Blackjack

Title means 2 things: the manga I’ve started reading called “Blackjack,” an immensely popular Japanese manga series about righting the wrongs of bad doctoring. I may be too absorbed in the whole Japanese manga thing and going through a phase right now, but I feel like the best creative minds are in manga; Japanese dramas aren’t very original or are based off of Japanese manga. Like many other manga, it’s easy to get suckered into reading this manga for a long time, mainly because the story line’s pretty enthralling, it’s tempting to keep turning pages because instead of long stretching text on the next page there are pictures and clever uses of illustration, and because there are chapters that space out each particular edition; not to mention the language benefit I get from reading Japanese. Manga could be like the “football” or sports watching of Japanese, not in the sense so much as it replaces sports watching (Japanese people do watch sumo, soccer, etc.) but in that it gets woven into the fabric of Japanese culture, it makes people sit down for 3 hours or more doing one thing at one time, and it unites Japanese people with post-game water cooler talk (instead of talking about the big game, Japanese manga lovers gather in lines to wait for the new edition of the manga and discuss the eagerly awaited no edition), and there are some manga better than others (One Piece and Slam Dunk being the New England Patriots and Green Bay Packers of continuous success).

There is nothing like going through a hot streak at the blackjack tables in Vegas; I can say this now after I’ve arrived back home, not at the blackjack tables where I immediately lost 3 consecutive hands after making this jinx-laden observation. Over the years, my gambling tastes have changed, from playing online poker and live poker in backroom tables during college to liking sports betting to trying other rowdier table games like craps and roulette as well as taking it international recently with pachinko. However, my love for blackjack has remained the same (those last couple sentences sound ominously similar to a drug addict’s confessions of obsession). Blackjack inherently is a game of math and statistics, trying to figure out how often a 16 busts when you hit, or if how often the dealer busts when showing a 6 or 5, and making informed (by mathematicians who’ve made the calculations) or at least calculated guesses as to what might happen and acting on them. It’s one of the few guys that doesn’t seem like complete random luck (even though it’s almost exclusively that), that there’s other factors involved like math, momentum, strategy, and collegiality (playing with friends).

This post, though, is more about the American and more traditional understanding of the term blackjack: 21.

Blackjack is not a game that needs to be enjoyed only at a casino; one of the few that can be enjoyed both alone and without much equipment (imagining gearing up a huge roulette wheel at home or setting up a craps table, all that is needed is a deck of cards. I’ve sat around sometimes on an airplane with nowhere to go or just trying to run a simulation of “how many times does the dealer get 20 when he’s showing a 10?” just to see what it feels like in real life, or just to satisfy my itch to become a blackjack dealer when I grow up (one of my lifelong dreams and one of the only jobs I feel like I’d be pretty good at, given my affinity for adding up small numbers at a quick pace and chatting up random strangers over a game of cards).

There’s also a lot of mystery and intrigue surrounding blackjack: from the mystique of counting cards and winning millions of dollars (harder than it sounds, btw, and still based somewhat on chance) chronicled in the movie and book “21” as well as a widely-known but rarely-read or memorized “Book” which instructs every move to be done in any given situation for blackjack players that leads to the best odds, blackjack has a certain allure to it as a transcendent game, something that defies logic and has its own legendary status, like saying “that time Bobby Fischer won a game of chess even when spotting the other side a queen.” It’s no spelling bee, that’s for sure.

Blackjack is also a social game; the players sit around a semi-circle and collectively conspire (legally) to beat the dealer, who’s surprisingly also on the player’s side, with the common enemy being an unseen evil, the dreaded deep pocket House who always gets an unfair advantage of getting to go 2^nd and only having to reveal one of the cards they have. The players by nature HAVE to communicate with the dealer, whether it’s just by hand signal (hit or stay) or in a more traditional sense, asking questions about the hand or just chatting up how life is going, even if the dealer is trying to just grease the wheels towards a tip. Still, it can quickly become an open forum on strategies about blackjack, the oddest things people have seen, what sports games to bet on that weekend, and any other amount of banter, which really facilitates the action on the tables, something that can reliably become dull without the proper amount of commentary and discussion. I’ve personally started various traditions within our group of friends regarding blackjack, terming the battle a “team battle” where players get “team wins” if more players win than lose or “complete losses,” asking dealers for “rare, medium, and well done” cards in place of small, medium, or faces when the situation calls for it, and calling out “thank you” in different languages when the dealer busts (so far I’m up to 7  languages). It’s really a fun ritual, and I’d wager that I’m one of the more fun people in terms of blackjack players in Vegas, something that one shouldn’t be too proud of but I maintain a fantasy of to justify my continued visits to blackjack tables up and down the strip. “There’s that Ramblin’ Robert again!” I picture a guy saying from a back “Eyes in the Sky”  camera room at the Bellagio (my favorite place to play blackjack, they always have a 10 dollar table with a solid dealer manning the helm).

Ah, the joys of blackjack. Quietly, it has become one of the biggest joys and eccentric tastes I’ve developed in my 20’s. (Next to Mapo Tofu, playing dodgeball, Japanese language and culture, and international trips).

 

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan