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Richard W. Munchkin | |
|---|---|
| Born | Des Plaines, Illinois, United States |
| Alma mater | Columbia College Chicago |
Richard W. Munchkin is an American writer, director, producer, radio host and professional gambler.
Between 1987 and 1999 Munchkin wrote, produced and/or directed in more than 20 movies and television shows primarily in the adventure genre including Guardian Angel (1994), with Cynthia Rothrock, Evil Obsession (1996), [1] Fists of Iron (1995), [2] Ring of Fire (1991), [3] L.A. Heat (1999). [4] and Edge of the World (2018). [5]
In 2018 Munchkin starred as himself in Inside the Edge: A Professional Blackjack Adventure, a documentary about elite blackjack players. [6]
Originally from Des Plaines, Illinois, Munchkin started playing chess and gin rummy at the age of three. His first exposure to the idea of playing for profit came when he was 12, when a family friend mentioned playing backgammon for money. Making about $100 or $200 a week, [7] Munchkin was able to put himself through Columbia College in Chicago where he received a BA in Theater Arts by playing backgammon and poker professionally.
After graduating from college in the late 1970s, he moved to Las Vegas and worked as a dealer and occasional pit boss at The Castaways Casino. While working in the casino he learned to count cards, and after a few years was making more money playing blackjack than dealing, so he quit to become a full-time professional blackjack player.
In 2004 Munchkin competed in Season 1 of the World Series of Blackjack, a series of televised blackjack tournaments hosted by the Game Show Network.
In 2009 Munchkin was inducted into Blackjack Hall of Fame.
On gambling, Munchkin has said in a 2017 interview "I believe that every single game in the casino can be beaten... ...I have played winning games at almost everything." [7]
In 2002 Munchkin authored Gambling Wizards. [8] In it he chronicles his interviews with some of the most famous gamblers in the world including Doyle Brunson Tommy Hyland and Chip Reese.
He is a contributor to Blackjack Magazine, All in Magazine and Blackjack Forum
Munchkin currently[ when? ] hosts a weekly radio show, Gambling with an Edge, [9] which can be heard on KLAV in Las Vegas.
Gambling Wizards: Conversations with the World's Greatest Gamblers Huntington Press, April 2003, ISBN 978-0-929712-05-5
Blackjack Forum Interviews with Tommy Hyland, Al Francesco, among others.
Blackjack is a casino banking game. It is the most widely played casino banking game in the world. It uses decks of 52 cards and descends from a global family of casino banking games known as "twenty-one". This family of card games also includes the European games vingt-et-un and pontoon, and the Russian game Ochko. Blackjack players do not compete against each other. The game is a comparing card game where each player competes against the dealer.
Card counting is a blackjack strategy used to determine whether the player or the dealer has an advantage on the next hand.
The MIT Blackjack Team was a group of students and ex-students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and other leading colleges who used card counting techniques and more sophisticated strategies to beat casinos at blackjack worldwide. The team and its successors operated successfully from 1979 through the beginning of the 21st century. Many other blackjack teams have been formed around the world with the goal of beating the casinos.
Edward Oakley Thorp is an American mathematics professor, author, hedge fund manager, and blackjack researcher. He pioneered the modern applications of probability theory, including the harnessing of very small correlations for reliable financial gain.
Michael Shackleford,, also known as "The Wizard of Odds", is an American mathematician and an actuary. He is best known for his professional analysis of the mathematics of the casino games. He is also an adjunct professor of actuarial science and mathematics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He became interested in the mathematics of gambling at a young age after reading John Scarne's Guide to Casino Gambling.
Arnold Snyder was a professional gambler and gambling author. He was elected by professional blackjack players as one of the seven original inductees into the Blackjack Hall of Fame which is hosted at Barona Casino for his record as a blackjack player and his innovations in professional gambling techniques. He was the first blackjack authority to publish the importance of deck penetration in card counting, in his 1980 book The Blackjack Formula. He was also the first blackjack researcher to argue that radical simplification of blackjack card counting systems did not substantially decrease earnings.
Thomas Hyland is an American professional blackjack player and a 2002 inductee to the Blackjack Hall of Fame. Hyland studied political science at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. Since 1979, he has been recognized for his role in forming and managing two blackjack teams. Hyland is also a card counting expert.
Michael Konik is an American author, television personality, jazz singer, improvisational comedian, blackjack player and poker player. Konik has a degree in Drama from New York University.
Anthony Curtis is a blackjack player, gambler, author and publisher. He publishes the Las Vegas Advisor, a newsletter founded in 1983 that covers discounts in Las Vegas, and Huntington Press, a publishing house that has released books about gambling, as well as true crime, including The Killing of Tupac Shakur, a Los Angeles Times bestseller by author Cathy Scott.
The Blackjack Hall of Fame honors the greatest blackjack experts, authors, and professional players in history. It was launched in 2002, and its physical premises are in San Diego, California.
Blackjack Forum was a trade journal for professional blackjack players, founded in 1981 and published by Arnold Snyder. Originally a 100-page quarterly journal, it expanded into an online forum which is frequented by professional gamblers, attorneys, industry people, mathematicians, and other aficionados. Along with Stanford Wong's Current Blackjack News, it was considered one of the major newsletters for the blackjack market.
Peter A. Griffin was a mathematician, author, and blackjack expert and is one of the original seven members of the Blackjack Hall of Fame. He authored The Theory of Blackjack, considered a classic analysis of the mathematics behind the game of casino 21.
Advantage gambling, or advantage play, refers to legal methods used to gain an advantage while gambling, in contrast to cheating. The term usually refers to house-banked casino games, but can also refer to games played against other players, such as poker. Someone who practises advantage gambling is often referred to as an advantage player, or AP. Unlike cheating, which is by definition illegal, advantage play exploits innate characteristics of a particular game to give the player an advantage relative to the house or other players. While not illegal, advantage play is often discouraged and some advantage players may be banned by certain casinos.
In card games, hole carding is the obtaining of knowledge of cards that are supposed to be hidden from view. The term is usually applied to blackjack but can apply to other games with hidden hole cards, like three card poker and Caribbean stud poker. So long as it does not involve the use of a device like a mirror, actions like touching the dealer's cards, or having another person read and signal the hole card, in most jurisdictions hole carding is a legal form of advantage gambling. In some games, like stud poker, casinos normally have rules against rubbernecking or having a confederate stand behind an opponent to signal hole cards.
Comps are complimentary items and services given out by casinos to encourage players to gamble. The amount and quality of comps that a player is given usually depends on what games they play, how much they bet, and how long they play.
Mike Goodman was an American professional gambler, a pit boss for a Las Vegas casino, and an author of books that gave advice on gambling and told stories of gamblers and their escapades. He is most known for his 1963 book How to Win: At Cards, Dice, Races, Roulette, which went through many printings and sold over a million copies.
Cathy "Cat" Hulbert was an American professional gambler. She was one of the world's first professional female card counters. Card Player magazine named her one of the top seven-card stud players in the world in 1996.
Nathaniel Tilton is an American former professional blackjack player, author of The Blackjack Life, and Certified Financial Planner.
Colin Jones is a Blackjack card-counting expert, teacher, and entrepreneur. He was a founder and manager of The Church Team, a successful Blackjack card-counting team based in Seattle, Washington, which won approximately 3.2 million dollars from casinos between 2006 and 2011. Jones is featured prominently in the 2011 award-winning documentary, Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians. He owns the website Blackjack Apprenticeship and holds regular Blackjack boot camps in Las Vegas.
Al Francesco is an American blackjack player and gambling strategist. Considered to be “The Godfather of Blackjack”, Francesco is recognized as the creator of the team play concept, the “big player” strategy, and the drop card method. Beginning in 1971, Francesco personally recruited and trained disciplined card counters to work together in teams to beat the casinos. Franceso's teams of blackjack players would station themselves at various blackjack tables to count the decks, and when the mathematical odds turned in their favor, the counters would signal a “Big Player” to come to the table and place large wagers until the edge was lost and once again favored the dealer. While most card counters would eventually be discovered by casinos through their betting patterns and banned from further play, Francesco's unique team concept helped his players evade detection and continue winning.
