Pages

I have two distinct lives. One in the trenches of low-budget film and television, the other in professional gambling. Because of the feast-or-famine nature of show business I need a reliable income... gambling. So here you will read about both worlds. Enjoy!



Thursday, December 12, 2013

Gambling With an Edge - guests Tommy Hyland & John C.

Our guests this week are Tommy Hyland, and John Chang, on to talk about blackjack teams. Tommy runs the Hyland team, one of the longest running and most successful teams of all time. You can read about him in Gambling Wizards. (Shameless plug) John ran the MIT team and you can read more about him here. Interview.

Click to listen - Alt click to download

Show Notes


[1:00, ]: show introduction (questions for guests)

[2:03, ]: introduce guests

[2:15, ]: How do you recruit new members?

[4:05, ]: What percent of players that expressed interest actually followed through?

[5:13, ]: How do you evaluate member skill?

[6:21, ]: What was the testing process for new counters?

[9:35, ]: Accuracy of the movie 21- checkout process.

[10:58, ]: how do you split profits in a team (managers, investors, scouts, players, etc),

AND… how did that evolve over time?

[18:21, ]: what did management end up with?

[18:40, ]: how were comps treated w/r/t team compensation?

[24:30, ]: how did you deal with barrings?

[27:30, ]: [how] has the game, esp w/r/t barrings/backoffs, changed for teams since the advent of player lawyers such as BobN?

[30:58, ]: how do you detect and handle dishonest players when managing a team? did you use polygraphs ever?

[37:59, ]: do you require that everybody on the team have investment in the bankroll?

[40:41, ]: how do you deal with players that play sub-par games because they’re afraid of heat?

~42:00 VARIANCE ANALYSIS METHOD

[46:35, ]: do you two (Tommy, John) still play yourself?

[48:50, ]: do you allow players to play games on the side (such as poker) while on team trips?

[51:45, ]: in the event that a player is robbed, how would you handle that?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was a bit disappointed with this one. I know TH really guards his secrets but I thought you could have hit him with some tougher questions to give the listeners a tidbit of what he's doing now.

Richard Munchkin said...

We all would like to know how top pros are earning their money these days, but this was one of the conditions of the interview that we not ask about those things. The creative player will take ideas that have worked in the past, and find ways to adapt them and make money in the future.

Josh Axelrad said...

Chang's account of spy activities on the part of another blackjack team is a pretty fanciful misinterpretation. And the stealing of players... man, those people weren't cows that got loaded on somebody's truck or anything.