Did Ken Uston Betray His Mentor?

In 1977, Ken Uston's first book, The Big Player, became a best seller for Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. Co-authored with professional writer Roger Rapaport, this was the book that taught the public at large, and casino industry insiders, how Al Francesco's blackjack teams got away with winning huge amounts of money in casinos all over the world.

Many of Uston's teammates, however, and especially Al Francesco-the man who had invented the team concept and taught Uston how to play-felt betrayed. Al had been using his BP teams since 1971, racking up huge wins at all of the major casinos in Las Vegas and Reno, without any inkling of suspicion within the casino industry of what he had been doing. And for three and a half years, Al had been doing this with a twenty-one-man team that included three BPs and eighteen spotters. By playing in three different casinos, and continually rotating spotters and BPs in and out of all of them, Al felt that the casinos would never be able to make the play by putting together his spotters with his BPs. Al Francesco felt certain that the only way his BP strategy could ever be discovered would be by someone on his team spilling the beans. And he had two team policies that he required all team members to adhere to: complete honesty and absolute secrecy.

Ken Uston, in fact, initially got a position on one of Al's teams in 1974 as a result of another player's violation of the honesty policy. Al had a brother-in-law at that time acting as a Big Player, and he discovered his brother-in-law was stealing money from the team. So Al fired him and started looking for another BP. He was introduced to Ken Uston, and he felt Uston would be the right man for the job. As a vice president of the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco, Uston had the credentials to fool the casinos into thinking he was a man with a lot of money. And, Uston was obviously smart and ambitious, and knew how to play the part of a millionaire who could throw money around at whim. Al trained Uston to count cards, and later to act as a BP. Al later commented wryly, "I probably should have stuck with my brother-in-law; at least he wouldn't have written a book about it!"

Al did not find out about Uston's book until a week before the book was published. And the way he found out about it devastated him. For the first time, at the Sands Casino in Las Vegas, Al's team was busted by casino security. Uston was the Big Player on that play, and he was putting on a show for a representative of his publisher who was at the casino to watch him in action. The publisher subsequently used the team's bust to promote the book and make Ken a media star. And it worked. Ken Uston and the big bust at the Sands made the news, and Uston was soon widely viewed as the mastermind Big Player who had made it all happen.

Though Uston always denied it, Al has always felt that Uston set up the bust simply to promote the book. According to Al, Uston was not a winning BP with his teams. He was aggressive and flamboyant, but he never really won any money. The fact that Uston had spent more than a year writing a book about Al's teams, without ever mentioning to Al that he was doing it until it came out in the news, drove a wedge between the two men that would last for years to come.

But there is no denying that Ken Uston's The Big Player, published in 1977, influ¬enced and educated many other card counters about the team approach. Al Francesco had been betrayed, but it was no coincidence that the Tommy Hyland Team, the Czech Team, and the MIT Team were all initially formed in 1978, the year after the publica¬tion of The Big Player. This book, filled with exciting stories of subterfuge and incred¬ible wins, ushered in the Age of the Blackjack Mega-Team. It is one of the blackjack classics that probably created more professional players than any book since Lawrence Revere's Playing Blackjack as a Business.

And what happened the year after The Big Player was published? In 1978, Resorts International, the first East Coast casino, opened in Atlantic City. Now, the game really gets crazy...