The Eudaemonic Pie

by Thomas A Bass

  In spite of the precautions that kept talk about it to a minimum, the Project began to accumulate a group of interested friends. Those knowledgeable about gambling offered advice on casinos. Others enlisted as potential players. And still more people, acquired by word of mouth and chance encounters, lent technical expertise. One of these was Jonathan Kanter, an electronics whiz who appeared like an answered prayer to solve the problem of the shockers.

  Doyne was driving the Blue Bus to the university when he stopped one day to pick up a hitchhiker. In hopped Kanter. Slender, intense, his long brown hair roped into Jamaican dreadlocks, “he looked like a white Rastafarian,” said Doyne, “with a rat’s nest of hair that probably hadn’t been combed in three years.”

  On the spectrum of computer freaks, Kanter was way to the left. He went barefoot and laughed like he was stoned all the time. A New Yorker who had dropped out of high school to go west, he lived in a garage filled with electronic gear and supported himself by building telephone blue boxes. Sleeping until two in the afternoon and then working until dawn, he kept the classic hours of a computer nut.

  They started talking and Doyne asked Kanter, “What are you doing up at the university?”

  “Roulette,” Kanter said. Doyne was surprised to hear that he had got the idea from reading Thorp’s book, and that he was now involved in building a roulette computer with a professor named Ralph Abraham.

  “I met Ralph late in 1975,” said Kanter. “At the time he was into building a machine for beating the Wheel of Fortune. With a simple analog device, he wanted to predict from the sound where the wheel would stop. The device gave you a voltage whenever it heard a click, and from that you could figure out the rate of deceleration. A drummer and bass man with perfect pitch had done the same thing merely by listening to the wheel.

  “I had just turned twenty when I got involved enough with Ralph’s project to go to Tahoe with a tape recorder. That’s when I read Thorp and learned about using a computer to predict roulette. I ran to Ralph with the idea and he said, ‘No, it’s too difficult.’ But we went to work on it anyway.

  “He thought up the idea of stroboscopic sunglasses, which we tested with a strobe light and a bicycle wheel spinning at the same speed as a roulette wheel. We discovered the ball decelerates too quickly for this to work. Then I started building an analog machine that would make predictions from the sound of the ball as it travels around the track. The volume changes as it either approaches or moves away from you. I took my recordings to the Center for Research into Acoustics and Music at Stanford to run some spectrum analyses. I wanted to see if the frequency of the ball changed as it decelerated. One look at the spectrum and you knew this wouldn’t work either. But the amplitude tests showed definite sound peaks. As the ball gets closer, its volume increases. So it seemed to me that what we wanted was a peak detector.”

  Unknown to Eudaemonic Enterprises, Kanter had rented a roulette wheel from the same game store on Market Street in San Francisco. He tried tracking the ball on videotape, but gave up when he discovered that his pictures were hopelessly blurred. He then turned to high-speed movies with a digital read-out flashing in the background.

  “I was still thinking of working with sound, but I soon got hip to the idea that sound wasn’t enough. Sound alone would allow you to follow only the ball. That’s when I thought of radar and the Doppler effect.”

  Kanter ordered a Doppler radar device from West Germany: a Valvo MDX 0520, costing two hundred sixty-five dollars. Cheaper models used for home burglar alarms can be bought at any hardware store, but they have horn antennas in the shape of metal ears or funnels attached to their bodies. The Valvo was completely flat, with a printed circuit antenna made from windings of copper. The size and color of a hockey puck, the device produced via radar a direct measure of speed for an object moving either toward or away from it. It did this by means of the Doppler effect, which explains, in its most famous example, why a train whistle changes pitch as the train approaches and passes in front of you.

  On hearing Kanter’s story, Doyne told him about his own work in roulette and invited him to 707 Riverside, where the roulette wheel, along with the KIM, Raymond, and Harry, had been set up on a picnic table in his bedroom. Doyne was putting the finishing touches on the program while running the computers against the game in play.

  Kanter was “really impressed” on finding this mini-casino and electronics shop in someone’s bedroom. “The wheels I had rented in San Francisco were in terrible shape compared to theirs, which was new and shiny. They also had an array of different-sized balls, which I knew at the time to be important. Doyne showed me the measurements they had made with photo diodes mounted around the sides of the wheel, and this was clearly a better way to get data than my earlier attempts in San Francisco. They were the most together people I had run across.”

  On Kanter’s bringing over his Valvo radar device, they found it worked perfectly on the wheel, where it could track the metal cups spinning on the rotor. It worked less well, though, in measuring the velocity of the balls, particularly those made of Teflon, which is nearly transparent to microwaves. Eudaemonic Enterprises decided to stick with the stopwatch system of switches and toe clicks. What this input lacked in accuracy, it made up for in versatility.

  While most of its concerns were mathematical and electrical, Eudaemonic Enterprises also confronted problems that were psychological in nature. Given the distractions found in casinos, how could data takers train their toes for accuracy in clicking? And how were bettors going to keep cool in the face of casino heat?

  To tackle the first of these problems, Doyne set up the eye-toe biofeedback machine and established a regular schedule of practice sessions for anyone hoping to play in the casinos. First prize for the winner of these Riviera Sweepstakes—that person displaying the best eye-toe coordination—would be a trip to the roulette tables of Monte Carlo.

  Consisting of two parts, an infrared photocell directed onto the track of the roulette wheel and a toe-operated microswitch mounted into a pair of sandals, the biofeedback machine was wired into the KIM computer, which registered a toe click and a photocell “click” at each passage of the ball around the track. After comparing human time and photocell time, the KIM flashed the difference on an LED display. It also compiled running averages.

  “There was quite a range of abilities,” said Doyne. “The best people had errors within three hundredths of a second, while others couldn’t get within a tenth or even a quarter of a second. This correlated strongly to how athletic you were, and men typically performed better than women. We did worse when we were tired and discovered on getting stoned that our averages went down with every toke. With alcohol, on the other hand, some of us improved after one drink. So we figured out the optimal amount of alcohol required. The key was to be concentrated but relaxed, like playing tennis.”

  Always a strong athlete, and later a professional volleyball coach, the winner of the Riviera Sweepstakes was Steve Lawton. With an average clicking error of less than three hundredths of a second, he was henceforth known to the Project as “Stevie the Toe.”

  Although still officially on leave, Doyne returned to the university that spring as a teaching assistant in the introductory course on electronics for physicists. “I had run out of money. My bank account read zero dollars.”

  “It was a lonely, difficult year for Doyne,” said Letty. “He used up all his reserves during the time he was out of school. His financial reserves. His reserves of self-confidence and initiative. Anyone else embarking on the Project would have quit long ago, and those who knew what he was doing were bowled over by his persistence and drive.”

  Doyne had invested two thousand dollars in the Project and lent another fifteen hundred to Norman so he could finish college and start graduate school at Santa Cruz. “Norman,” said Doyne, “had exceeded every limit everywhere for student loans. He was so in debt that for several years he wore braces on his teeth which were neither tightened nor
removed because he couldn’t afford a visit to the dentist. I finally dug into our electronics toolbox and used the same long-nosed pliers and clippers that had built Harry to remove the braces myself. It was really pretty simple. With a little more practice, I could have gone into business.”

  Teaching electronics was equally painless (Doyne gave the course lectures on microcomputers), and working at the university proved a good way to enlist bright students into the Project. Doyne kept an eye on five in particular: Marianne Walpert, Ingrid Hoermann, Mark Truitt, Rob Lentz, and Sandy Wells, the last of whom was hired that spring to rebuild Norman’s radio receivers. The others would also eventually commit themselves to working for a slice of Eudaemonic Pie.

  Being back on campus gave Doyne the chance to talk about roulette and computers with selected faculty members. Most of them had no idea why he had dropped out of school, and those in the know about the Project were close-mouthed to the point of paranoia.

  “Everyone wanted to know what Doyne was doing,” said Norman. “He gave them a line about how he was working on a secret money-making scheme that would release us from the fetters of the rat race. Most of the professors would nod their heads and say, ‘Oh, yes, that means patent agreements. You have to treat these things with propriety.’ But others were peeved about not being included in the inner circle of confidants. Whenever we did talk to someone about the Project, they were tickled pink by the idea of our pulling it off.”

  George Blumenthal, Doyne’s former adviser, thought his work on roulette sufficient for a Ph.D. Other faculty members reviewed his equations or reflected generally on the problem of beating roulette. Throughout these discussions the name of Ralph Abraham kept popping up. A gambling system is ultimately only as good as its concealment, and Abraham was clearly the recognized expert in Santa Cruz on casino surveillance.

  For a modest town of difficult access, Santa Cruz is endowed with a surprising array of luminaries who wander its forests and meadows like intellectual nabobs displaced from more traditional centers of culture. Loose in the redwoods at that time were Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Gregory Bateson, and John Cage. The satyr among them, sporting a pepper-gray beard and bemused, if not sardonic, smile, was Ralph Abraham.

  Professor of mathematics at Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz, author of the pre-eminent text in classical mechanics and five other books, specialist in nonlinear analysis, dynamical systems, morphogenesis, and pattern formation, Ralph Abraham arrived in Santa Cruz in 1967 at the age of thirty-one and dropped acid for the first time. “That was the turning point for me,” he said. “I began my life on the road, the search for the miraculous, and also my life of crime.”

  On his first day in Santa Cruz the yet-to-be transformed Abraham was instructed by his friend Page Stegner to look up Fred Stranahan. “I drove over to Jim Houston’s house in a Shelly Cobra that I had rented from Hertz,” said Abraham, “and Houston told me I’d find Stranahan out at the Barn in Scotts Valley.”

  The home of the Merry Pranksters, the Barn was painted in psychedelic colors, lit in black light, and filled with space music made by the Sons of Eternity, who played instruments shaped like pornographic sculptures. “There were three hundred people in there,” said Abraham, “all tripped out on acid—kids, dogs, everybody. I had my first trip there, and then I saw what was happening.”

  On moving to Santa Cruz, Abraham bought a twenty-four-room Victorian mansion on California Street and began “listening to radios from other planets. I gave my life over to the I Ching. I began traveling, spending a year in Europe, sleeping on floors, in opium dens and train stations, and then I thought I was seasoned enough to go to India. I studied the Vedas for seven months and supported myself by giving math lectures. I looked into all the available forms of mysticism: Gurdjieff, Sufis, astrology, and politics, too. But I decided, rather than mysticism or politics, that ‘the way’ for me was to travel, that it was better than belonging to a group or meditating or having a guru.

  “There was a lot of pressure from Governor Reagan and the chancellor of the university to have me quit; so they were glad to see me go traveling. On getting back from India, I made a survey of all the professions that would support my way of life. There was a list of criteria by which I evaluated them: flexibility, good working conditions, profitability, and transportability around the world. I chose gambling as my profession.”

  Abraham sold his house and moved into the St. George Hotel, a way station for transients down on Pacific Street. He set up shop in the Catalyst, a bar then located in the lobby of the St. George. “I ate all my meals there while practicing card counting for weeks on end. I already knew Thorp’s book. I read it again, learned the system, and practiced with flash cards in the Catalyst, until I later worked out a scheme with a projector and slides showing two hundred different possibilities. Then I headed for Nevada.”

  Abraham and I are drinking chai and eating tumis—stir-fried vegetables—in a Santa Cruz cafe called India Joze while he recounts this part of his life. Bespectacled, tanned, with a prepossessing forehead and piercing dark eyes, he looks like a professorial guru conscious of the veil of maya, but tenured into it. In preference to tweeds or saffron robes, he wears a multipocketed vest and cowboy snap shirt. There is a long pause in the narrative before he resumes.

  “I lost continuously. Five thousand dollars altogether. Then I discovered Larry Revere’s book. No doubt about it, it describes the world’s finest blackjack system. I began losing faster. Then I took my hundredth look at Revere’s book and found on the last page a sentence that says you can’t learn a system out of a book.

  “I headed for Las Vegas and found Revere. I gave him my last hundred-dollar bill and said, ‘I want to be your student.’ He was a millionaire several times over. It was a power token, an act of humiliation. I became his star student. He taught me how to walk, how to dress, how to sit down and leave a table, how to shuffle money from one pocket to another. He was an acting teacher, a master of disguise.

  “‘Revere’ wasn’t his real name, and the name before that wasn’t real either. After his first lesson, I began winning, but I knew he was holding out on me. I wanted his knowledge. He had bought a casino and was playing both sides of the business, and by then he needed a secretary; so I inserted a friend of mine from Santa Cruz into his life. I phoned her up and she flew to Vegas to go to work for him.

  “But as I said, from the day I met Revere I became a successful blackjack professional. I installed myself in Tahoe and began making a couple of thousand dollars a month. Playing two hours in the morning and two in the evening, I cleared twenty dollars an hour. I could have made five times as much in Vegas, but I couldn’t stand the place.

  “With a disguise I could play the same casino for weeks on end without their knowing I was winning. The acting is all in your hands.” Abraham opened his vest and showed me the extra pockets sewn inside. “You have to shuffle chips in and out of these pockets. Knowing exactly where they are, you want to look as fuddled as everybody else. You’re sitting at a table with people who are losing, and if they weren’t losing you wouldn’t be winning. While putting a lot of chips into your pockets, you have to make it look as if you’re pulling them out.

  “You also need a strategy for cashing your chips. You can’t do it in the same casino; so you take advantage of the courtesy most of them extend in cashing each other’s chips. You memorize shift changes, so that losses get reported on different shifts, and then you drive around town in a certain pattern to pick up your winnings. These techniques are known as ‘money management.’

  “While you’re playing you have to count all the cards in twenty-six seconds. Twenty-eight seconds and you lose. The game just goes right by you. There are a hundred hands per hour, thirteen cards per hand, over a thousand cards per hour, and you can’t afford to make one mistake. I used to practice for an hour in the morning before hitting the casino. You have to count cards out of the corner of your eye while talking to the guy
next to you. The place is noisy, like an airport on Sunday night. The dealers, pit bosses, cocktail waitresses know a hundred ways to make you lose your concentration. And once in a while, when a dealer suspects something, he’ll try to trap you. He’ll shoot a card traveling at forty miles per hour straight for your nose, and you can’t catch it, or he’ll know what you’re doing.

  “Back then there were maybe two hundred professional blackjack players. Now there are thousands. Ken Uston took over from Revere when he died and introduced the concept of team play, with groups of a dozen going out on the road for a year. Stanford Wong worked out a strategy based on walking from table to table, called ‘wonging.’ He learned how to watch the dealers’ faces for telltale signs, or ‘tells,’ which tipped him off on when to bet.

  “With the proliferation of schemes there was a war going on between the casinos and the professional gamblers. Revere himself got co-opted when he bought a casino. Soon it was impossible to tell who was whom, especially when the casinos started pushing schemes themselves. They understand that nobody loses money faster than a card counter. One mistake and you’re lost.

  “Every technician over in the Silicon Valley thinks of himself as a gambler. On weekends he drives to Tahoe to count cards, or putters around in his garage wiring semiconductors into a gambling system. But in this business either you’re a professional or you’re nothing. The casino world is an airtight community, an alternate reality. You live in the hotels and play downstairs in the air-conditioned casinos and never go outside, because nothing outside is as interesting as inside.

  “You see the casinos wheeling carts around to pick up the cash-boxes. Hour after hour they’re raking it in. You’re sitting next to losers who don’t leave the table until they’re broke. You see their wives pulling on their sleeves, saying, ‘Honey, don’t do it. That’s our bus fare.’ And then it’s gone and you have no idea how they’re going to get back to wherever it was they came from.