Bad Ass Andy
By: Michael Craig

Full Tilt Poker Summer 2006 Cyberspace Traffic Controller

At his dinning room table, Andy Bloch plays in an online poker tournament. At stake: a seat in the World Series Main Event.

For most online players, just winning a seat would be a careerdefining achievement. But Andy has been playing in the Series for the last decade (with breaks for law school exams and a boycott during some of the Nick and Becky Behnen years). He is, however, a spokesman for FullTiltPoker.com, and he frequently plays in its tournaments to promote the site.

And a great promoter he is. Players flock to tournaments he enters. This is standard practice for the better-known ’Tilt pros, though Bloch also pulls them in as railbirds. They pepper him with questions and he carefully answers them all.

This tournament is down to seven players and Andy is the chip leader. The top two get seats in the Main Event plus $2,000 in cash. The next three receive lesser amounts in cash.

OBSERVER: I’m going to Foxwoods next month. Aren’t you from CT?

ANDYBLOCH: Yes.

OBSERVER: What’s the closest airport? On the button, Bloch raises and both blinds call.

ANDYBLOCH: Providence. The flop is jack-eight-six, two clubs.

ANDYBLOCH: New Haven. The blinds check. Andy bets.

ANDYBLOCH: Then Hartford, Boston, New York. The blinds fold and he picks up the pot. A few hands later, the shortest stack, on the button, moves all-in. This raise is just double the big blind. Andy, in the big blind, calls, showing 10-9. The raiser has ace-six. The flop brings a ten.

OBSERVER: Andy, what was your grade point average? The river adds insult to injury, a nine, eliminating the player on the bubble. ANDYBLOCH: At MIT or Harvard? The perfect answer. The railbirds eventually ask him for both schools and Bloch, ever-polite, answers.

Foxwoods Fall 1993 The Hickock Kid

Somehow, Andy Bloch must have taken a wrong turn. Just a year ago, he received his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He obtained a plum job offer in New York and seemed to be on his way to a career of distinction and success as a computer programmer.

So why is he hanging around Foxwoods, the giant Indian casino that opened, seemingly in his back yard, the year before? The new job fell apart after an argument with his boss. On a trip to the casino, a novel game in the blackjack pit attracted his attention, and permanently altered the course of his life.

The game was called Wild Bill Hickock and it was a twist on the games casinos offer that resemble poker but allow the players to bet against the house. The game wasn’t getting much action, so the casino altered the rules by adding a joker and improving the payouts. After playing a few hands, Andy became convinced that the game was beatable. Waiting to start an even better job with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Boston, he programmed his family’s Apple IIe to figure out if there was a strategy that gave players an advantage over the casino in Wild Bill Hickock.

It took two days to write the Hickock program in a combination of machine language and BASIC, and two more for the Apple to run the program. The conclusion: Playing an optimal strategy, a player could maintain a 2% edge. (When Andy could afford a faster computer after starting with DEC, he wrote a more advanced program and discovered a strategy that could achieve a 6% edge.)

He made return trips to Foxwoods and confirmed that the strategy worked. His excitement, which was substantial, was tempered by several problems. First, the maximum bet on the game was $50, so his expectation was only $25 per hour. Second, he was due to start at DEC, which would cut further into his playing time at Foxwoods. He needed to find a team.

Ironically, Andy Bloch never met anybody connected with the MIT Blackjack Team during his five years at the school. Because most undergraduate students are below the legal gambling age, the bulk of the MIT Team – itself a misnomer because there have been

multiple groups, some with only tenuous connections to the school, counting cards together – has traditionally been former, returning, and graduate students, along with some locals who never attended MIT.

While Andy was looking for co-venturers, the MIT Team found him. A couple of former students, since featured in Bringing Down the House, Busting Vegas, and documentaries about the team, wanted to form an “MIT poker team.” Because Andy had been playing some poker at Foxwoods and won a $100 buy-in tournament in December 1993, they thought he should be a charter member. He wanted their experience in deploying a Hickock team. Playing blackjack together also hung in the background.

Ultimately, they collaborated on three gambling projects. The first was the Hickock team. Finding and training players proved difficult, and other players (some of them MIT students) were also discovering Hickock was beatable, making seats sometimes hard to find. They made about $75,000 in six months, though Gaming Today reported they “took Foxwoods for over $1 million.”

Bloch also received his first taste of an immutable gambling law: nothing good lasts forever. At the first opportunity, Foxwoods made additional changes. These changes made Hickock so unfavorable that not only did Andy and his team give up playing, but so did everyone else. The casino soon discontinued the game.

Nobody has written any best-selling books about the MIT poker team and with good reason. Andy was profitable on the team’s bankroll in a hundred or so hours at Omaha High-Low, but no one else was winning. The team soon disbanded. According to Andy, one of the organizers, known as Mister M in documentaries about the Blackjack Team, later became the poker coach to a local computer programmer, Robert Varkonyi, who went on to win the 2002 World Championship.

The third venture was blackjack, and that proved more profitable.

Las Vegas Summer 1995 Go West, Young Man

Despite DEC’s reputation as the premiere computing company for scientists and engineers, the job lacked the allure of using the same skills to gamble. “I got bored working as an engineer. I was going to Las Vegas every weekend. It seemed half the time I was at work, I was reading rec.gambling or thinking about poker.”

By 1995, he quit the prestigious job and moved to Las Vegas to become a professional gambler. He was playing with the MIT Team – he later became the team manager – and developing his poker skill. He used variations of the Hickock program and his general programming ability to figure out strategies that otherwise might have taken him decades of table experience to recognize.

For example, a friend developed a program for figuring out Chinese Poker, and shared it with Andy and others. He finished in the money in three Queens Classic Chinese Poker events in September 1995, then won the 1995 Hall of Fame Classic Chinese Poker event.

He also wrote a program for developing optimal heads-up No Limit Hold’em strategy. At dinner at the Golden Nugget celebrating his Binion’s win, a friend brought along another computer programmer who finished fourth in the event. This began Andy’s friendship with Chris Ferguson, and it started with a surprise: It turned out they had separately focused on heads-up play, written similar programs, and came up with similar results, down to the listing of the exact stack sizes to move all-in or call an all-in bet.

Over the next several years, Andy met many like-minded men who, despite the best efforts of educational institutions and the white-collar workforce, preferred to gamble, either as a serious hobby or professionally. They all made money in Vegas, and most made their mark in business as well: Phil Gordon, Paul Phillips, Greg Raymer, Perry Friedman, Richard Brodie, Howard Lederer, and several others. (Bloch has gotten more than camaraderie and intellectual stimulation from these associations. Phil Gordon’s company produced Andy’s Beating Blackjack DVD. Chris Ferguson introduced him to the operators of Full Tilt Poker. He did even better by Howard Lederer. Howard introduced his niece Jennifer to Andy; they are now engaged.)

Living in Vegas, he also scoured the casinos for games, promotions, and machines where someone had offered a deal to customers without gaming management thinking it through. One early such situation involved a blackjack promotion at the Sahara, in which the casino would pay 2-to-1 for blackjack instead of the normal 3-to-2. The promotion, Andy recalls, was supposed to last for a month, but the Sahara stopped it after three days. Andy learned about it on the third day.

The improved payout gave a player employing basic strategy a 2% edge over the house. Andy wasn’t aware of the promotion; few blackjack pros were. Some friends noticed it and called him. “C’mon. You’re right there. You have to get in on this.”

“So I sat down,” Andy explains today, “and didn’t get up until they cancelled the promotion.” Initially, he could play two hands at $500 per hand. Then just one hand. Then a $200 maximum bet. Then if he got up, he wasn’t allowed to sit back down. After he was there about fifteen hours, refusing to get up even to use the bathroom, the pit boss said they were closing the table and discontinuing the promotion in an hour. He won about $7,000 that night.

Harvard Law School Fall 1996 Lawyers, Guts, and Money

Nevertheless, after a year as a professional gambler in Las Vegas, he moved back East to attend Harvard Law School. “While between jobs, I took the LSAT and did pretty well. One day, I happened to see Maya Angelou on a commercial reading a poem about reaching your potential. I don’t even remember the poem specifically but I decided maybe I should go to law school. I wasn’t sure, though, so I applied to just three schools – Harvard, Yale, and Stanford – and figured if I got in to one, then it was the right move. If not, it wasn’t meant to be. I got into Harvard.”

He wasn’t actually choosing education or a white-collar future over gambling. He was still part of the Blackjack Team, managing the operation and making frequent trips to Las Vegas. The period, from 1996 to 1999, was eventful for Bloch and the team. They won millions and he managed the team, donning disguises to play, getting harassed by casinos, and earning a reputation as an “undesirable” by the infamous Griffin Investigations. The Griffin page on Bloch, which listed him above known cheats and criminals, appropriated a picture of him from the MIT Yearbook as well as several pictures taken by casino surveillance.

Card counting is not cheating and is completely legal. Because casinos are private clubs, however, they can refuse to admit anyone they don’t want, for any reason. The casinos don’t want skilled players beating games that are, for nearly all their customers, unbeatable. So they bar them from the premises. If they find them again on the property, they can now have the player arrested for trespassing.

Bloch was at loose ends after graduating from Harvard Law in 1999. He was still making far more playing blackjack than he could even at a top law firm in Boston or New York. He continued to play poker, but only sporadically. The focus of tournament poker was a couple of LA tournaments, Jack Binion’s tournament in Tunica, Foxwoods, and the World Series, which eclipsed them all. Andy was boycotting the World Series after it banned Paul Phillips for his critical comments about the tournament.

He toyed with working in public interest law, but the position he decided to pursue never became available. His association with the MIT Blackjack Team ended after a pair of profitable reunions over New Year’s 2000 and the Super Bowl later that month. Paul Phillips was allowed back in the Horseshoe during the 2000 Series. Andy made two final tables in 2001. He made an unpredictable move, to Washington, DC, to be near his sister to help her raise her young daughter. (He managed to remain an instigator, crossing a police line during a March 2003 anti-war demonstration, which led to his fourth arrest – the first that wasn’t blackjack-related. He represented himself, and his conviction was overturned on First Amendment grounds at the end of 2004 by the DC Court of Appeals.)

Law and engineering ultimately failed to excite him. He had taken blackjack about as far as he could and walked away. Was there a career in poker for him?

Final Table - Everywhere 2002-Current Day I Got to Tell You, Poker’s His Thing

Andy committed himself to tournament poker just in time. In January 2002, after spending a while in the chip lead, he just missed the TV table at Tunica. (The final table was televised, but this was six months before the beginning of the World Poker Tour.) At Foxwoods in November, he won the 7-Card Stud tournament and finished third in the Main Event, the third stop on the new World Poker Tour. He made a second WPT final table in Los Angeles just three months later, again finishing third.

Now, in 2006, Andy Bloch is in a quandary. He won’t sign the WPT’s release because he considers it unfair and financially threatening. Therefore, he can’t play events like Foxwoods and Tunica where he has been successful even before the Tour took them over. Even though he plays at the World Series – he recently made a final table at a Circuit event – he has not yet had great success there.

But he is a professional and he plays all the games, all over the world. He has finished in the money in Paris, London, Dublin, and Monte Carlo. He has made final tables in nearly every form of tournament poker: Limit and No-Limit Hold’em, Stud, Omaha High-Low, Razz, Pot Limit Omaha, Stud High-Low, Chinese Poker, and mixed games like HOSE and HORSE.

He has run roughshod over the Ultimate Poker Challenge the last few years, winning the Main Event in July 2005, and making the final table in the November 2005 edition. He has won a preliminary No Limit event at the UPC and made two other final tables since 2004. He has also won a pair of other No Limit Hold’em tournaments in Las Vegas over the last couple years.

Golden Nugget 2004 Poster Child

The after-effects of being a professional card-counter have been wide-ranging. Unlike some of his colleagues, who remain shadowy figures in books and documentaries, Andy Bloch’s many appearances at televised poker events have made him well known throughout the casino industry. Casino executives treat him with a strange combination of deference (as they would a celebrity with big bucks) and wariness (as they would someone Griffin Investigations considers a higher risk than a cheater).

When Fox was taping episodes of The Casino, about the Golden Nugget and its then-new owners Tim Poster and Tom Brietling, he was called by the producers and invited to play blackjack during an episode. He never had a problem with the Golden Nugget in the past, but this was a switch from his usual reception in the blackjack pit.

It was a set-up. The program guide for the episode says “Tim deals with a notorious card counting team.” Andy never played a hand of blackjack. They invited him on so Poster (who also got himself fined by the Gaming Control Board for some of his conduct in front of the cameras) could bar him.

Golden Nugget Back Room Six Months Later Tipped

Andy is the chip leader at a $1,000 buy-in No Limit Hold’em event at the Plaza in downtown Las Vegas. Play has ended for the day and he and Perry Friedman retreat to the Golden Nugget, where Perry is staying, for dinner at the buffet. Although Andy’s “barring” seemed like a joke, he has taken it seriously and never gone near the blackjack pit. He has, however, visited friends staying at the Nugget during the World Series, eaten in the restaurants, and conducted business meetings there.

The pair leaves after finishing dinner, but Bloch goes back. He forgot to leave a tip. He runs into the casino employee who read him the trespass law on TV. The man has Andy seized by security, taken to a back room, handcuffed, and placed under arrest. At a hearing, he is offered the chance to have the charge dismissed in exchange for a guilty plea and a $50 fine. But Andy is not guilty and refuses to plead. He eventually gets the charge dismissed. (His limited legal experience has shown that he could clearly make a good living as a lawyer, if he merely sat for a bar exam and could attract clients other than himself.)

Your DVD Summer 2006 U2 Can Be Beating Blackjack

Andy’s most recent association with his card counting days has been more enjoyable (and more lucrative). In connection with ExpertInsight.com, Bloch produced and starred in an instructional DVD titled Beating Blackjack.

Andy does an excellent job in describing and demonstrating basic strategy, a simple but effective counting system, and how to vary your bets with the count. The real pleasure of the program is the last segment, about team play. Bloch describes the basics of MIT-style team play: spotter, counter, gorilla, camouflage, heat, etc. Then, he demonstrates it all in a dramatic segment that includes hot babes, hotel-room fights, a nasty pit-boss, a snarling eye-in-the-sky goon, Andy disguised as Bono, another actor portraying Bono, a chase scene, and Johnny Chan.

Bloch holds his own as an actor, and the segment is a little serious, a little campy, a little exciting, and a lot of fun. Buy it for the solid instruction; show it to friends for Andy Bloch in a cowboy hat and escaping an overheated pit boss in a stairwell. (The DVD recently won a Telly Award.)

The Immediate Future Where The Streets Have No Name

By the time the Vegas temperature drops below 100 , Andy will have once again fled Las Vegas. His fiancée Jennifer is completing her course work at Duke – she is triple-majoring in three kinds of engineering, and poker and Andy Bloch have proven to be only a temporary detour – and he is tagging along.

“What are you going to do in Raleigh-Durham?”

He answers with an enigmatic nod and shrug. It is a typical Andy Bloch answer - short, simple, and correct. He is going to do what he always does: look for the kind of action where he can use his brains to get an edge. And if he doesn't find it, the internet is always there and the airport isn't far away.