BLACKJACK ON THE BOARDWALK: ATLANTIC CITY

Casino Deals Card Counters A Losing Hand In Blackjack
ATLANTIC CITY, N.7. (UPI)=The Casino Control Commission said Wednesday that it has allowed Resorts Interna-tional to ban professional card counters from its blackjack tables.

Resorts attorney Joel Sterns said 75 professional card counters from all over the world, including Yugoslavia, Czecho-slovakia and the Philippines, have been identified by the company's security agents. He said some of the card counters are being backed with $100,000 bankrolls, and have been walking away from the casino's blackjack tables with up to $40,000 a day.

Seventeen card counters were thrown out of the boardwalk ca-sino Tuesday night, Resorts officials said. Many of them showed up Wednesday afternoon at the commission's hearing on Resorts' application for a perma-nent gambling license in New Jersey.Among those expelled was Howard Grossman, billed as the greatest blackjack player in the world. He said he had been at the casino for 10 days and "was just having a good time."

Resorts, the first legal gambling casino on the East Coast, re-ceived the permission in the form of a legal opinion by commission Chairman Joseph Lordi.
Commissioner Albert Merck said he has "very serious doubts about a casino blacklisting and identifying undesirables."

He said the real problem is that with professional gamblers, blackjack is considered a game of skill, not a game of chance.

This article appeared February 1, 1979, months after my visit. It is a most incredible piece of propaganda. The casino interprets the rules both ways, as Commissioner Merck points out. Resorts claimed that Blackjack is a game of skill.

If so, retorts Merck, it shouldn't qualify in a casino as a game of chance. But Resorts wanted it in the casino, so they claimed it as a game of chance as long as they could eject anyone who is skilled at playing it. Unbe-lievable!

The most disturbing point of the article is the way Resorts at-torney Joel Sterns painted Blackjack card counters as ". . . walk-ing away from the casino's blackjack tables with up to $40,000 per day." And the idea that counters were coming from all over the world to play at Atlantic City was questionable. Here is why those two statements make little sense.

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