Guest chats are your chance to interview advantage play authors, players and researchers. Guest chats will be held in the main Chat Room. Please move to another chat room if you wish to chat with someone on a different topic. Some of the chats will be moderated or moderated part of the period. In a moderated chat, questions and comments that members type will not appear instantly. Instead, they will go to a moderation queue and posted one at a time by the moderator. This is not meant to censor posts, but to avoid massive simultaneous questions. Transcripts can be found in the Guest Chats Forum. Suggestions are welcome and should be posted in the same forum. Note: All times are Las Vegas time. As always, please be respectful to one another.
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| Kevin Blackwood | Monday Jan 23, 2012 5pm PT Archived |
Professional advantage player for a quarter century. Author of The Counter and Play Blackjack Like the Pros. Co-author of Legends of Blackjack and author of numerous articles. Played in the World Series of Blackjack and the Ultimate Blackjack Tour. One of the very few Blackjack authors to have snagged a "Big five" publishing house, and the only author I can think of that has written both fiction and non-fiction books on card counting. |
| K.C. | Monday Jan 30, 2012 5pm PT Archived |
Professional card counter who is documenting his AP career in a new film. (See Inside the Edge for a trailer of the movie.) Apropos a recent discussion on this forum, KC also won and lost over a million using Wong on Dice. (Thanks to Richard Munchkin for arranging this chat.) |
| Rainman | Tuesday Feb 7, 2012 5pm PT Archived |
Long-time AP, team manager, shuffle-tracking researcher who has put his research to work. Author of the Unbalanced Shuffle Tracking section in Modern Blackjack. He has also developed a simplified version of REKO for counters that play both shoes and hand-held games. |
| Anthony Curtis | Wednesday Feb 15, 2012 5pm PT Archived |
Anthony operates Huntington Press, the World’s largest gambling publisher, and Las Vegas Advisor. He is an expert Blackjack tournament player and has appeared in the World Series of Blackjack and the Ultimate Blackjack Tour, as well as the Travel Channel, Discovery, NBC, A&E, and BBC. He also knows Las Vegas like the back and front of both hands. HP’s new Blackjack title, The Blackjack Life, is due out in March. |
| Bryce Carlson | Friday Feb 24, 2012 5pm PT Archived |
Playing since the 70s, Bryce Carlson is one of the most experienced (and winning) Blackjack players, and an expert at avoiding backoffs. He is the author of the classic Blackjack for Blood and developer of the Advanced Omega II strategy. Going through some old papers last month, I ran into letters from Bryce from the early 90’s providing advice on Blackjack software. |
| Josh Axelrad | Tuesday Mar 6, 2012 5pm PT Archived |
Author of Repeat Until Rich. A professional Blackjack player that, despite his modesty, wrote a book that the extremely critical NY Times said was a “literate and swaggering heist caper of the sort that Jonathan Lethem and Quentin Tarantino might fry up together from an old Elmore Leonard recipe… Mr. Axelrad’s book stands out from earlier ones because he’s a real writer — a muscular, cynical and observant one.” And yes, the Blackjack experts agree. |
| Richard W. Munchkin | Monday Mar 19, 2012 6pm PT Archived |
Starting as a dealer and pit boss at the long-gone Castaways, Blackjack Hall of Fame member RWM learned card counting and found he could make more money on the player side of the table. Capitalizing on his friendships with nearly everybody in the field, RWM became known for his interviews of other players in Blackjack Magazine, All In Magazine, Blackjack Forum and his book, Gambling Wizards: Conversations with the World's Greatest Gamblers as well as his time co-hosting the Gambling With an Edge radio program. He has also produced and/or directed over 20 movies and television shows. Although RWM is often in the chat room, this is your chance to interview the interviewer. |
| Colin -- Holy Rollers | Monday Apr 9, 2012 5pm PT Archived |
Colin is one of the pair behind the Holy Rollers, a large, active Blackjack team. You can find a clip of their just released documentary at www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGbHCua_uiA&feature=youtu.be. I’ve been doing business with Ben and Colin for just under three years and find them to be one of the busiest groups in the field. |
| Bill Zender | Monday Apr 30, 2012 5pm PT Archived |
The ZMan has done it all. A former Nevada Gaming Control Agent, he worked his way up through the casino industry starting as a blackjack dealer in 1976, finally advancing to vice president/director of casino operations and owner of the Aladdin Hotel and Casino in the 1990's. At that time, the Aladdin was known as the most counter-friendly casino. He also owned and operated his own dealing school, taught courses on casino management at University of Nevada, given game protection seminars to gaming companies and law enforcement agencies, written four must-read books on blackjack and Asian games, served as an expert witness on gaming in various courts, and had also played blackjack professionally. The ZMan may have worked most of his life on the casino side; but he has stressed to the casinos the dangers of offering poor rules and conditions. |
| John Chang | Wednesday May 23, 2012 6pm PT Archived |
BJ Hall of Fame inductee and MIT team manager Johnny C. is the real-life inspiration behind the Micky Rosa character in the book Bringing Down the House. OTOH, the Micky Rosa character played by Kevin Spacey in the movie 21 is completely fictional. Ben Mezrich later claimed that Rosa was a composite character. But, this was because he made so many factual errors that his artistic license should have been suspended. John’s wife was also a character in the book and movie. He is one of the few from the MIT team era that are still active and is a true pro. |
| Nathaniel Tilton | Tuesday Aug 28, 2012 6pm PT Archived |
Nathaniel Tilton has a new book titled: The Blackjack Life: A Journey Through the Inner World of Card Counting, the Lessons of Teamwork, and the Clandestine Pursuit of Beating the Odds. Good title, long subtitle. But, needed to separate it from the pack. The book was just released at the first of the month and I have yet to read it. I decided to go with a chat because Munchkin gave a good review and I talked to Semyon Dukach, and he gives it a thumbs up. (Never argue with a Russian gun dealer, even if it is just a cover.) |
| Max Rubin | Wednesday Jun 19, 2013 6pm PT Archived |
Many APs have played both sides of the table. Max plays all sides, and does it with style. He is a regular when it comes to Blackjack on TV, including hitches as the expert commentator on GSN's World Series of Blackjack, the color commentator on CBS' Ultimate Blackjack Tour and numerous other TV appearances. He is host and game master of the annual, infamous Blackjack Ball. He hosts the Blackjack Hall of Fame. He is a long-time casino consultant, as well as an ex-pro gambler himself. He is the author of Comp City: A Guide to Free Casino Vacations, the best introduction in print to hustling every comp you can. Most importantly, he knows friggin’ everybody. Max charges $5,000 for a dinner speech. Chat with him here for free. |
| Robert Loeb | Tuesday Nov 12, 2013 6pm PT Archived |
Loeb is the co-author of Blackjack and the Law, a 245 page detailed book on legal aspects facing APs including casino exclusion, IDs, back-rooming, cheating, tax laws, invasion of privacy, fairness of games, Indian reservations, and Internet casinos. |
| Tommy Hyland | Wednesday Jun 11, 2014 6pm PT |
Tommy Hyland is manager of the longest-running blackjack team in history and one of the original inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame. In a well-known case, members of his team were arrested in Ontario for team ace sequencing. The judge ruled that it was not cheating, but merely the use of intelligent strategy. |
