Math Major Counts Cards, Beats Vegas Dealers

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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What can you do with a math degree? Well, a couple options. You can follow in the footsteps of my dad and Stepmom, both of whom became aerospace engineers supporting NASA missions to space. Or you can enter the underappreciated profession of teaching and during long hours and administrative headaches in exchange for shaping future generations of geometry-equipped minds. Alternatively, you can really put your skills to work and head to the casino, where you attempt to take down the house by counting cards and winning at Blackjack.

Guess which option today's story chose? Well, here's a hint. He didn't work for NASA. He didn't spend much time in the classroom. From an investment of $2,000, he goes on to earn more than $600,000 in several years, then starts a team that earns millions in the next several years.

And then from there, naturally, he goes on to become a teacher after all. A teacher of Blackjack, that is. So we're calling this story, Math Major Counts Cards Beats Vegas Dealers. Stay tuned. It's coming right up.

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The right book can change your life, but nobody could have guessed the impact that one would have on the life of Colin Jones. After graduating from college with a math degree, Colin had no idea what he wanted to do. One of his friends loaned him a book about Blackjack card counting. And he thought to himself, "Hey, I'm a math guy. "I could do this." So with his wife's support, Colin took out $2,000 of their savings to put his skills to the test.

Over the next five years, Colin personally won over $600,000 from playing Blackjack at casinos. He then started a team with his buddy, which eventually went on to win more than 4 million over the course of eight years. They called themselves the church team because the members had been introduced to each other at church, and a documentary was even made about them. But all good things must come to an end. Even the church team taken down casinos.

That team had to constantly travel around the country because casinos would blacklist them simply for being too skilled. They were beating the house consistently with completely legal methods. Travel eventually took its toll and the team disbanded. Yet Colin realized that card counting was something that a lot of people might be interested in. There was a certain appeal to it.

Not only could you make money by sitting at a casino table, at least if you did it properly, and if certain conditions were met, but you also got the thrill of beating the system. That's why he started Blackjack Apprenticeship, an online resource that would teach others how to count cards. Colin and his friends invested a few thousand dollars of their winnings and hired a WordPress developer to build them a membership site. This would not only host an in-depth video course, but also include features like a forum and training drills. Additionally, they would offer two-day boot camps in Las Vegas for those who wanted hands-on training.

For that, he decided to get a couple of his professional card counter friends to help. And the $3,000 he charged for the event made sure that there was enough profit to go around. But Colin still needed traffic. He had a good business model and the necessary skills, but finding customers wasn't easy. Since he had no idea what he was doing, he approached a friend who owned a small SEO agency.

That friend told him he had a conversion problem and said, "I don't even know what you want me to do "when I show up on your website." This prompted Colin to start reading blogs to learn everything he needed to succeed. One of the strategies he adopted was called the skyscraper technique. The idea is simple. You stand out by being the very best at what you do. In this case, focus all your efforts into a single post and make sure that post is better than anything else online.

And so, Colin went about trying to create the world's best page on counting cards. He spent more than 10 hours writing a single post and included numerous high-resolution photographs to illustrate his idea. Six months later, he was ranked number one for the search term how to count cards. This was clearly a strategy that worked, so Colin repeated his process, eventually ranking well for other competitive keywords such as Blackjack strategy. This increased web traffic further and added to the bottom line as well.

Despite the well-planned approach, Colin admits that he may also have gotten a bit lucky. He managed to run the wave of interest in Blackjack following the release of the movie "21," which was inspired by the true story of how an MIT Blackjack team traveled around the world to beat casinos. The surge of interest helped one of Colin's YouTube videos be ranked number one for card counting. Eventually, the hype died down and he went back to improving his business at each stage of the funnel. Through small experiments, he found that certain tweaks could lead to a disproportionate increase in revenue.

Here's an example, he found that switching his lead magnet, a lead magnet is essentially the freebie that you offer to website visitors in exchange for subscribing to the site, and he switched that incentive from an e-book to a mini video course. It led to a 400% increase in subscribers simply because it was more interactive and just more interesting. Colin's advice is that running a business is a lot like counting cards at Blackjack. It's all about knowing how much value you're creating, figuring out how you can add to that, and making the right decisions based on your observations. He also suggests you always bet on yourself.

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Always bet on yourself. That is actually the title or the chapter title of a chapter in a book called "Born for This" that I published a few years ago. And I went back to look at that chapter to see what else I had said about it. And I had this whole section there about how to make a backup plan using this kind of if-then logic that computer programs use to process information. So that whole if-then method is basically deductive reasoning.

If this happens, then something else will happen. If you do this, then this, et cetera. And in programming, coders try to always create fail-safe options. So if something doesn't work as planned, then it goes to the next thing. If a subway line goes down, how can computers be rerouted with the least amount of hassle?

So this whole principle of logic, of if this, then that logic. You can think about it in terms of your own career. You can think about it in terms of a side hustle. Anything that might sound risky, like counting cards at Blackjack, for example, you can apply an if-then strategy. So let's take a workplace example.

If your goal is to get everybody excited about some presentation or new course or proposal of some kind, maybe your goal is, okay, I'm gonna pitch it at the bottom and hope it moves to the top. And so you're like, great, that's my strategy. If that works, great. If that strategy doesn't work, then I'm gonna go and ask somebody else or I'm gonna proceed with some different approach. And you can just do this an infinite number of times for whatever you're trying to accomplish.

Here's plan A, here's plan B, here's plan C, and so on. And this is something that can help you both practically in terms of reducing risk and also just psychologically and motivationally in terms of framing it in your mind. If you think something is really risky, ask yourself what can you do to create a backup plan and perhaps even a backup plan for the backup plan. Just something I thought of as I worked on this episode about counting cards, which of course was fun. So I hope you enjoyed it too.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you would like to learn about Blackjack card counting and all kinds of other stuff, our show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/805. I will include links to everything mentioned here, including of course, Blackjack apprenticeship. It is the end of the week, at least when I'm recording this. Got our weekly recap coming up tomorrow and a whole new set of stories next week.

Thanks so much. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the "Onward Project."