Hello all,
I just finished reading The 21 Century Card Counter for the lolz because I had some downtime. It was a fun read, a little cringey in parts ("Washington Young Bloods" is like the name that a parody of suburban white kids would choose for an AP crew), but it had some decent stories. That being said, the book is essentially a giant advertisement for Blackjack Apprenticeship and Blackjack Bootcamps. It really felt like every other page had some reference to the program or the bootcamps and how great everyone was doing. Then I started to think about criticisms I had heard that Colin had been keeping any negativity of AP life of his site, which seemed duplicitous and at least morally questionable (if true, as I have never had a subscription to their site. I would welcome anyone who has solid info on this one way or another to chime in).
I think Colin is truly amazing at marketing. I read the amazon reviews for the book before getting it and was amazed by how sunny they all were with hardly any dissent whatsoever. I never hear about any failures or donks from the program. Gambling with an Edge seems to have more and more guests somehow affiliated with the program. I have no idea how the bootcamps are and I have no reason to do some deep cover investigative journalist operation to find out (given that I already know how to count cards), but I again never hear of people unsatisfied with the program, which is both impressive and slightly odd.
This all being said, the actual monetary results of the Church Team and Colin himself seem rather underwhelming in comparison to other teams and individuals with whom I am familiar. Supposedly the Church Team made $3 million over 6 years, or around $500.000 a year. This sounds fine but the team was huge with over a million dollar roll. If you are going to burn a bunch of players you would think you could achieve a bigger win. Colin states that in his career he personally made $600.000, but he has been doing this for IIRC around 20 years. I assume Colin quickly went full managerial/back office in the team but still that does seem quite low.
On the other side of the coin, I find it odd that the book celebrates several examples of people shooting to the moon starting with minuscule bankrolls. I started with a larger than average bankroll and so I recognize my potential for bias, but I do find it irresponsible to constantly be celebrating people who started with $1000 rolls and took them up to the stratosphere. To me, starting with that kind of roll is just gambling--it's not "let me use some insane quantum theoretical mathematics to exponentially grow this roll via hyper card counting," it's more like "let me flip coins with the casino and hope I luckbox fifty in a row." Again, this is probably going to come off as just playa hatin', but I do think it's morally irresponsible to champion this sort of thing, even if you add an asterix with a footnote that says something to the effect of "I knew I had to get lucky and I definitely don't encourage anyone to do this super cool thing I did but now I'm rich lol."
This probably came off as overly disparaging, but I did want some opinions from the greater community about this rather than have to rely upon reviews from online accounts made yesterday about how they did a bootcamp and now they're ready to take on the world. Any well-thought criticism either for or against is more than welcome.
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