After Double Attack became a hit I decided to leave the casino business, move to Vegas and invent and market casino games full time. I may be the only independent game inventor that had 4 different games in Vegas strip properties at one time or another. Including The Wynn, The Venetian, Rio, Ballys and Paris. But as the years went on I started to realize that the casinos were no longer interested in dealing with independent game inventors and instead only allowed major players to place games in their casinos. In fact, especially for side bets, many deals were being made at the corporate level for unlimited game licensed with access to people that most independents don’t have. So a after a number of years my interest in gaming waned and I retired from game marketing and concentrated on investments and other businesses that interested me. I still had a number a casinos with my games and would sometimes pick up new clients through their referrals to sister properties, but I was no longer actively pursuing it. That is until a number of recent events and revelations in a short period of time occurred and renewed my interest in gaming.
ABOUT
I became interested in Blackjack a little before casinos in NJ opened and after a trip to Vegas in 1977. I was always gifted in mathematics and after reading the new BJ rules in NJ I realized that they had made a mistake in offering surrender before the dealer checked for a blackjack. Using the appendix tables in Thorp’s book “Beat the Dealer” I discovered that the player actually had a small edge off the top of the then 4 deck shoes and decided to head there on opening day. Below is a photo of me published on the front page of the long defunct Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin. This was taken about 10 minutes after they opened so I was almost certainly the first card counter to play in Atlantic City! I’m the kid sitting down with the tan jacket. Soon after I found it nearly impossible to get a seat at a low limit game without waiting hours. So my card counting career was cut short. I was just out of college and decided to go to dealing school and starting dealing in Oct of 1978. By the 1990’s I was working for the Taj Mahal where I was on the card count team for many years and also helped the VP with many things involving the mathematics of casino games. It was during this time that I became somewhat of an expert in BJ computer software and all types of skill play and the general statistics of casino games. In fact a few times other casinos asked my VP to borrow me to teach them how to use certain BJ software. When I saw new games starting to appear in casinos I decided, with the skills I developed over this time, I could invent and analyze the mathematics of a new BJ game. I had already invented a few non casino games years earlier and knew I could up with something better than the BJ variations that were out at that time. After quite a while I convinced my VP to try it out. So in 2004 Double Attack Blackjack went live at the Taj Mahal. Below is a news article and photo of me dealing the game I invented.