Adam Turman
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Noah (not his real name) is a 31-year-old professional bettor. He earns his cash the way many waste theirs: by wagering on sporting events. Before that, blackjack paid the bills. His profession has taken him across the lower 48 and made him persona non grata everywhere from Shoreline card rooms to Vegas casinos. It's also kept his bleary eyes trained on a computer screen for seemingly endless hours, watching betting lines move, half-point by half-point, until he decides they've gone too far.
While Noah easily earns six figures annually, the life of a high roller is hardly that. He drives a Hyundai, rents a modest apartment, and dresses like a college student. Women lose interest in him when they learn of his vocation. And generally, he says, "People laugh when I say I bet on arena football, high-school football, the WNBA, and the Little League World Series."
Gambling began as a hobby for Noah in late 2002. He was managing a small downtown retail store and playing 15 hours of blackjack a week on the side, usually pulling in somewhere between $10 and $20 an hour. When he was laid off in April 2004, he decided to try to turn that hobby into a job. The goal was to hit the blackjack tables and swell his bankroll from $40,000 to $50,000 by the time his severance pay ran out. If he could do that, he decided, "I could feel confident I could do this for a living."
Right off the bat, he hit a losing streak, knocking him down to $25,000. Then a well-heeled player invited him on a trip to Minnesota's Mystic Lake Casino, promising to cover any losses that exceeded Noah's bankroll, with the two splitting profits. The pair went on a monster run, earning almost $60,000 in one weekend. Noah had found himself a career.
Counting cards is a strategy employed by practiced blackjack players who monitor what cards have been dealt and then quickly calculate the likelihood of various cards being dealt in future rounds. It's been glamorized in the movie 21 and in the book, Bringing Down the House, upon which it was based. However, while those works largely portrayed "team play," wherein counters work together to identify opportunities and deceive dealers, casinos had caught up to that game by the time Noah started counting. The team play of the Minnesota trip was an exception; Noah otherwise worked almost exclusively as a lone wolf.
Since Seattle bans card rooms—the (formerly) smoky little establishments containing 15 tables or fewer and no slot machines—Noah honed his counting skills in the 'burbs, mainly Shoreline. He recalls that "things got a little awkward" as the dealers who'd known him since he was a neophyte began to realize that he was taking the house's money—frequently, in large quantities, and not just because of luck. But he quickly tired of the lack of high-stakes tables, and eventually took to the road.
Noah's friend Jeff Sobolow recalls gambling with Noah at a Tahoe casino. "It was one of the few times he let me play with him—he doesn't let friends play with him all that often," he explains. "I get a beer and he orders a soda or ginger ale or something. But he makes sure to tell the waitress to put it in a cocktail glass, so it looks like a normal drink. Then we're at the table and he's making eye contact with me, looking at the girls, chatting like everyone else. At one point he was looking at me, and the dealer shorted him a couple chips, and he turned to her and very nonchalantly said 'You may want to count that again.' She was like, 'What?' He just said, 'I think you might have miscounted.' He wasn't even looking at the table."
"He looked like just another 20-something guy wearing a hooded sweatshirt and talking about sports," Sobolow adds. "You'd never know he's a professional card-counter. There's such an acting component to it. A lot of people, if they really focused, could maybe count cards. But they'd have to make it obvious and stare the whole time."
The list of places in which Noah has gambled sounds like a Johnny Cash song: Phoenix, Reno, Prescott, Yuma, Tucson, Wendover, Tahoe, Primm, San Diego County, Bellingham, Hinckley, Red Wing, St. Croix, Danbury, Duluth, Atlantic City, and the Yukon Territory. Ditto the list of cities with casinos and cardhouses from which he's been "backed off," or told not to return. (While counting cards isn't illegal, casinos don't take kindly to it, and in all but a couple of states can simply make counters leave.)
In one notable episode, four burly security guards in a Vegas casino surrounded him. "They were so close to me I couldn't move without touching them," he recalls. "The only way I got out of it was I managed to slip my cell phone out of my pocket and very visibly dialed 911. They backed off and I ran out the door. The woman on the other end said 'This is not an emergency,' and I said 'Bullshit—it is.'" While the days of Vegas casinos roughing up customers had passed by the time this incident occurred, Noah still counts it as his scariest moment as a gambler.
