In many ways, gambling is like entrepreneurship. The odds are stacked against you, unless you cultivate your own unfair advantage or delicious secret sauce. You could have a rousing success one day and an utter failure the next, and your emotions can swing along with them. And the key is staying level-headed and being persistent. So it’s no surprise that, when Jones began to tire of blackjack, he parlayed his card counting expertise into entrepreneurship. He’s the cofounder of Blackjack Apprenticeship, a community website with resources for card counters. They’re the creators of the popular iOS app Blackjack Card Counting Trainer, and today they announced plans to develop a card counting training app for Google Glass. Like many entrepreneurs, Jones is motivated by something other than money. In 2003, he read some card counting books, took $2,000 of his savings (with his wife’s permission), and tried his luck at blackjack. Within six months, he and his partner Ben Crawford were making over $100 per hour on average and had turned an initial $11,000 into $100,000. But something funny happens when you carry around tens of thousands of dollars in your pocket, losing and winning just as much in a single day – you start to care less about money. Instead, expert blackjack players care about “EV,” or expected value: the amount of money you expect to make in a given time period. By card counting, players can shift the odds slightly in their favor and create a positive EV (say, a few hundred dollars an hour). Jones found his deeper motivation around 2006, when he and Crawford started a group of card counters who shared profits. Interestingly, the group was mostly Christian and became the subject of a documentary called Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians. They found a noble purpose for what might seem like an un-Christian activity: they were taking money from a corrupt institution. “I’ll live off of ramen everyday to create value because I know that’ll pay off, and I want to see the fruit of what I’m doing.” Instead of speaking the word of God, they were speaking the truth about casinos: educating people that card counting is not illegal, and that the jackpot dreams propagated by casinos are mostly an illusion. In the end, Jones’ group ended up making over $4 million in total profits, which helped him fund his startup. Even more than resources and education, his goal is to provide a community to help card counters deal with losses – which still occur about 45 percent of the time. “I feel like entrepreneurs can relate,” he says.
