Before going to bed, one of my sweeties and I watched this documentary called Holy Rollers. It's about a gigantic (to me) team of Blackjack players who happened to be Christian (a lot of them Ministers) that go all over the place and play Blackjack. This documentary crew followed them around for three or so years in order to find out how they do it, but they showed remarkably little about their strategy. I mean, they talked a little about the arithmetic involved, but they didn't mention what strategy charts they use, or what games they play. They didn't mention how the teams are structured beyond the hyper-simplistic backers, managers, players scheme.
There were times when we were watching it that he and I just laughed our asses off because we either resemble (in his case) or resembled (in mine) the attitudes of the players that were featured. It was obvious to us that the documentary was focusing mainly on the players that were either out by the time that the production wrapped up or were burned by a majority of casinos to the point that they were no longer able to play. A good portion of those particular people had also jumped into the game as backers themselves.
Something that alarmed both of us is how insular the group was. They had a non-Christian player on the team and when a person on the team accused him of stealing with no proof at all, they fired him. The reason the guy had for thinking the non-Christian was a thief? The Holy Spirit told him so. This incident occurred during a point in time that they hadn't closed many bankrolls (made their target profit goals to distribute money to investors and bonuses to team members) so paranoia was starting to run high.
The reason this bothered me? Similar things have happened when the streaks were not what were expected. It affected me directly. That's all I am going to say about that right now. However, I can safely say that no one on our team was ever fired for being a non-Christian.
I like that the documentary made it a point to note that there is high risk involved in this. The variance of the game gets to be such that if play isn't perfect that the money can just drain right back into the casino that you are trying to take it from. Apparently, the team grew so fast and the players didn't keep up their play practice outside of the casino, honing their count, that the entire team suffered this hitting of the human side of the variance pretty fucking hard. That being said, we don't have enough information to extrapolate how many players there were or how many of them became complacent in their counts. That lack of information was deliberate. After all, these people don't want anyone else to be able to take their model and repeat it.
There are times when I seriously miss my old gig. It seemed like the situation with the people I was working with was tailor made for me in certain respects. I was valued for my skills and liked for me. I was not just a cog in the wheel, though, I kind of was in the sense that another person could be trained to do a majority of what I did. However, I did something recently for my former employer and the stress of doing that thing with all its associated general disorganization made me realize that what I used to do was about ten times more stressful than that. I used to eat the type of stress that was driving me crazy the last week for breakfast and not even notice it. I know that I couldn't go back to doing it. So, I have a bunch of interesting stories. I have to close that chapter in my life and accept that the likelihood of me returning to it is extremely low.
But there are days when I really do miss the money and the comps.
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