Repeat Until Rich: A Professional Card Counter's Chronicle of the Blackjack Wars [Hardcover]

Josh Axelrad (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 18, 2010

A deliciously wry, edge-of-the-seat memoir of making a fortune with card counters across a wide swath of blackjack in America.

At twenty-four, Josh Axelrad held down a respectable and ominously dull job on Wall Street. Adventure was a tuna fish sandwich instead of the usual turkey for lunch. Then one night, a stranger at a cocktail party persuaded him to leave the nine-to-five behind and pursue an unlikely dream: the jackpot. The stranger was a blackjack card counter, and he sold Axelrad on the vision of Vegas with all its intrigue, adventure- and cash.

Repeat Until Rich is Axelrad's taut, atmospheric, and darkly hilarious account of ditching the mundane and entering the alternative universe of professional blackjack. Axelrad has one thing in common with his team: Jon Roth, the leader and a former options trader; Neal Matcha, a recovering lawyer; Aldous Kaufman, a retired math Ph.D. candidate. They all thrived in the straight world, found success boring, and vowed to make life more exotic. Axelrad adopts Roth's philosophy-"repeat until rich"-and from his strategy and skill spring hasty retreats across casino floors, high-speed car chases, arrests on dubious grounds, and the massive cash paydays that make it all worthwhile.

Along the way, he unveils the tactics and debunks the myths of professional card counters. In team play, he's either the "big player," who bets the big money, or the "controller," who subtly coordinates the team's betting while wagering only the minimum himself. Counting is not illegal, and it's less intellectually daunting than its MIT-level mystique suggests. With clarity and wit, Repeat Until Rich proves the old gambler's maxim that "if you can tip a waiter, you can count cards." But it also proves how zealous, even forceful, casino bosses can be in "backing off" counters-seeing past their undercover methods and banning them from the tables. Josh soon grows to love all this trouble, and discovers, more than the money, what he needs most of all is the rush.

Filled with actual bad guys, chase scenes, and high stakes, Repeat Until Rich offers an intoxicating, unprecedented view of the dangerous allure of living off the cards and one's wits.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Axelrad was a Columbia graduate with a boring Wall Street job until he met a guy who knew a guy and became a professional card counter, playing blackjack in casinos across the country as part of a well-oiled team made up of counters, spotters, “gorillas” (players who don’t count cards), and BPs (players who also count). No math whiz, Axelrad took awhile to learn how to keep the running count in his head, but he got there eventually and, with his elevation to BP, became one of the team’s stars. His account of winning more than $700,000 for the team in about four years is fascinating, both for the insider details (especially the back and forth between counters and the casinos, who do their best to ban pros from the tables) and for the repartee between teammates (imagine a real-life Elmore Leonard caper novel). The tale turns more serious, however, when the blackjack run ends following 9/11 (too hard to carry large amounts of cash on planes), and Axelrad turns to online poker and becomes dangerously addicted. A fine portrait of the highs and lows of the gambling life. --Bill Ott

About the Author

Josh Axelrad played blackjack professionally for five years and poker unprofessionally for one. A graduate of Columbia College, he languished briefly in investment banking before he turned to cards. His personal win as a card counter, at $700,000, has left him eighty-sixed from the finest casinos in Vegas and around the United States. His subsequent losses at poker (exceeding $50,000) have cost him credit privileges at the Internet's most reputable poker rooms. A commentator on the casino industry for National Public Radio's Marketplace program, Axelrad also performs at Stories at the Moth in New York and has been featured on the award-winning Moth Podcast.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The (March 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594202478
• ISBN-13: 978-1594202476
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #368,930 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #44 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Puzzles & Games > Blackjack

More About the Author

Josh Axelrad is a former professional blackjack player and author of the memoir REPEAT UNTIL RICH, published by Penguin Press in 2010. He was born in Southern California. His book about gambling was lauded by The New York Times and pwned by some person on Amazon. During his blackjack career he was barred from over 100 casinos in 15 states and reminded of the fact via Twitter. He no longer gambles. His writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Guardian Online, The Nervous Breakdown and elsewhere. He's appeared on TV but it was Bloomberg. He's been featured on The Moth Radio Hour, The Moth Podcast and The Best of The Moth. He's been heard on NPR and on BBC Radio and numerous regional outfits. He's patrilineally Jewish, a non-smoker, and heterosexual.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review from a teammate, March 23, 2010

By 

Randy Willberg - See all my reviews

This review is from: Repeat Until Rich: A Professional Card Counter's Chronicle of the Blackjack Wars (Hardcover)

I have known the author, Josh Axelrad, for years. We have played blackjack together many, many times--dozens for sure, and possibly hundreds of hours. In fact I took a very young Josh on his first real casino sessions in which we did lose a bunch of money. (These sessions were so short, and so insignificant that Josh did not write about them in the book, although he did write about the early trip with that other team. The sessions I am referring to were part of that trip.) That's not to say, of course that we were not playing with an edge. Any professional gambler understands that in the short-term you lose almost as often as you win. It's the long-term that we're concerned with, and I can assure anyone reading this review that Josh's team and Josh himself most certainly were big winners overall.

I read an early draft of this book, and am still awaiting the arrival of the published version. Unlike some of the other recent books written about well-known teams, this book does not bend or exaggerate the truth. There isn't a need to, as what really happened is interesting and exciting enough. I had a hard time putting down the draft, and I lived much of what Josh writes about. In addition to being a truthful and accurate portrayal of life inside a professional blackjack team, the book is also extremely well-written. I consider Josh a friend, but had no idea he could write so well. I can say without reservation that you will enjoy this book. I can also say that I expect this will be the first of many books that Josh Axelrad writes. It's that good.

Well-done, Josh!

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't put it down, March 19, 2010

By 

Rob Pen (Arvada, CO, US) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Repeat Until Rich: A Professional Card Counter's Chronicle of the Blackjack Wars (Hardcover)

This book was a quick read...engaging, humorous at times and suspenseful. The events within his journey were shocking at times. A real behind the scenes perspective of the inner circle of card counters. I never realized that card counting was actually legal. And, how these teams actually went about mobilizing against the "system" was not only methodical, but became an art.

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Card Counting and More..., March 22, 2010

By 

Steven D. Germain (Hastings-on-Hudson, New York USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Repeat Until Rich: A Professional Card Counter's Chronicle of the Blackjack Wars (Hardcover)

Repeat Until Rich is a chronicle of professional black jack card counting but it is also (and importantly) much more than that. It is also a story of redemption, a coming of age story and a story of Recovery and the things about one's self that we have to admit in order to live up to (in the case of author, Josh Axelrad) one's prodigious talents. To realize that the unconscious exercise of talent can be a type of seduction and escape.

Axelrad could have been writing about himself when he writes of his youthful impressions of his step-Uncle, Eric, "He claims to have spent ten years, until he was thirty, utterly adrift, selling jewelry at fairs as a wandering hippie, but then he went to law school. He told the story in a way that made law school sound as if it took him four weeks. Then suddenly he was rich...He went from hippie to kazilionaire. He made it seem effortless, random." But as young Axelrad wonders, ..."there must have been more to him than that."

Like his Uncle Eric, Axelrad self presents in a way that can leave you scratching your head at his life of card counting but in this very moving memoir courageously shows us that there is much more to him than that.

This is the story of a young man who became a very good writer, and in the process, (you can imagine him cringing at the sound of this), grew up.