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Kenny
Uston Remembered
by Jerry Patterson
Ken
Uston was arguably the most famous blackjack player ever.
His innovative blackjack team play techniques took millions off the Las
Vegas blackjack tables before they were detected by the casinos.
Player, Author, Instructor, Jazz Musician, and gambling raconteur, Kenny
was a great guy to hang out with. This
article contains a few of my remembrances.
Brought
up in a middle-class New York City household, Ken Uston graduated from Yale
with the highest honors. At the age of 31 he was earning $42,500 a year plus
many fringe benefits as a Senior Vice President of the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange.
But he gave it all up and dropped out of the corporate world to play
professional blackjack.
Although
Kenny didn't invent team blackjack, Ed Thorp gets the credit for that, he was
the key member of the first blackjack team organized in the mid-1970s by a professional
blackjack player in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The fascinating story of this team is told in Kenny's out-of-print book,
The Big Player.
The
first time I saw Kenny, he was sitting at a blackjack table at Resorts International
in Atlantic City ... shortly after the AC casinos opened in the late 1970s in
the days of early surrender and when the casinos were required by regulation
to deal at least two-thirds of the shoe with no shuffle-up allowed.
Uston was by himself with the familiar curly hair and beard. Kenny, betting stacks of green, was losing heavily.
"You don't want any part of this holocaust," he said to a friend.
I
was a budding professional blackjack player at the time, having just published
my first blackjack book - the first edition of Blackjack: A Winner's Handbook.
I was also proud of a weekly gambling column that I was writing for The
Philadelphia Inquirer. I decided
I wanted to meet Kenny.
My
wife Nancy, much more assertive than I, had no problem in accosting Kenny at
the table, talking to him and arranging a dinner meeting with Kenny and his
sister Lynn at the old historic, Knife & Fork Restaurant.
Over dinner, the conversation was a jumble of Kenny's plans to form teams,
his plans for a new book and his sister Lynn's attempts to pin him down for
promotional appearances.
Kenny's
huge ego didn't prevent him from expressing genuine interest in my blackjack
theories and plans for teaching and writing.
He talked about teaching a seminar in Washington, DC and I, a blackjack
instructor as well, decided I wanted to learn from the master.
I wrangled an invitation from Kenny, attended the seminar and learned
a tremendous amount about teaching the game.
Among Kenny's many talents, teaching was near the top of the list.
Kenny
wanted me to play on his blackjack teams.
I admit I was dazzled by all the prospects of quick money.
But I turned him down, preferring instead to maintain a longer blackjack
career. Kenny burned out team members
very quickly. In those days, once
you became known to the casinos, it was difficult to make money playing the
game.
Kenny
and I had many discussions about going into the teaching business together.
Nancy (my business partner as well as my wife) and I listened to Kenny's
offer one evening. He would lend
his name to the business and make special appearances for selling and teaching.
But when we proposed dividing the profits by three instead of two, as
Kenny wanted, he balked, and our discussions went up in smoke.
This
didn't affect our friendship. For a six-month period, while he was writing his book, One-Third
of a Shoe (half of what became known as Two Books On Blackjack), we saw
Kenny and his girlfriend, Suzy, at least once a week. We were asked to offer advice on the book and helped Kenny
with his self-publishing activities.
Kenny
needed some quick cash in the early 1980s and came to me for a loan.
He offered collateral. So
I lent him about $10K. The collateral?
His collection of $500, $1,000 and $10,000 bills he didn't want to convert.
He paid me back within just a few weeks.
I met him inside the safety deposit room of an Atlantic City bank and
Kenny repaid the loan in casino chips from Resorts International.
One of his teams had just doubled a bank.
I
have vivid memories of the last three times I saw Kenny.
I had dinner with Uston the night before his win in the New Jersey Supreme
Court was announced. He had beaten
the casinos in a long and costly battle to earn the right to play blackjack
without getting barred because of his card-counting skills.
However, the casinos were given countermeasures that would make it difficult
(if not impossible) for him to win. But
this didn't matter. Kenny had made
his point. He felt great that night
and we both had too many drinks. "Nobody
but me could have pulled this off," he said.
And he was right.
In
1985, Kenny formed his last blackjack team in Las Vegas.
He shaved his beard and straightened his hair.
He looked like he did in his pictures when he was Vice-President of the
Pacific Coast Stock Exchange. When
I saw him at the Jockey Club, I knew him right away.
But apparently the casinos didn't recognize him, because he played right
alongside his team members all summer.
I was teaching a class at the time and one day I remember the sounds
of his piano filtering into my classroom there at the Jockey Club. Of course, the students were excited when I told them who was
playing ... and we didn't get much
done that afternoon. Kenny was
a tremendous jazz pianist. He emulated
Errol Garner - his favorite jazz pianist.
The
last time I saw Kenny was at a gourmet restaurant at Resorts in Atlantic City.
We discussed another joint venture over a fantastic dinner.
As always, the talk turned to blackjack and Kenny reminisced about his
teams and big wins. He told me
how he once got a 100:1 betting spread in a single-deck game at Lake Tahoe,
betting from $10 to $1,000 a hand without the deck being shuffled.
Words are not enough to describe the drunk act he simulated that night,
staggering around the floor of the restaurant in front of our table and others
nearby, to show how he made the whole caper possible.
It was a masterful lesson in the art of fooling the casino bosses, but
could I or anyone else have pulled it off?
I doubt it.
Kenny
was a very special person. He excelled in everything he did, whether it was blackjack,
Pac Man, teaching, writing, programming a computer, or whatever he undertook.
Ken Uston passed away in 1987 from unknown causes.
******************
Jerry
Patterson, a gambling instructor, author and player for 25 years, is author
of Casino Gambling: A Winner’s Guide to Blackjack, Craps, Roulette, Baccarat
and Casino Poker, the #1 selling gambling book on amazon.com and bn.com
since shortly after publication in February 2000.
You can purchase the book through the Books
section of AnteUp Gambling Links, by visiting Jerry’s Website Casino
Gambling Edge, or at bookstores nationwide.
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