Sportsbook & Gambling Information

A New Deal: One of world's top card counters shares blackjack knowledge — and winnings

By Scott Maben
The Register-Guard


Kevin Blackwood has led a life of stealth, high stakes and discipline in a career that many dream about and very few achieve.
He has traveled the world, claiming to have pocketed more than $1 million at one of the simplest card games: blackjack. He has earned lavish perks, from gourmet dinners and fine wines to golf games with celebrities and ringside boxing seats.

But the life of a professional gambler is anything but glamorous. After a while, it wasn't even much fun, admits Blackwood, 49, a Eugene resident of 20 years.

To rake in the chips he has amassed, Blackwood spent years honing his skills as a card counter. He had to build a thick bankroll to play with and steel himself for the days he would lose tens of thousands of dollars.


Kevin Blackwood is coming out of the shadows of professional gambling to teach others how to play blackjack like the pros.

Worst of all, he had to cope with the constant threat of being targeted by casino surveillance, of burly pit bosses showing him the door for playing the game too well. Sometimes he donned disguises or dyed his hair to avoid detection. Still, he has been tossed out of casinos more than 200 times.

He spent far too much time on airplanes searching for good action and less heat, hopping from the Vegas strip to Mississippi riverboats to clubs in Belgium, back rooms in Korea and dicey joints in the Dominican Republic.

In his mid-20s, at the start of his career, he felt like a kid finding free money on the sidewalk, Blackwood says.

"It's James Bond. I'm a secret agent. I'm behind enemy lines," he says. "I'm taking them for money, beating the biggest corporations in the world at their own game. It's kind of heady stuff, but after those things kind of die down and it gets into the cat-and-mouse battle, it gets a little more to be a real job."

Blackwood, who figures he's one of the five most successful blackjack players in the world, still finds casinos where he can play long enough to win without being bounced.

But for this husband and father of two - his sons are 17 and 20 - those days mostly are behind him. The travel takes a toll, and casinos are more aggressive at spotting master card counters, even employing facial recognition technology.

More importantly, Blackwood began to question what legacy he would leave. "You kind of think, `Is that what I want to be known as - just somebody who made a lot of money playing blackjack?' "

So he is recasting himself as an author and tournament player sought for his card-counting expertise.


Blackwood - the professional name he writes and plays under - self-published a semi-autobiographical novel, "The Counter," in 2002. He's about to follow it up with a work of nonfiction, "Play Blackjack Like the Pros," from HarperCollins this spring. In it, he reveals his gambling philosophy and tries to correct the common blunders of the average player.

He says his goal is to help casual players improve their advantage and at least break even most of the time.

"There's no reason people have to lose every trip," says Blackwood, a logical, mathematically grounded player who dismisses the notion of luck.

Most tourists think they play basic strategy accurately, Blackwood writes in his new book. "Yet in the fast-paced environment of the casino, what little they learned often melts away in the heat of battle."

He's working on a third book on the legends of blackjack. Writing, he says, is more gratifying than the long days he spent building his chip stack at Cesars Palace or the MGM.

"In blackjack, basically you're getting the money and sometimes you're almost literally running out the door with the money," he says. "Whereas in writing, I'm not making much money, but it's much more meaningful and fulfilling."

Blackwood also is finding a welcome reception at tournaments hoping to capitalize on the exploding popularity of televised poker, which has made celebrities of Annie Duke, Phil Ivey and Chris Moneymaker.

This month, Blackwood will appear with other invited pros and celebrities vying for $500,000 in prize money in the televised World Series of Blackjack, taped in November at the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Blackwood can't reveal how far he progresses in the tournament, to be shown in 13 episodes starting Jan. 21 on GSN, formerly the Gameshow Network. But he is featured in at least the first show, when he says he experienced the most dramatic hand of his career.

Blackwood hopes such tournaments will lead him and fellow pros out of the shadows of the world of card counting and give them status as legitimate blackjack experts.

Counting cards is not illegal, but most casinos won't tolerate the rare player who can track the cards that have been played and determine betting advantages of the remaining cards in the shoe - the stack of cards in the game that often contain multiple decks.

That's skill, not cheating, Blackwood says. Those players ought to be saluted, much like athletes at the top of their game, not vilified and banished, he says.

Yet card counters must constantly defend their abilities against the prevalent assumption that they are cheating. Most people still believe in the first commandment of gambling: You can't beat the house. It's simply not true, Blackwood says.

"I have a religious background, too, and I never considered it immoral, unbiblical, illegal - any of those things," he says. "Do I feel guilty about making the money? No. ... I don't look at it any different than a lot of other jobs I would do as a Christian."

In fact, Blackwood has had such a good run, he believes it's time to share his pots with the less fortunate. He has vowed to donate all his tournament winnings to charity, such as World Vision, the international Christian relief organization.

"I am trying to position myself as the Robin Hood of blackjack," he says, borrowing a term from Barry Greenstein, known as the Robin Hood of poker.

People in the gambling world aren't always surrounded by the best values, and he hopes to inspire others, as well as TV viewers, to "think about deeper issues in life."

Blackwood and his wife moved from Portland to Eugene in 1984. He planned to pursue a doctorate in history at the University of Oregon, then teach church history. But that changed abruptly one day when he couldn't find a parking spot on campus.

"I just circled around about 10 times and said, `Heck with this,' and dropped out," he says. "Teaching history looked like kind of a difficult road as far as starting out in South Dakota at a junior college and working my way up. It just didn't look as appealing as it once did."

At the time, he was getting more interested in blackjack, and the money was getting better all the time. He says he always was drawn to board and card games, and still plays a mean game of backgammon or Scrabble.

"I guess I just have an innate sense of probability and understanding of what it takes to get an edge in those kinds of things," he says.

The most important ingredient in becoming a successful card counter, he says, is discipline. Good memory and math skills are important, but the key is to stick to the system, to not panic and overbet.

"You've got to be willing to walk away a loser on some days. Even if you have the edge, you're not going to win all the time," he says.

And when he won a lot, he didn't change his lifestyle much.

"A lot of other players, you come home after a $10,000 win, you might want to buy a boat or a car. Next trip you might lose $5,000 or $10,000," he says. "So you have to sock it away for a rainy day."

Instead of moving near the gambling capitals, like many pros do, the couple decided to stay in comparably sleepy Eugene.

"I kind of wanted a normal life. A lot of the other people I know in the business live in Nevada, and it kind of affects you, I think, being around that 24-7 and year-round."

He mainly worked solo, but Blackwood occasionally joined a card-counting team, collaborating with others to zero in on multiple-deck tables when the advantage was best.

He even organized one such team with three elite runners: former UO standout Karl Keska, who went on to become England's top distance runner and competed in the 2000 Olympics; Greg Whiteley, who held the American 5k road race record; and Mike Bilyeu, whose running career provided a stepping stone for a small film role and ads for Reebok.

Blackwood trained the three to count, and the "track team" hit Vegas, wearing warmup suits and dashing from casino to casino. His cohorts split up to serve as spotters: track cards at separate tables, then signal Blackwood when it was ideal to jump in and place big bets.

Today, Las Vegas, TV tournaments and online gambling are all the rage, and Blackwood certainly is on this lively showboat. But he's wary of inspiring - either through his books or TV appearances - reckless play.

"I still think gambling is poor stewardship, is poor use of your money for most people," he says. "For the most part, there's money being drained there that could go to more productive areas. For me, it's not a drain. Overall, I'm a favorite when I play."

BLACKJACK BASICS

Hard hands

• 17 or more, always stand

• 12 through 16, hit against dealer's 7 through ace, otherwise stand

Double downs

• On 11, double your bet against 2 through 10, otherwise hit

• On 10, double against 2 through 9, otherwise hit

• On 9, double against 3 through 6, otherwise hit

• 8 or less, always hit

Pair splits

• Always split aces and 8s

• Never split 5s or 10s

Soft hands

• Soft 18 or more, always stand

• Soft 17 or less, always hit

And never, ever ...

• Take insurance

• Drink and gamble

• Play with money you can't afford to lose

- Kevin Blackwood