Al Francesco - Taking teams to the blackjack tables

It could be argued that no other single player has cost casinos as much money at the blackjack tables as Al Francesco.  This is the man that pioneered the team counting approach that has formed the basis of tactics successfully employed by various groups such as the MIT blackjack team. 

He is also the mentor of other students of the game, some of whom have gone on to themselves become legends and inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame.

Casinos not happy with a consistent winner

Al's advantage playing days started by perfecting counting methods learned in Ed Thorp's book Beat the Dealer.  Not long after perfecting Ed's methods Al was in fact beating the dealer more often than not and very soon found himself unwelcome at the casinos.  This lead to a forced holiday from advantage play and time spent learning other methods of counting - notably Lawrence Revere's Advanced Point Count system.

But after returning to the casinos and being more profitable than ever Al found himself being quickly identified as a winning advantage player and harassed constantly.

Can you imagine the frustration of knowing that you have the skill to walk into a Vegas casino and play with a real edge over the house and be constantly asked to leave the premises.  Money there for the legal taking - you're just not allowed to play the game.

It must have been at this point when Al turned his considerable intellect to the issue of how to count undetected rather than simply how to count.  Aliases just weren't going to cut it (Frank Schipani and Frank Salerno were 2 of his favorites) so he devised the concept of team counting and the big player.

The Counting Team and Big Player

A player counting in isolation is easily detected by a casino.  A bet pattern of relatively low value bets early in the deal followed by noticeable increases towards the end of the shoe, if and when a count is favorable, will flag their skills to casinos sooner or later.

To tackle this issue, Al put together a 7 player team - 6 counters and a 'Big Player'.  The counters, all at different tables and betting small and to no particular pattern, would keep the deal's running count and signal to the hovering big player when a shoe had a favorable count.  At this point, knowing the shoe is red hot the big player would join the table and bet aggressively from the outset - showing no discernable bet pattern.

From 1971 to 1977 Al and his team took casinos for millions of dollars.

All good things come to an end

Much to AL and his team's dismay, in 1977 one of its foundation members, Ken Uston wrote of the teams phenomenal successes in a tell all book named The Big Player.  The book let the cat well and truly out of the bag as to how they had managed to take casinos to the cleaners over the past half decade and with the party over Al's team went their separate ways.

But while the book alerted the casinos to the practice of team counting, it also schooled the wider blackjack playing community on the possibilities of team play.  The enormous success of teams like the well documented MIT blackjack team and lesser known Czech team and the Greeks were based on employing some variation on the big player team counting approach.

Like I said, Al Francesco has cost casinos many, many millions of dollars.

To read more about Al Francesco, visit his website at alfrancesco.com.

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