, brightly lit  volcano in the center. The volcano was in mideruption, red plumes of flame  spraying high into the air as a crowd of tourists applauded. It was an awesome  sight, one that would be repeated every fifteen minutes until midnight. Kevin  wondered if it was just as impressive the tenth time around.  

Would the thrill he was feeling at that moment—the moment before his first  real casino play—ever wear off? 

He tucked in his shirt and headed through the glass doors that led into the  Mirage. An inadvertent smile moved across his face as he took in the vast  atrium: Like the lagoon, it was decorated in the fashion of a tropical jungle,  with thick foliage, rumbling brooks, and even the odd waterfall. The air  seemed misty, unlike the dry desert air outside, and the entire  place smelled authentic.  

Surrounding the vast atrium was the Polynesian-themed casino, split into a  number of different play areas, all festooned with real and plastic plant life.  Kevin got his bearings and moved toward the blackjack pit to his right.  

The place was jumping—as crowded as the Tropicana in Atlantic City, but  with a different clientele. Women in shiny tube tops, showing ample curves  and way too much skin, mingled with conventioneers in leisure suits. Groups  of Japanese men, red-faced from alcohol and shouting loudly at one another,  melded into junkets from the Midwest. Cowboy hats, silk suits, leather pants,  gold lamé, slicked-back hair, ponytails, even the odd tuxedo—it was like no  crowd Kevin had ever seen before. The energy level was incredibly high, and  his ears were ringing from the noise as he reached the blackjack pit. Even  though he had prepared for this, he was anxious; this place was as distracting  as an amusement park.  

He moved into the center of the blackjack area and began to scope the scene.  The high-stakes section took up a good fifteen tables, all with minimum bets  of one hundred and maximums of five thousand. It was a moderate spread,  good enough but not optimum. At certain intervals, the Big Players would be  playing more than one hand at a time to take full advantage of the changing  count.  

Shifting his gaze nonchalantly as he walked, Kevin easily picked out Brian  and Michael, two tables apart. Michael, the preppy tennis jock, was chatting  easily with a beautiful blonde sitting next to him. She looked like a stripper,  with magnificent fake breasts and a skirt riding high up her thighs. Nobody  would be noticing Michael, that was for sure.  

Brian, the physics geek, was playing a different role, slumped over at the  third-base position, two empty glasses in front of him, constantly rubbing his  eyes like he was about to pass out. He looked like a geeky college kid left  behind by his friends, too drunk to hit the clubs and too stupid to quit  gambling for the night. He hardly even seemed to look at his cards; it took  Kevin a second to realize he was reading the numbers from the reflection on  his empty drink glasses. A real pro.  

And if Brian was a pro, Kianna Lam was playing on a whole different level.  Kevin had walked around the pit twice before he even noticed her, sitting at  the first base of a crowded table set between two jungle vines. Her little body  was daintily perched on her stool, her legs crossed, her hands folded neatly in  her lap. Surrounding her—engulfing her, it seemed—was a group of drunk 

Asian businessmen. They looked to be rich Chinese, just off the plane from  Hong Kong. They were giving her advice as she played, trying to impress her  in a mixture of Chinese and broken English. She flirted back, covering her  mouth when she laughed, responding in equally accented English. Even the  dealer was smiling at her, helping her add her cards together.  

Kevin shook his head, amazed. Martinez had told him that she was one of the  top card counters in the world, almost as proficient as Micky. More  impressive than her skill, her act: Asian, female, with a heavy accent and a  cute figure. She could count right in front of a pit boss, and he’d never believe  she was a pro.  

Kevin wanted to be that good.  

He set his jaw, approaching a half-empty table a few feet from a gurgling  miniature waterfall. He sat down next to a bald, pudgy man in a bright green  Hawaiian shirt and yellow shorts. Next to the man was a small, mousy woman  with glasses and a ruffled white skirt.  

The man smiled at Kevin as he sat down. “Come to join our sinking ship?”  Kevin laughed, reaching into his pocket for his cash. “That bad?”  

“My wife and I have been here twenty minutes, and we’re down five hundred  bucks. If it gets any worse, we’re going to have to hitchhike back to Chicago.”  

Kevin counted out twenty hundreds, setting them on the felt. The dealer—a  short Latino-looking man with a mustache and overly manicured fingers—re counted them, exchanging them for black chips. Kevin placed a single chip in  the betting circle, then winked at the pudgy man and his wife.  

“Maybe we’ll all be hitchhiking together.”  

Over the next ten minutes, Kevin played out an uneventful shoe. The count  never went above positive three, and stayed below zero for most of the deal.  The cut depth, or penetration, was pretty good, however; the dealer was  cutting all the way to the last deck in the shoe. Which meant that the dealer  was favorable, and it was just a matter of time.  

As he played, Kevin kept his eyes open for Martinez. It wasn’t difficult for  him while counting, since he was keeping to basic strategy and never raising  or lowering his bet. Three hands into the second shoe, he caught sight of the  BP. Actually, it would have been hard to miss him. He was wearing a blue  crushed-velvet shirt and black leather pants. His hair was slicked back, and a  gold necklace glimmered beneath his wide-open collar.  

Christ, Kevin thought. He watched as Martinez strolled around the blackjack  pit, seemingly oblivious to the action all around him. He passed Kevin’s table  twice, but the count was still too low to be worthwhile. Then, suddenly, he 

headed for Michael’s table. He sat next to the tube-topped stripper and  immediately began flirting with her as he pulled a huge wad of cash out of his  back pocket. Kevin could only imagine what she was thinking. Michael, the  tennis jock, was clearly out of the running.  

Kevin went back to his cards, playing and counting and chatting away with  the nice couple from Chicago. The shoe ran through again—and again, the  depth was nearly five decks, a wonderful counting opportunity. Kevin’s  attention perked as the first few rounds of the next shoe came out: plenty of  twos and threes, sending the running count higher and higher. Pretty soon it  was in double digits, and Kevin began looking for Martinez again. Just his  luck, Martinez was rising from Michael’s table, scooping black and purple  chips from the felt. Kevin leaned back on his stool, crossing his arms over his  chest. He didn’t see Martinez look his way, but suddenly the velvet fog was  lurching toward his table.  

The couple from Chicago stared as Martinez dropped onto the stool next to  them, dumping his chips in a messy pile on the felt. “Howdy, everyone!  What’s shakin’?”  

His voice oozed Southern California. The mousy woman moved a few inches  closer to her husband. Kevin sighed loudly. “We’re not doing so great. I’ve  already blown through half of last month’s paycheck.”  

Martinez grimaced. Then he pushed a seemingly random handful of chips into  his betting circle. Three blacks, two purples, six green. One thousand four  hundred and fifty dollars. Let the Eyes in the Sky try and figure that one out.  They’d never guess that this velvet-clad, crazy motherfucker knew the count  was positive fifteen, with less than a third of the deck left.  

“Don’t worry. I bring good luck. I always bring good luck.”  

Martinez reached under his collar, pulled out a tacky gold medallion and  kissed it. Kevin had to kick himself to keep from laughing.  

Even the dealer smiled. “Where are you from?” he asked as he dealt the cards.  Kevin got a king, Martinez a queen. “Los Angeles?”  

Martinez swatted a hand against the felt. “What gave me away? Just flew in  an hour ago. Gotta get out of town on the weekends, you know. I get enough  of the industry during the week.”  

The next set of cards came out. Kevin drew a nine for a solid nineteen.  Martinez drew another queen, a strong twenty. The dealer had a six  showing. Heaven on felt.  

“You work in Hollywood?” the mousy woman asked, excited. 

Martinez grabbed another handful of chips. “Benny Kato’s the name. I  produce music videos. Mostly street hip-hop, you know, pow-pow-pow,  ‘word up,’ and stuff. Hey, count this up for me, boss. I want to split these  suckers.”  

He pushed the chips across the felt. The dealer stared at him for a moment,  then started matching the chips with Martinez’s bet. He set a second pile of  fourteen hundred and fifty next to the first and split the two queens. Then he  turned his head over one shoulder and called, rather loudly: “Splitting tens.”  

A grey-haired man in a slick dark suit looked over from across the pit. He  took in Martinez’s velvet shirt and visible gold chain, then nodded. The dealer  proceeded with the deal.  

Kevin’s heart thudded as he watched the cards come out. Splitting tens was an  unconventional move—usually, an extremely stupid move. Unless the count  was high and the dealer’s card low. Then it was an extremely profitable move.  Martinez drew another face card on his first hand and a seven on his second.  The dealer flipped over a ten, then drew a queen, to bust. Everyone at the table  won.  

Overall, Kevin was down three hundred dollars.  

Martinez had just bumped up twenty-nine hundred dollars in a single hand. It  wasn’t luck. It wasn’t gambling. His odds of winning were significantly  higher than fifty-fifty.  

If it was anything at all, it was acting.  

“See,” Martinez shouted. “I always bring the goddamn luck!”  

He yanked his medallion out of his collar again, and offered it to the mousy  woman from Chicago. She shook her head. He shrugged, then kissed it  himself.  

The next afternoon, Kevin came awake staring at himself. It took him a full  minute to realize he hadn’t gone insane: There was a mirror on the ceiling.  

He was lying in a bed the size of his room back in Boston. To his right, a vast  picture window overlooked the Strip. To his left, a marble hallway led to a  marble bathroom with a marble Jacuzzi. Straight ahead, a set of double doors  opened into a circular living room with curved leather couches, plush white  carpeting, and a revolving wide-screen TV.  

Kevin wasn’t sure what time he had finally drifted off to sleep. The only thing  he knew for certain was when he had stopped playing: ten-fifteen A.M. He 

distinctly remembered writing the time down on his log sheet while locked in  a bathroom stall at the Stardust. Along with the time, he had kept track of all  his wins and losses, as well as all of his call-ins (including the count, how  many spots were played, how many decks they went through, how deep the  dealer’s penetration, and Martinez’s win-loss performance). Probably the most  difficult part of a Spotter’s job was to keep track of everything that went on at  his table. At the end of the trip, Kevin would have to turn in his notes to  Kianna, who was acting as team secretary; the old team secretary, a kid Kevin  had never met, had left MIT for a job at a computer software company and no  longer had time to travel with Micky’s crew.  

By ten fifteen, Kevin had filled both sides of his log sheet. Six different  casinos, more than twenty blackjack tables, and at least a dozen call-ins. It had  been exhausting, even with the five-minute breaks he took every hour, mostly  spent crouching in a bathroom stall, jotting notes in the log.  

Overall, Kevin was down a little over a thousand dollars. During his watch,  Martinez was up fourteen thousand. Kevin had no idea how much Martinez  had made with the other Spotters, but altogether it had probably been a very  lucrative night.  

At ten-fifteen, Martinez had given him the signal to quit—rubbing the back of  his neck—and he had happily complied. They had taken separate cabs back to  the hotel and carefully avoided sharing elevators up to the rooms. Kevin  hadn’t seen Fisher, Micky, or most of the others since the airport. Brian and  Michael were staying in rooms down the hall. He wasn’t sure where Martinez  had slept, or if he had slept at all. Micky had strict rules against drinking or  partying, even between shifts, but God only knew how Martinez spent his  time in Vegas. He probably knew the town better than anyone.  

Kevin stretched his arms above his head. His muscles were stiff from sitting at  the tables all night, and his eyes burned from the secondhand smoke. He was  also hungry; he had eaten an enormous room-service breakfast, but that was  hours ago. He sat up, searching for the menu. He had just tracked it down  when the double doors that separated his bedroom from the living room  swung inward.  

Fisher was standing in the doorway, a crooked grin on his face. He aimed a  plastic bag at Kevin. “Here, catch. That’s your tuition.”  

The bag landed on Kevin’s chest. He could see stacks of bills inside. He was  getting good at estimating money amounts by weight and width.  

“Twenty thousand,” he stated.  

“Don’t get too excited,” Fisher said. “It’s not all for you. That’s the player  split from last night.” 

Kevin whistled. Twenty thousand split eight ways was twenty-five hundred  apiece. Pretty good for one night’s work.  

“It won’t always be that high,” Fisher said. “It was a particularly good night.  In fact, Martinez and I think we should let you try a little Gorilla play before  the fight.”  

Kevin sat up in the bed. Although spotting had its moments, overall it was a  mental grind. The real glory was in the big betting, and Gorilla was the first  step.  

“Seriously? Micky thinks I’m ready?”  

Fisher shrugged. “Well, actually it was more my idea. Micky likes to take  things slow. But he shouldn’t make all the decisions; he doesn’t even play  anymore, he’s burned out of too many casinos. He’s making a whole lot of  money off of us, just sitting around by the pool.”  

This was the first real dissension Kevin had heard since joining the team, but  he wasn’t surprised it was coming from Fisher. He had an aggressive  personality, and, like Martinez, hated being told what to do. Unlike Martinez,  he didn’t always know when to keep his feelings to himself.  

Despite the hotheadedness, Kevin genuinely liked Fisher. Although recently  he had spent a lot more time with Martinez, he felt closer to Fisher, who was  more like him. A tough spirit from a good family who just wanted more out of  life.  

“Do you think I’m ready?” Kevin asked.  

Fisher grinned. “Only one way to know for sure.”  

Fight night, the MGM Grand, Las Vegas.  

From the moment the elevator doors slid open on the casino level, Kevin was  swept up in a sea of frenetic energy. He was a molecule in a hyperenergized  electromagnetic field, his brain function replaced by pure reactive adrenaline.  The assault on his senses was nearly overwhelming. It was like New Year’s  Eve at midnight in Boston: a mob of drunken revelers packed together, all  dressed in colorful, sometimes bizarre fashion, everyone shouting and  pointing and rushing in random directions, buzzers and bells and bright lights  and flesh, so much goddamn flesh, women in leather skirts and saran-wrap  tops, men with their shirts open to the navel and too much jewelry, wannabe  mobsters in pinstripes, middle-aged tourists from the Midwest, cowboys and  Wall Streeters and L.A. hipsters…

Kevin closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, recalibrated. As in swimming, he  tried to find the pinpoint of blue straight ahead. He stepped into the casino and  weaved through the crowd, focusing on the blackjack tables and swarms of  gamblers around them. Along the way, he liberated a Scotch from a passing  waitress’s tray. He took a sip, then splashed some of the pungent liquid on his  shirt. He mussed up his hair, undid a few buttons, rolled one sleeve almost to  the elbow. His gait slowed, his feet landing farther apart. Anyone watching  would have witnessed the shift: from MIT whiz kid to drunken prep school  burnout.  

As he staggered through the crowd, he took stock of his counters. Kianna was  at the table closest to the elevators, surrounded once again by the Hong Kong  Mafia. Michael and Brian were at tables near the back of the pit. And  Martinez was at a central table, sitting with three African-American men in  expensive silk suits. Kevin was about to start a second pass around the casino  when he saw Martinez’s arms fold together.  

Clutching his drink, he swept through the abnormally large crowd behind the  table and wedged himself into the one remaining seat, first base. He jammed  his hand into his pocket, pulled out ten thousand dollars in cash, and plopped  

it down on the felt. As the dealer began counting out chips, Kevin offered a  wide smile to the table. “How’s everyone doing tonight?”  

Martinez grunted. “Getting crushed like a carton of eggs.”  

The three others nodded amiably, and Kevin was suddenly struck by how  huge they all were. They made Martinez look like a plastic doll; their legs  seemed impossibly long, disappearing beneath the table. Kevin turned his  attention to their faces. A lifelong sports fan, he had no trouble recognizing  

two of them: Patrick Ewing and John Starks. He was at a blackjack table with  three star basketball players from the New York Knicks.  

No wonder so many people are gathered around the table. Kevin glanced at  Martinez again, but his teammate was ignoring him; he’d already passed the  count, so nothing else mattered. Not the fact that there were celebrities at the  table, not the crowds standing behind them, not the pit boss who was looking  over adoringly at the enormous men with deep, deep pockets.  

Kevin turned his attention to the betting circles. One of the Knicks had three  hundred dollars down. Starks was betting two fifty. Ewing had five hundred  dollars in front of him.  

Kevin placed two five-hundred-dollar chips into his circle.  

The third Knick shook his head, impressed. “Hey, Big Money. That’s how  it’s done.” He took a handful of cigars out of his pocket and offered them to  the table. Ewing and Starks each took one, Martinez declined. Kevin  shrugged. What the fuck? He could be back in Boston, sharing a beer with 

Felicia at some fraternity party. Instead, he was smoking cigars with the New  York Knicks.  

“Thanks,” he said, letting Ewing cut the tip for him with a cigar cutter. “You  guys here for the fight?”  

“Nothing like Vegas on Fight Night,” Ewing responded.  

The cards started to come out, but Kevin barely noticed them. He kept one eye  on Martinez, waiting for the signal to raise or lower his bet. Otherwise, he was  a Gorilla, unthinking. He had been called into a plus-twelve deck (eggs), so  the odds were nicely in his favor.  

Over the next hour, Kevin led the Knicks in an impressive slaughter; he  racked up ten thousand dollars in profit, earning applause from the crowd by  splitting tens twice and doubling down on an eight. By the time he rose from  the table, the Knicks were inviting him to an after-fight party in a celebrity  suite at the Mirage, and Ewing was asking him for stock tips (they had  somehow gotten the impression that his father ran a billion-dollar hedge fund).  Nobody was even giving Martinez a second look. He vanished into the crowd  while Kevin colored up his chips.  

Kevin’s head spun as he stepped away from the table. This was better than he  had imagined. He wished there was someone back home he could call, but the  only people who would appreciate it were here with him. He checked his  watch, realized it was time to shower and change for the fight. He glanced  back toward the other tables to see if Kianna and the rest were already on the  move.  

He didn’t see the Spotters, but as he was about to turn back toward the  elevators, something else caught his eye. A short, stocky Indian kid was  sitting at a blackjack table twenty feet away. The kid was unremarkable:  dressed in khakis, betting the table minimum, patiently studying his cards. The  strange thing was, Kevin recognized him. His name was Sanjay Das; he and  Kevin had taken physics together two years ago. He was in Kevin’s class at  MIT.  

Maybe it was a coincidence; maybe he was just in town to see the fight. Or  maybe there was something Micky and the others hadn’t told him.  

Maybe Micky’s team wasn’t the only MIT game in town. 

Kevin decided to put the thought aside for the time being. He could ask  Martinez or Fisher about it when they got back to Boston. Now it was time to  celebrate. 

An hour later, Kevin walked down the center aisle of the MGM Grand Garden  Arena, his eyes dazzled by the bright lights, pay-per-view cameras, and  shouting fans. He kept checking and rechecking the seat number on his ticket;  the boxing ring was getting closer and closer, and there was still no sign of his  row. It seemed like he’d be sitting right on George Foreman’s lap.  

He was at row ten when he heard a whistle erupt from somewhere to his right.  “Hey, Big Money!”  

He looked over and saw Patrick Ewing and the other Knicks waving at him.  His ears rang as he stopped for a moment to shake their hands. Everyone in  the rows behind craned to get a good look at him, trying to figure out who this  Asian kid was: They figured he had to be someone famous, hanging out with  the celebrity basketball players. Kevin took another cigar from Ewing, then  bid them all good luck.  

He finally found his seat—seven rows in front of theirs, right up by the ropes.  With some difficulty, he found Martinez, Fisher, Micky, and the rest spread  out across the front section of the arena, separated by wealthy strangers and  A-list celebrities: Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Kevin Costner, Jack Nicholson,  Charlie Sheen. Somehow, in the visual cacophony that was Vegas, the MIT  geeks seemed to fit in.  

For a brief second Kevin locked eyes with Fisher, who raised his palms to the  cavernous ceiling: Here we are, what do you think?  

Kevin was trying to come up with a response when the lights suddenly went  out. Loud music exploded from speakers embedded in the walls, and the entire  arena shook as the hungry crowd leaped to its feet. 

The fight was about to begin.  

Eleven  

Weston, MA, Thanksgiving 1994  

T here’s no neon in Weston, Massachusetts.  

Twenty minutes from Boston by Mercedes-Benz, Weston was an upper middle-class enclave separated from the real world by a tree-lined stretch of  the Mass Pike. The sleepy New England town was suburbia incarnate: white  picket fences, yellow school buses with blinking red lights, colonial homes,  lush green lawns, lemonade stands, tennis courts, basketball hoops, tree  houses, porch swings, dogs on leashes, kickball and flashlight tag, public  schools that looked like prep schools and prep schools that looked like Ivy  League universities. 

On a bright Thursday afternoon, Kevin sat next to Felicia on a porch swing,  watching the leaves swirl across the back lawn of his parents’ two-story  colonial-style house. Though the breeze was beginning to turn cool, the crisp  scent of another autumn filled Kevin with warmth. He had spent every  Thanksgiving since birth in this house; his neurons were littered with  ritualized memories carried by the familiar scents and sounds. Like always,  his two older sisters were puttering around the kitchen with his mother: Kevin  could hear them through the first-floor window, their voices carrying over the  clink of plates and silverware. His father had momentarily retired to his study,  with his geology books and scientific magazines. Kevin and Felicia had stolen  a rare moment alone to seclude themselves on the rosewood porch that jutted  out over the back lawn.  

Kevin had helped his father build the magnificent, split-level porch when he  was twelve years old: He remembered staring at the pile of exotic lumber that  the truck had dropped off, wondering how it would ever resemble the  blueprints tacked to the wall of his father’s study. By the end of the summer,  as the porch took form and the envious neighborhood kids began to gather for  barbecues and touch football, Kevin had grown to think of his father as a  suburban superhero.  

It was a hard adjustment when he had exchanged his happy suburban life for a  prep school surrogate family. His father had tried to explain things to him  when his older sisters were likewise sent away. There was nothing more  important to the elder Lewis than education; an immigrant from Hong Kong  with an anglicized last name, Kevin’s father had struggled his entire life to  overcome a childhood bereft of opportunities. He had dedicated himself to  making sure his children had nothing to overcome. In his mind, Exeter was a  way of ensuring Kevin’s future.  

Kevin had hated leaving home, and it had taken him a few months to finally  understand his father’s point of view. Most of his classmates were children of  obscene privilege; to succeed against them, Kevin had needed to work twice  as hard. He had focused on math and science—again following in the  footsteps of his sisters—because in his father’s world, there was no such thing  as a liberal-arts education. Math was where you were measured, math was the  ruler of your potential success.  

Math had given Kevin opportunities: Exeter, MIT, and now blackjack. His  father was proud of him for the first two. Kevin wondered if his father could  ever respect him for the third. He gently pushed off with both feet, sending the  wooden two-seater swinging in a delicate arc. Felicia smiled and put her hand  on top of his. “I like your sisters. They seem so grounded.”  

Kevin nodded. He listened to the two of them helping his mother with the  dessert—something to do with apples, cinnamon, and sugary pie crust.  Melissa’s voice was high-pitched, singsongy; Kelly’s had a deeper, more  serious tone. The two were best friends, cut from a similar mold. Melissa 

worked for a venture-capital firm in downtown Houston. She drove a black  SUV and liked to hike in the mountains. She had graduated from Yale and  would soon enter Harvard Business School to continue her education. Kelly  was the more fashionable of the two; she had graduated from Harvard, lived in  L.A., and worked for a boutique investment bank. She wore Armani and Prada  and collected East Asian art. Her hair was streaked with blond, and when she  was working, she wore glasses with prescription-free lenses. Both of them had  made plenty of money, putting in long hours at their respective jobs. Both  would eventually get more degrees, get married, and get houses in the  suburbs.  

Kevin was supposed to be just like them. Kids from Weston didn’t grow up to  be professional card counters. They went to Harvard or Yale or MIT. The  rebellious ones went to Brown, or maybe even Stanford. They became doctors  and lawyers and bankers. They had families and lake houses and million dollar mortgages. They drove Volvos and SUVs.  

“Kelly reminds me of my sister,” Felicia continued. “Maybe you’ll meet her  on Christmas. She’ll be back from Paris for most of December.”  

Kevin nodded again, though he wasn’t sure he shared her optimistic view of  their future together. Over the past three weeks, he had begun to find that he  had less and less to say to her. He knew it had to do with the secrets he was  

keeping—the weekly trips to Vegas, the aliases, the multiple credit cards, the  IDs he was hiding in his desk drawers, the money he kept stashed all over his  apartment, the time he spent with his new card-counting friends, the phone  calls he was starting to get from casino hosts, always offering him  something—a free room, a free flight, tickets to shows and fights and private  parties. He wondered if telling her the truth about the blackjack team would  save his relationship; more likely, it would drive her away.  

Similarly, for the past few days he had thought about opening up to his dad.  Kevin had never kept a secret this big from his family, and he felt like a  coward for his unwillingness to explain things. He knew the secrecy was  going to get more difficult over time. His life was beginning to change  because of blackjack and the money that his new skill was generating.  

After his first weekend in Vegas, Kevin had bought a new stereo system and a  color TV. After the second weekend—and more Gorilla play—he had  overhauled his wardrobe, buying some flashier outfits for Vegas and some  new athletic gear. After his first experiment with the role of Big Player, he had  even contemplated moving out of his shared apartment to a place of his own,  but had prudently decided that would be too hard to explain.  

Despite his secrecy, his parents had begun to suspect that something was  going on. His mother often wondered aloud where the money was coming  from for his new clothes and toys. She joked that there was a tree in the 

backyard from which he shook hundred-dollar bills. She wasn’t that far from  the truth, he thought .  

But the more Kevin considered telling his father the truth, the more  impossible it seemed. If he could somehow take his father to Vegas with him,  show him that there was nothing corrupt or illicit about it, maybe he would  understand. Maybe.  

“Kevin…” his mother’s voice drifted out from the kitchen, interrupting his  thoughts. “You better get in here before your sisters eat everything in sight.”  

Kevin removed his hand from beneath Felicia’s as he led her inside. He tried  to make the motion look casual, but he thought he saw something in her eyes.  A glimmer of concern, maybe a portent of the inevitable.  

Kevin’s father was at his customary seat at the head of the dining room table.  A plate of half-eaten pie was in front of him, and The New York Times was  open on his lap, to the business section, as usual. He went through five papers  a day, from The Wall Street Journal to The Boston Globe. If the TV was on, it  was always CNN or the nightly news. On weekends, maybe PBS.  

Kevin took the seat next to him, while Felicia excused herself to use the  bathroom. He watched his father turn the pages, checking his stock portfolio.  He paused to glance at Kevin and nod, then went back to the NYSE.  

Part Chinese, part Caucasian, Peter Lewis was tall and fit, with thinning grey  hair and a high, furrowed forehead. He hardly ever smiled, but his eyes were  kind, and he almost never raised his voice. His clothing cycled between MIT,  

Yale, and Harvard sweatshirts—one from each of the schools his children had  attended. He hoped to add more sweatshirts as the years progressed. Kevin  thought he’d get two more; he’d need to have another kid if he wanted to go  for three.  

His father was a good match for Kevin’s mother, who was just a few inches  shorter, thin, with the same color hair and eyes. Unlike his father, she was  always smiling, so widely it almost seemed like her round face might split in  half. She was also of mixed descent; she had relatives in Ireland and Taiwan,  two extremes juxtaposed in her skin: here smooth and tan, there freckled and  creased, but overall exotic and attractive. Kevin could hear her still moving  around the kitchen, gathering dessert plates, shooing his sisters away from  what remained of the pie.  

It was a rare opportunity, a moment alone with his father.  

Kevin decided to test the waters: “Dad, have you ever heard of card  counting?” 

His father didn’t look up from the newspaper. “You mean like professional  poker players, who keep track of the cards?”  

Kevin listened for the sound of the bathroom door. He certainly didn’t want to  tackle both Felicia and his father at the same time. He proceeded cautiously.  “No, I mean blackjack. Some people count cards to give them an advantage.”  

His father turned the paper over, scanning the back page. “Foolishness. They  use six decks at casinos nowadays. You can’t keep track of six decks. It’s not  possible.”  

Kevin shook his head. He was surprised his father was falling for the common  misconception. People thought card counting was possible only with the  single-deck game, when in fact, six decks were a bettersituation for the  counter. In a single deck, the dealers shuffled every few hands. If the deck  went hot, you had just a moment to take advantage of the situation. With six  decks, you could have ten minutes with a hot shoe.  

“Dad, counters don’t keep track of all the cards. It’s about ratios, good cards  to bad—”  

“Kevin, it’s a waste of time. Gamblers never win any money.”  

Kevin could tell from his father’s tone that the conversation was over. It was a  frustrating moment. Kevin understood his father’s point of view—but what  his father hadn’t taken the time to process was that itwasn’t gambling at all. It  was more like a math or physics problem, a question with an answer—and  that answer led to easy money.  

In the end, Kevin decided it was just as well; Felicia was on her way back  from the bathroom, and Kevin’s mother was coming out of the kitchen with  another plate of apple pie in her hands.  

The timing wasn’t right. Kevin’s father wasn’t ready to listen. Maybe he’d  never be ready to listen.  

Kevin felt strangely relieved.  

Twelve  

The Double Life, 1994–95  

T he next six months flashed by at a thousand RPMs.  

Kevin’s world became a schizophrenic blend of grey reality and brightly  colored fantasy. At home in Boston, he barreled through his senior year at  MIT. Thankfully, most of his course requirements were already completed, so  it was just a matter of coasting through a handful of engineering seminars 

while closing out the swim season. Splintered into that grey tapestry were his  weekend excursions to Vegas with Micky and the crew: well planned, almost  military-styled assaults that soon became routine but never mundane. Every  third Friday night, Kevin went straight from the Infinite Corridor to the  America West 69 neon express, exchanging his dorm room for a three thousand-square-foot celebrity suite, trading dinner at the dining hall for  three A.M. room-service feasts. Frat parties became Fight Nights, brews at the  local bar were replaced by free champagne in crystal glasses, poured by hosts  in private booths at some of the most upscale clubs in the country.  

Along the way, Kevin felt himself changing. He was living two opposing  lives, with two distinct sets of memories. At home, he could reminisce with  Felicia about what they’d miss when they graduated: basketball games at the  Garden, late nights at a pub called Crossroads, ice skating in the Boston  Common. But he could also close his eyes and see the bright lights of Vegas,  the high-adrenaline moments of frozen time that spun through his memory  like glowing shards of shattered glass.  

By Christmas, Kevin had eased into the role of Big Player. He wasn’t as  polished as Fisher or as theatrical as Martinez, but he had a quiet competence  with the cards and a real talent for sliding in and out of a table. As Micky had  said, Kevin had the look; no matter the situation, he never appeared out of  place. He could sit at a table of conventioneers, A-list celebrities, or Hong  Kong businessmen, betting twice as much as any of them without raising the  attention of the pit boss. He could play in a high-stakes pit with Kevin Costner  and Howard Stern, or at a five-dollar table tucked away by the slot machines,  and never compromise his style of play. He learned to inhabit his aliases like a  trained actor playing a role. Sometimes he was Teddy Chan, the son of a heart  surgeon from Hong Kong. Other days he was Arthur Lee, an Internet  millionaire from Silicon Valley. One weekend he was Davis Ellard, whose  family owned supermarkets across Asia. The next trip he was Albert Kwok,  the nephew of the richest landowner in Malaysia.  

By mid-December, his wallet was full of photo IDs and credit cards. He  created nine distinct aliases and acquired nine different casino hosts, some of  them at the very same casinos. When he hit the Stardust, there was pink  champagne waiting in a wraparound corner suite. At the MGM Grand, a tray  of filet mignon was parked by the wide-screen TV. At Caesars, they kept a  pony keg of Sam Adams chilled in his bedroom, to remind him of the fully  stocked bar at the villa that his imaginary billionaire father kept outside of  Rome.  

But the comps were only half the story. For Kevin, the real thrill was in the  game itself. Working the system, turning the math into money, keeping the  count without breaking character. Much of the system was a grind: playing  thousands of hands in a single weekend, keeping meticulous track of wins and  

losses, knowing when to get up from a table and when to start burning the  cards. But to be really good, Kevin had to reach a level of sophistication as 

practiced as the technique of a professional athlete. Turning his rudimentary  skills into expertise was the most difficult task Kevin had ever performed.  Anyone could learn to count, but only a true master could earn Micky Rosa’s  respect.  

When Kevin finally became an expert at all levels of counting, including  shuffle tracking and card cutting—the two tricks he had watched Martinez and  Fisher perform back in Atlantic City that first weekend—he felt a real sense of  accomplishment, measurably more satisfying than when he aced an  engineering midterm. The highs and lows in Vegas far outweighed the swells  and ebbs at home, and the counting moments that stood out—good and bad— defined that period of his life.  

Four A.M., a tropical corner of the Mirage.  

Kianna was sitting at a half-empty table, tapping her bright red nails to the  tune of a Jimmy Buffett ballad rolling in through the tropical bushes. Her hair  was piled on top of her head and held up with white ivory chopsticks. Her  eyes were overly made up, and they never seemed to focus on the cards. Two  drunken college kids were hitting on her from second and third base, drawing  smiles but nothing more. When one of them complimented her silk blouse, she  demurely crossed her arms over her chest. Kevin moved in for the kill.  

The dealer looked as bleary-eyed as the college kids, struggling through the  zombie shift. He barely noticed as Kevin placed seventeen hundred dollars in  two betting circles, playing the remaining table by himself. The count stayed  good, and by midway through the shoe, Kevin had chased away one of the  college kids and was playing three hands of ten thousand dollars each. Even  Kianna was sweating, little droplets forming above her almond eyes. But  Kevin stayed cool, absentmindedly touching the goatee he had grown the  week before. Albert Kwok liked facial hair. He was even considering adding  sideburns to the look.  

Kevin won two hands and lost the third. The count stayed good, and he rode  another three hands at ten thousand. He hit a blackjack and two  twenties. Thirty-five thousand in a single round. Now the count was back near  zero. Kevin scooped up his money and headed for the bar. Martinez passed  him at the edge of the pit. Their eyes never met, but the role of BP had shifted  for the third time that night.  

Right under the Eyes in the Sky. 

Two weeks later, back at the MGM Grand. The high-stakes pit was filled with  a raucous crowd, mostly VIPs invited out for a club opening at a nearby posh  hotel. The harsh scent of spilled alcohol melded with the thick smog from a  dozen Havana cigars that was making the air shimmer.  

Kevin was about to take a break and get something to eat when he was called  into a positive-fourteen deck by Michael, dressed in Nike sweats and shiny  new tennis shoes. Kevin was already up eight thousand dollars on the  weekend; he was picturing the new snowboard he was going to buy when he  got home, an imported model from Switzerland that would be perfect for  cutting up the slopes over Christmas break. He figured one more run at the  cards would net him a new snowsuit to go with the board.  

He slid into the table cocky, spreading out two hands of fifteen hundred to  start. He felt invincible, and the rising count only bolstered his confidence.  After three rounds, he had moved up to two hands of ten thousand dollars  each. He could feel the crowd gathered behind him, and hear them whispering  to one another: Who is this guy? Do you see how much he’s betting?  

His heart thumped as he drew an eleven and a pair of nines against the  dealer’s five. It was the most beautiful two hands he’d seen since he’d started  gambling. He doubled the eleven, raising that hand’s bet to twenty thousand  dollars. He drew a seven, making a hard eighteen, a decent hand. Then he split  the nines—ten thousand dollars more on the table—and drew a two on one, an  eight on the other. To hushed gasps from behind, he doubled the first hand,  drawing an eight. He left the last hand alone.  

Now he had fifty thousand dollars on the table and three good hands: an  eighteen, a nineteen, and a seventeen against the dealer’s five. The odds were  enormously in his favor. He leaned back, a big smile on his face.  

Then his stomach dropped as the dealer turned over his bottom card to reveal  a six. The dealer flipped the next card, a ten, for a twenty-one. Kevin’s ears  rang as the dealer swept his fifty thousand dollars off the table.  

“My God,” someone said from behind him. Kevin clenched his teeth. He  could hear Michael breathing heavily next to him. He thought about getting  up, but the count was still in double digits. And now the deal was even further  into the deck.  

His hands were shaking as he moved three stacks of ten thousand dollars into  three playing circles.  

The dealer dealt Kevin another powerful eleven, an ugly fourteen, and a pair  of sevens, then pulled the worst card in the deck, a six.  

Kevin took a deep breath. “Here we go again,” he said, as the crowd behind  him pressed even closer. 

He doubled down the first hand, adding ten thousand more. He drew a nine for  a solid twenty, a wonderful hand. He left the fourteen alone and split the  sevens. He got a ten on each, two seventeens. Now he once again had fifty  thousand dollars on the table, betting on a twenty, a fourteen, and two  seventeens. He would wipe out the memory of the last hand in a single stroke.  

The dealer flipped his bottom card, revealing a queen. He now had a sixteen,  the worst possible hand. Kevin was actually smiling again as the dealer drew  his next card. Then the entire crowd groaned.  

A five. The dealer flipped a goddamn five, for another twenty-one. On a  positive-fourteen deck, Kevin had lost one hundred thousand dollars in two  hands.  

He sat there, frozen, watching the dealer sweep away his money. Then he rose  and stumbled through the crowd. By the time he reached the elevators that led  upstairs to his suite, his face had gone numb. He used his key card to access  the VIP floor.  

After exiting the elevator, he stumbled down the hallway to his room. He lay  down on the plush shag carpet, arms outstretched. He stared at the ceiling. A  hundred thousand dollars in two hands.  

Overall, the team was still way up on the month. But it was a painful lesson to  learn all at once. No matter the count, the cards could go bad. Over time,  winning was inevitable, a matter of pure math. But in the short run, the game  could go either way. Even math left room for luck.  

It was a good twenty minutes before Kevin felt strong enough to rise from the  floor and search for the room-service menu.  

New Year’s Eve 1994, Bally’s on the Strip. Kevin counted down the last ten  seconds of the year with Michael Sloan and a table of electronics salesmen  from Iowa, cheering along with them as multicolored balloons floated past the  huge crystal chandeliers that hung from the cavernous ceiling. Although  Kevin knew the site of the lavish casino had been host to the most devastating  tragedy in Vegas history—a fire in 1980 that killed eighty-seven people and  injured seven hundred others—he had experienced nothing but good fortune at  the blackjack tables. The room was perfect for team play: a spacious area the  size of a football field, with countless felts, comfortable cushioned chairs, and  good visual angles for signals. Kevin and Martinez had been tag-teaming all  night, bouncing from Michael to Brian to Kianna with ease. As the horns  blared and the champagne flowed, Kevin won three hands of two thousand  dollars, followed by two hands of twenty-five hundred. He was spreading out  another five grand in two piles when a woman slid into the chair next to him  and asked if she could play one of the open circles. Kevin was about to say 

something obnoxious—he was checked in to Bally’s under the guise of Elvin  Shaw, a prickish rich kid from a wealthy Manhattan family—when he noticed  the look on Michael’s face two seats down. Pure, unadulterated lust.  

He glanced at the woman, trying not to be too obvious. She was tall, with long  auburn hair, smoke-colored eyes, and high cheekbones. She was wearing a  silk halter top that barely contained her unnaturally round breasts, and a sliver  of tan abdomen was showing above her tight leather pants. She was the  epitome of the Vegas girl, the sort of woman you saw on the arm of a  celebrity in the high-stakes pits or whisking through a VIP line at a trendy  nightclub. Women like her did not exist in Boston, and even if they did, they  wouldn’t have socialized with whiz kids from MIT.  

Kevin felt his face growing warm as he made room for her at the table. He had  just celebrated Felicia’s birthday two days before—followed by a heated  argument concerning his plans to “visit his high school buddies in San Diego”  over New Year’s. But as he looked at this woman, Felicia was the last thing  on his mind.  

One of the electronics salesmen whistled, harvesting a quick glare from those  smoldering eyes. Then Michael cleared his throat. “Having a happy New  Year?” he offered lamely.  

The woman completely ignored him, putting a single twenty-five-dollar chip  in her betting circle. Kevin smiled to himself, feeling a bit more  confident. This is going to be fun.  

He moved five thousand dollars—the table limit—into his betting circle. The  woman pretended not to look, but he could tell by the goose bumps on her  tanned arms that she was impressed. The nearest salesman—a stubby man  with a puggish face—was less subtle.  

“Hey kid, don’t blow your whole allowance on one hand.”  

Kevin laughed noisily, back in character. “You know my generation. If I don’t  lose it here, I’m just going to spend it on hookers and coke.”  

The cards started to come out, and Kevin played as aggressively as he could.  He pushed the bet as long as the count was high, doubling and splitting as  often as possible. He was a peacock—posturing, throwing money like crazy to  get the woman’s attention—and it was working. By the end of the shoe they  had struck up a conversation, broken into snippets between five-thousand dollar hands. Her name was Teri Pollack, and she was twenty-two years old.  She had grown up in Southern California and still lived in L.A. As Kevin had  already guessed, she made her living off of her looks: she was a rookie  cheerleader with the Rams. 

If Kevin hadn’t spent the evening playing five-thousand-dollar hands, he  might never have had the courage to ask a professional cheerleader for her  phone number; but tonight he wasn’t Kevin Lewis. As the electronics  salesmen watched in awe, she wrote her number on a cocktail napkin and  stuck it in Kevin’s shirt pocket.  

When she left the table, it felt like all the air had been sucked out of the  casino. Kevin sat out the last few deals of a positive shoe, but he was certain  Michael wasn’t going to hold it against him in his spotting report.  Opportunities like Teri Pollack didn’t come around often. At MIT they didn’t  come around at all.  

Kevin knew she was probably interested in him only because it was New  Year’s Eve in Vegas and he was betting five thousand dollars a hand. But he  didn’t care. This was now as much a part of who he was as his engineering  pedigree.  

He was so overwhelmed by his good fortune that he didn’t notice the man in  the dark grey suit approaching from the other side of the blackjack pit. When  he finally caught sight of Michael’s hands rising to his head, it was too late.  

Kevin started to gather his chips as the man came up behind him and put an  arm on his shoulder.  

“Mr. Shaw, could I have a word with you?”  

Kevin rose from his seat and took a step back from the table. The man was  tall, with dark hair and a thin brown mustache. A name tag on his lapel  identified him as one of Bally’s shift managers, a Mr. David Cross.  

Kevin reminded himself to stay in character. He took a hundred-dollar chip  from his pile and tossed it to the dealer as a tip. Then he jammed the rest of  his stake—a little over seventy thousand dollars, mostly in five-thousand dollar denominations—into his pockets and turned to the shift manager.  

“Sorry, Dave. Can’t chat now. I turn back into a pumpkin at two A.M.”  “Well, then, I’ll make it brief. We can’t let you play blackjack here anymore.”  

Kevin fought to remain calm. This was his first official barring. He had gone  through the moment a dozen times in his head, but this was for real. Still, as  shocking as the moment was, it wasn’t exactlyintimidating. Kevin looked the  shift manager over, taking in his cheesy mustache and off-the-rack suit. He  looked like a high school English teacher. In Kevin’s imagination, the barring  casino officials had always been burly men with bent noses. This guy wasn’t a  threat. He was a nuisance. 

“Why the hell not?” Kevin said, rather loudly. The table in front of him had  gone silent, and the salesmen were all watching with blank looks on their  faces.  

“Because you’re too good for us,” the shift manager said. He was smirking as  he said it. Kevin felt anger building up inside him—but he remembered what  Micky had told him. If they ask you to leave, you leave. Still, it seemed so  unfair, so un-American. He hadn’t cheated. He had used his brain to beat the  deck.  

He had also made twenty thousand dollars and gotten the phone number of a  Rams cheerleader. All in all, a good run.  

Fuck it, Kevin said to himself. He shrugged, then brushed past the shift  manager, heading toward the front door. “I never liked this casino anyway.  Smells too much like smoke.”  

Kevin was smiling as he reached the glass front doors that led to the garishly  lit moving walkway connecting the casino to the Strip. Martinez and Micky  hadn’t lied to him; getting barred from a casino was no big deal. Card  counters had the law on their side, and there was nothing the casinos could do  about it. Vegas was a juicy oyster, and Kevin was going to suck the  motherfucker dry.  

He stepped outside onto the moving walkway, dazzled by the neon-lit canopy  up above. If he had glanced back over his shoulder, he might have seen a tall,  angular man with weathered cheeks, silver hair, and narrow ice-blue eyes  watching him from just inside the glass doors.  

Thirteen  

Chicago, May 1995  

“So this is how it’s got to be. You’ve thought this through, and this is how  you feel,” Felicia said.  

It was between the end of spring and the beginning of summer, and Felicia  was standing awkwardly in a barren corner of the Delta Air Lines terminal at  Logan Airport, her hands hanging stiffly at her sides. Kevin tried to think of  something that would take the terrible, dejected look off of her face, but he  couldn’t bear to string her along anymore. He ran his hands down the sides of  his charcoal Armani suit, reminding himself of the life he was choosing.  

“I’m sorry. It’s the mature decision, Felicia. We’re graduating in a few weeks,  and we’re both moving away. I think we owe this to each other.”  

It was bullshit, but in the past year Kevin had become a master of bullshit.  Although it had taken him a few weeks to realize it, Kevin had resolved to end 

things with Felicia the minute Teri Pollack had sat down next to him at the  blackjack table.  

“We could make it work,” Felicia tried. She simply didn’t understand; she was  holding him back from a life he wanted to live. He reached for his briefcase,  praying that they’d call his flight before this got any uglier.  

“You’ll be going to medical school in San Francisco,” he responded. “And I’ll  probably be trading stocks in Chicago.”  

He’d had two interviews with the Bartlett Group, a boutique investment banking firm located on the west side of the city. He’d applied to appease his  parents, who were still getting over his disinterest in medicine and graduate  school. He didn’t really want to go into banking, either, but he knew he  couldn’t hang around Boston like Martinez and Fisher. He wasn’t ready to  make blackjack his full-time profession—a subject that had caused a few  heated arguments with Fisher, who was beginning to take things more  seriously after their stellar profits over the last six months. Micky had finally  stepped in, suggesting that Kevin’s job in Chicago would put him closer to  Vegas and act as good cover material for a number of his aliases. Martinez  had stayed out of the argument altogether. His allegiance was with Fisher, but  he wasn’t the sort to push his own views on anyone else.  

Fisher’s concerns were unnecessary; Kevin had no intention of curtailing his  involvement with the team. The past three trips to Vegas had been the best  weekends of his life. He’d spent most of his free time with Teri, using his  comps at the various casinos to sweep her off her feet. Anywhere else, he  would have felt too insecure to try to impress a woman like her. But in Vegas,  he was the BP, with the keys to the city. He had standing reservations at the  fanciest restaurants and front-row tickets to all the sold-out shows. The only  thing holding him back from truly inhabiting his new lifestyle was Felicia— and graduation was a perfect excuse to cut her loose.  

“I’m sorry,” he said, as his flight to Chicago finally came over the PA system.  “I know we’ll stay friends.”  

Felicia gave him a look that nearly tore him in half, then tempered it with a  hug. He could feel her trembling in his arms.  

“Good luck with your third round,” she said, before numbly walking away.  

Kevin watched her go. Then he gathered up his briefcase and headed for his  gate. He admonished himself for the knots in his stomach. He was doing the  right thing. He shouldn’t have even let her come to the airport with him. Her  presence had only forced him to compound his lies.  

The truth was, there was no third-round interview. He was on his way to  Chicago to meet Martinez, Fisher, and the rest of the team. 

During his last interview trip, he’d discovered a riverboat casino parked on the  Fox River in Elgin, Illinois, just forty minutes outside of Chicago. After a  quick scouting session on his own, he’d invited the rest of the team to check it  out. Micky had approved the layout, and they had added the stop to their  playlist. It was a good break from Vegas, especially as they entered the slow  gambling season. Aside from the odd arena event and July Fourth, the crowds  avoided the desert oasis during the summer.  

It was a good time to take the team on the road.  

The Grand Victoria Casino was the most spacious gaming facility in the state  of Illinois—and one of the stranger venues Kevin had come across since he’d  started playing cards. Designed to mimic a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler,  the steamboat looked like a cross between an amusement-park exhibit and a  set in a lavish but slightly B-grade Hollywood movie. Adorned with bright  lights and wood trim, the boat had been built on an ambitious scale; guests  were corralled through an eighty-thousand-square-foot pavilion on the way to  the casino, passing beneath a fifty-five-foot ceiling sporting an eight-foot-tall  clock. The paddleboat boasted more than ten thousand visitors per day—a fact  made even more impressive considering the boat’s capacity was only twelve  hundred. That meant the Grand Victoria was almost always running at  capacity. With twenty-six blackjack felts spread across the open rectangular  deck of the boat, it was an excellent card-counting arena, with just the right  balance of camouflaging crowds and easy table access. Furthermore, in  Micky’s words, the Grand Victoria was a casino willing to “take the action.”  Although the table limits were only two thousand dollars a hand, nobody was  going to bother them for putting down the high bets. Certain casinos in  downtown Vegas—and all over Atlantic City—“sweated the action,” sending  a pit boss to breathe over a player’s shoulder when the big bets were coming  down.  

Kevin’s team met at Buckinghams Steak House, the complex’s only upscale  eatery, decorated to look like a Victorian-era parlor room. Micky handed out  assignments; as in Vegas, he was going to sit out, letting Kevin, Martinez, and  Fisher run the show. Kianna and the rest seemed happy to remain in spotting  positions—maybe it was the responsibility of carrying large amounts of cash,  maybe it was just a function of their personalities—so they would spread out  across the floor, covering nearly half of the tables all night long. Martinez  took the first shift and Kevin the second, while Fisher would wait until early  morning to play cleanup. That meant Kevin would hit the floor as BP around  two A.M. Unlike in Vegas, the BPs would not spot when they were waiting for  their shift. The venue was too close-knit; a player who suddenly mutated from  a minimum-betting-table squatter to a roaming rich kid would draw notice  here.