Arrayed on the table before him were the four eights. The house’s hand showed an upturned five. Whenever the racily clad cocktail waitress wandered in with a fresh whiskey and Diet Coke, he took it from the tray.

With him, it’s all about the math, and he knows it cold. Little interferes with his concentration. Johnson plays a long game, so the ups and downs of individual hands, even big swings like this one, don’t matter that much to him. He was now playing four hands, each consisting of a single eight-card, with $400,000 in the balance. Johnson says he was once dealt six consecutive aces at the Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut. Getting four cards of the same number in a row doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. His next two cards, surprisingly, were also both eights, so he split each again. If a player is dealt two of a kind, he can choose to “split” the hand, which means he can play each of the cards as a separate hand and ask for two more cards, in effect doubling his bet. Since the house’s hand has one card facedown, the player can’t know exactly what the hand is, which is what makes this a game.Īs Johnson remembers it, the $800,000 hand started with him betting $100,000 and being dealt two eights. Scanning the cards on the table before him, the player can either stand or keep taking cards in an effort to approach 21. The goal is to get to 21, or as close to it as possible without going over. A card’s suit doesn’t matter, only its numerical value-each face card is worth 10, and an ace can be either a one or an 11.

Two cards are placed faceup before the player, and two more cards, one down, one up, before the dealer.

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