SPEAKER_1: Yes, very good, you're the good guys.
SPEAKER_1: Exactly, there you go.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_1: This is StarTalk Sports Edition.
SPEAKER_1: Today, we're going to talk about counting cards.
SPEAKER_1: Stuff that the casinos hate about you if you have the talent to pull that off.
SPEAKER_1: I got with me, as always, my co-host Chuck Nice, check it, baby.
SPEAKER_2: Hey, what's happening?
SPEAKER_1: All right, professional stand-up comedian and actor and game show host.
SPEAKER_1: Brain Games on National Geographic, very cool.
SPEAKER_2: Yes, and card counter.
SPEAKER_1: And the one person who is actual professional athletic street cred among us, Gary O'Reilly.
SPEAKER_1: Gary, always good to have you here, man.
SPEAKER_3: Pleasure's mine, thank you, Neil.
SPEAKER_1: Thanks for making us legit.
SPEAKER_1: So, Gary, what, I mean, card counting, we've all heard about it, we've seen movies about it, we wish we had that ability, and again, we don't know if you can be trained for it, and so you decided to create a whole show on it.
SPEAKER_1: So, what do you have in store for us today?
SPEAKER_3: A very, hopefully, a story that will not just be fascinated, but so interesting to a number of people.
SPEAKER_3: We are going to meet someone with an interesting and amazing life story.
SPEAKER_3: It basically starts as a preteen refugee who became a professional blackjack player on the infamous MIT Blackjack team.
SPEAKER_3: So, Neil, please meet our guest.
SPEAKER_1: Semyon, welcome to StarTalk.
SPEAKER_4: Thank you, thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_1: So, there's been a film made and books based on you and documentaries about your life.
SPEAKER_1: How do you go from being a computer science, early, early computer science geek to card to cards or blackjacks?
SPEAKER_1: Like, what is the, how do you go from A to B in that conversation?
SPEAKER_4: Oh, well, one day in 1991, I was walking down an infinite corridor at MIT and I saw a poster on the wall.
SPEAKER_4: And the poster said, make $10,000 over the summer.
SPEAKER_4: Play blackjack in the Vegas casinos.
SPEAKER_4: And, you know, that sounded pretty good.
SPEAKER_1: Well, just to be clear, MIT, you could probably get away with that.
SPEAKER_1: But there could be some places where that same sign would say, this summer, lose $10,000 in the casino.
SPEAKER_2: Right.
SPEAKER_2: But MIT is probably one of the few places where the poster would be believed.
SPEAKER_1: A believable poster.
SPEAKER_4: That's right.
SPEAKER_4: And you know, the truth is, I'm not sure I would have believed it, except I happened to play a lot of Pac-Man when I was a kid in Texas, and, you know, the video game.
SPEAKER_4: And so one day I went to the library and I needed to make my quarter, I lost a very long time, I couldn't get a second quarter.
SPEAKER_4: You know, it was just one quarter that we had.
SPEAKER_4: And so I went to the library and I found, I looked up books on Pac-Man and it was only one book by this guy named Ken Houston.
SPEAKER_4: I read the book and I was able to play Pac-Man a long, long time until I didn't feel like playing it anymore.
SPEAKER_4: But then I went back and noticed that he had a bunch of other books and all these other books were about Blackjack.
SPEAKER_4: So he was one of these guys that was able to beat, I guess, the casinos in Atlantic City when they first opened up about a decade before I played.
SPEAKER_1: Wait, so all this started because you tried to milk a quarter for as much Pac-Man time as you could get from it.
SPEAKER_2: That's right.
SPEAKER_2: See, but this is so very important right now for all of you parents out there to take note, okay?
SPEAKER_2: Because we all think that video games are deleterious to our children's mental health and to their academics and we say, oh, you're going to ruin yourself by playing these video games.
SPEAKER_2: But it's really not about the video games, it's about the child, the kid.
SPEAKER_2: So if your kid ever says, I'm going to the library to get some books on video games, they're going to be okay.
SPEAKER_2: That kid's going to be all right.
SPEAKER_3: As long as they're telling the truth, because if they're not, they're going somewhere else.
SPEAKER_3: Forget about it.
SPEAKER_3: So Semyon, okay, so you go from Pac-Man to Blackjack.
SPEAKER_3: It's a pretty big leap.
SPEAKER_3: So you must have had some kind of superpower somewhere up your sleeve.
SPEAKER_3: So what is it?
SPEAKER_3: Is it total recall, concentration, or do you just have to be good with numbers?
SPEAKER_3: What's the deal there for a Blackjack player?
SPEAKER_5: None of the above.
SPEAKER_5: I mean, the superpower, I think, was twofold.
SPEAKER_4: Well, one was, I guess, that I had this notion that I might go to the library and read something.
SPEAKER_4: That's already, right?
SPEAKER_4: Like, that's the privilege background, right?
SPEAKER_4: The examples set in the youth, I think that I had, right?
SPEAKER_4: I had educated parents.
SPEAKER_4: The other superpower, I think, maybe was just not being able to get that second quarter, like having the motivation to read the book and then later having the motivation.
SPEAKER_4: I worked my ass off.
SPEAKER_4: When I saw it, when I met the MIT Black Tech team, having read the books about it, I felt like it was a very lucky opportunity that I actually get to meet these people.
SPEAKER_4: And I wanted to make money.
SPEAKER_4: I wanted to make a lot more than $10,000.
SPEAKER_4: And I needed to.
SPEAKER_4: It was a real goal for me at the time.
SPEAKER_4: It's not necessarily the best goal for young men to have, but for me at the time, that was the goal.
SPEAKER_4: We were poor, right?
SPEAKER_4: Like we lived in the projects, it sucked.
SPEAKER_4: And that was the main differentiator, just the willingness to work my ass off and do this stuff over and over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_4: There was no rocket science, there was no math genius.
SPEAKER_4: I mean, coming up with those systems probably required a lot of knowledge and intelligence, but I actually didn't come up with them.
SPEAKER_4: I was taught how to do it.
SPEAKER_4: And then I ended up running my own group and teaching a bunch of other people how to do it.
SPEAKER_4: But it was all about like diligence, hard work, record keeping for sure.
SPEAKER_4: And just repeating things over and over and over again until they got it right.
SPEAKER_2: So there's another thing for you parents out there to understand, OK, is if you are doing OK, maybe you are middle class or middle middle class, upper middle class.
SPEAKER_2: OK, let your children be poor.
SPEAKER_2: Don't give your children any money that will motivate them.
SPEAKER_2: You know, my father used to say all the time, I'd be like, Dad, can I get some sneakers?
SPEAKER_2: He'd be like, go ahead.
SPEAKER_2: I'd be like, OK, can I have the money?
SPEAKER_2: It'd be like, you want sneakers, you go get them.
SPEAKER_2: And then I would say, and I would say, but dad, we have money.
SPEAKER_2: And then he would say, no, son, I have money.
SPEAKER_1: I earn the money.
SPEAKER_2: You are broke.
SPEAKER_2: You are poor.
SPEAKER_2: You don't have crap.
SPEAKER_2: So there you go.
SPEAKER_1: And that's how Chuck started robbing banks.
SPEAKER_4: It's really hard to pull off.
SPEAKER_4: I mean, I have six kids, right?
SPEAKER_4: And I mean, I have money now, right?
SPEAKER_5: And so it's easier said than done.
SPEAKER_4: It sounds like you did a pretty good job.
SPEAKER_4: I do my best, but it's not easy, right?
SPEAKER_5: It's not easy.
SPEAKER_2: No, it's not.
SPEAKER_3: All right, let's jump from being really incentivized to make this thing successful.
SPEAKER_3: You then have to, you must have to acquire a certain skill set.
SPEAKER_3: Are we into game series here?
SPEAKER_3: Do you start to deploy those sort of things?
SPEAKER_3: Or is it something different again?
SPEAKER_1: Or probabilities as well, as an entire brand out there.
SPEAKER_4: There's none of those things, you know?
SPEAKER_1: It had to be something.
SPEAKER_3: You were making money.
SPEAKER_2: I don't know, I just did it.
SPEAKER_4: Like 20 years ago, these books and stories about what we did came out and I did a lot of interviews.
SPEAKER_4: And people always wanted to hear about the mass teaching and stuff and I kind of played along.
SPEAKER_4: But at this point, I'll tell you what it really was, okay?
SPEAKER_5: We could have trained anybody to do it.
SPEAKER_4: It was the same as like the math skills required were second grade level, like literally counting, like three, four, five, five, four, three, two, just keeping track of like one number and adding one, subtracting one and just not getting distracted.
SPEAKER_4: Now that's the level of skills that were required.
SPEAKER_4: The rest of it was just memorizing a system that other people already came up with.
SPEAKER_4: It was pretty rudimentary.
SPEAKER_4: It required discipline.
SPEAKER_4: It required not drinking while you're doing it, stuff like that.
SPEAKER_4: It didn't require any great theoretical, mathematical thinking that lives in this.
SPEAKER_2: So, you know, it's...
SPEAKER_3: Go on, Chuck.
SPEAKER_2: I was just gonna say, it's...
SPEAKER_2: So I'm really attached to this story because my father was a gambler and I don't mean like he gambled.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, he was a gambler and...
SPEAKER_1: Chuck, that sounds like a blues song ready to be written.
SPEAKER_1: My father was a gambling man.
SPEAKER_5: You went to hold him and went to walk away.
SPEAKER_5: Yeah.
SPEAKER_4: Da-da-da-da-da.
SPEAKER_2: My daddy was a gambler.
SPEAKER_1: Da-da-da-da-da.
SPEAKER_2: Didn't always win.
SPEAKER_2: Da-da-da-da-da.
SPEAKER_3: We got a number one on our hands.
SPEAKER_2: But the funny thing is that he did count cards and I don't know the system that he used, but it was, and maybe Semyon could tell me what it is, but it basically was, there's a count.
SPEAKER_2: It's plus one, zero or minus one.
SPEAKER_2: That's all he did.
SPEAKER_2: And you bet according to where the count is, where the number of decks and the cards that are in the deck.
SPEAKER_2: And you just have to have the discipline to bet wisely during the entire shoe and to know when to bet when the count is up, down or zero.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, I never did it.
SPEAKER_2: So that's what I understood him to be doing.
SPEAKER_2: But there were times I would see him make a crap ton of money.
SPEAKER_2: And then there were times that led to him being divorced from my mother.
SPEAKER_1: And his dog left him.
SPEAKER_4: I'm not sure those two are related at all that, you know.
SPEAKER_5: I think losing money can lead to getting divorced, but making a whole bunch of money could also lead to getting divorced.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, very good point.
SPEAKER_2: You're absolutely right.
SPEAKER_2: You're right about that.
SPEAKER_1: OK, so if you didn't do anything, we're asking you, what did you do?
SPEAKER_4: That's what I did.
SPEAKER_4: I did the same thing if I did it.
SPEAKER_4: I think the difference was that we had a group of people who were very diligent about doing it.
SPEAKER_4: I think people kind of learn sort of things.
SPEAKER_4: They can kind of do it, right?
SPEAKER_4: We test the people all the time.
SPEAKER_4: We checked their skills not only once, but before each trip.
SPEAKER_4: You have a very small advantage, right?
SPEAKER_4: And it takes a long time to get to the long term.
SPEAKER_4: And in any short period of time, you could win or lose, it's kind of random, right?
SPEAKER_4: You have like this tiny little 1% edge or half a percentage.
SPEAKER_4: And after months or even years of playing, you're going to know you're going to be ahead.
SPEAKER_4: And in the real world, people get distracted, people get tired, right?
SPEAKER_4: People get emotional about how they win or lose.
SPEAKER_4: And they deviate from the system without even realizing it.
SPEAKER_4: So that's, I think, what distinguished us as real professionals from the many thousands of other people who kind of knew how to count cards.
SPEAKER_2: And it's funny because the casino does that, but they don't need the discipline because the house rules don't change no matter what.
SPEAKER_2: But the house rules are set up so that this slight percentage of advantage that they have means that over the long term, they're always going to win over the long term as a casino.
SPEAKER_1: Wait, just let me be clear.
SPEAKER_1: What he said was, Chuck, that there are fluctuations from hand to hand, even from day to day that can go up or down.
SPEAKER_1: But if you stay diligent with the system, the small percent that you gain against the average will accumulate and then you can basically bank those winnings reliably.
SPEAKER_2: And that's the deal.
SPEAKER_2: And they call that having long money.
SPEAKER_2: You gotta have long money.
SPEAKER_1: Long money, okay.
SPEAKER_3: So Semyon, in the intro, I talked about high-low system and card steering.
SPEAKER_3: So break down card steering for me because I think we've realized now that if you're going to play backjack, you have got to have ninja-like concentration and as they say, always watching.
SPEAKER_3: So can you just, even if it's just for me and the rest of our audience that don't know, card steering, please unlock that for us.
SPEAKER_1: Gary, we'll get to that question after the break.
SPEAKER_1: I know, sorry.
SPEAKER_1: See what I did there?
SPEAKER_3: Keep them hanging.
SPEAKER_1: So we'll be right back with our special guest, card counter extraordinaire, Semyon Dukach on StarTalk for tradition.
SPEAKER_1: We're back with Semyon Dukach.
SPEAKER_1: Neil deGrasse Tyson here, StarTalk Sports Edition.
SPEAKER_1: Semyon Dukach is an MIT computer scientist, entrepreneur, and who made his mark counting cards in Blackjack.
SPEAKER_1: And we're trying to get to the bottom of this, where how did it happen, where it came from, what special talents it was.
SPEAKER_1: And by the way, it's not illegal to count cards, it's just casinos don't like it when you do that, because it tips things in your favor instead of their favor.
SPEAKER_2: Which brings us to our first question, how did you get out of Vegas with both of your knees?
SPEAKER_3: Still in your legs.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so Semyon, I need you to define for us certain terms.
SPEAKER_1: We went into the break with Gary asking you about, what was it Gary?
SPEAKER_3: So there's a couple of techniques, and Semyon I'm sure will be able to, as I said, unlock those for us.
SPEAKER_3: One in particular, which sounds very interesting, card steering.
SPEAKER_1: Card steering.
SPEAKER_1: It's not only that, I wanna know about quantified thinking.
SPEAKER_1: There's all these terms.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, we're gonna get there.
SPEAKER_1: This is card steering.
SPEAKER_1: So Semyon, what do you got for us there?
SPEAKER_4: So we have a number of, let's say, more advanced, more complicated techniques that at least in theory could generate a bigger advantage than the 1% or so advantage you can get with card counting.
SPEAKER_4: And so card steering, there was a few variations of it.
SPEAKER_4: Sometimes it involved tracking sequences of cards through the shuffle, roughly being able to kind of see that there might be four or five cards in between each in a sequence after shuffling and kind of predict when the last one is gonna come.
SPEAKER_4: It wasn't always possible, right?
SPEAKER_4: Sometimes we could see the last card on a shoe after all shuffling is done.
SPEAKER_4: And then when you cut the cards, we would learn to cut a precise number of cards, like exactly 52 cards, let's say.
SPEAKER_4: Exactly from the back of the shoe, and then we would know that the back card would come out number 52, right?
SPEAKER_4: That's exactly how many you cut, which you could get good at by just practicing for hours and day, cutting exactly 52 cards.
SPEAKER_1: Semyon, don't people get shot for this?
SPEAKER_4: Well, maybe.
SPEAKER_1: I've seen enough movies where a Smith and Wesson beats four aces, okay?
SPEAKER_5: Yeah, a Smith and Wesson beats four aces, but not so much in the corporate public company around Vegas of the 90s.
SPEAKER_4: In Vegas of the 60s and 70s, I wouldn't have worked very well.
SPEAKER_4: And we did play a lot internationally and there were some places where we probably shouldn't have played.
SPEAKER_5: But...
SPEAKER_3: You think?
SPEAKER_5: The stuff we did wasn't illegal.
SPEAKER_4: We didn't violate any rules of the game, we didn't cheat.
SPEAKER_4: Which was important because we did get kicked out all the time, caught all the time.
SPEAKER_4: So, had we done anything illegal, it would have prosecuted us, certainly.
SPEAKER_4: So we were very careful not to break the law.
SPEAKER_3: You were running computer simulations.
SPEAKER_3: You were replicating live casino environments, so as your Blackjack players would be comfortable and not dazzled by a casino environment.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, this basically is almost...
SPEAKER_3: When you say you analyzed results, you looked at things.
SPEAKER_3: And you weren't just looking at successes, you were looking at failures.
SPEAKER_3: Now, then if you apply quantified thinking, how do you approach this group of data and then bring it forward successfully for you?
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, that's a really good question.
SPEAKER_4: I'll give you an example because I think that's some of the work that actually distinguished us from some of the other groups that weren't as successful, right?
SPEAKER_4: It wasn't those card steering and advanced techniques because those ended up not working most of the time, honestly.
SPEAKER_4: They only worked in certain situations.
SPEAKER_4: At the end of the day, we made the money doing the well-known card counting techniques that have already been written about, but we did it more diligently.
SPEAKER_4: And I think running simulations to predict how much you should have won in order to kind of track what really happened.
SPEAKER_4: And then running these examinations basically where in our own sort of classroom environment, we would try to distract people, right?
SPEAKER_4: We would have one person test another person, but someone else would be distracting them, like trying to talk to them, trying to offer them drinks or whatever happens in the real casino.
SPEAKER_4: And we would track how many mistakes people would make.
SPEAKER_4: People would always invariably make some mistakes in the counting.
SPEAKER_4: They just weren't perfect.
SPEAKER_4: They couldn't see every single card, right?
SPEAKER_4: And so we would get a better understanding model of the real life performance of the card counter in the casino, rather than the theoretical performance that the books say you're going to have.
SPEAKER_4: And so based on that, we would know the right amount to bet and the right way to play.
SPEAKER_4: And that made all the difference, right?
SPEAKER_4: Using that data and being realistic about our capabilities.
SPEAKER_1: But from one decade to another, computers gain speed and precision and accuracy and algorithms get better.
SPEAKER_1: So did any of this improve over the decades, from the 90s to today, for example?
SPEAKER_4: Probably to some extent, but I would say, you know, we've never used computers in the casino or anything like that, that probably would be cheating.
SPEAKER_4: We didn't work on any of those kinds of things.
SPEAKER_4: We merely used them to better analyze and better understand how we should be playing.
SPEAKER_4: And I think, yeah, I'm sure there were improvements, but for the most part, I think the technology was sufficient at the time to be able to improve discipline, right, and to be able to model how we will perform realistically in a casino environment and design the tests that we have to apply to each other to make sure that we were good enough.
SPEAKER_4: Because you really had to be very precise.
SPEAKER_4: You couldn't make very many errors, right?
SPEAKER_3: Semyon, if we look at sport, their quantified thinking, their data analytics, they analyze different things now, different metrics than the ones they did 10, 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_3: What would you be looking at now that you weren't looking at back then in the 90s that would change the game even more?
SPEAKER_3: Or have you just washed it away and not considered it?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I mean, the one thing that's changed dramatically in many casinos, and I'm not particularly sure if it's because of, you know, people like Semyon, but is the auto shuffler combined with eight decks, and the auto shuffler shuffles after like so many hands, not even it doesn't go an entire shoe.
SPEAKER_2: It's like you pick it up, you put it back in, it's shuffled like after three hands.
SPEAKER_2: Or sometimes you'll see that they do it, it looks random, like is it, I'm not even sure if the dealer is just instructed to do it, or if they're just like, just do it, just do it, you know, but that's got to have changed things tremendously for card counters.
SPEAKER_1: Well, that's right.
SPEAKER_1: Because Semyon, you know, when you're just playing at home, it's one deck of cards.
SPEAKER_1: And so you can get a sense whether the remaining cards to be dealt are royal heavy or, you know, low card heavy, you get a sense of that, but with eight decks, how can you possibly know that?
SPEAKER_4: You get a sense of it in the same way, you know, it's just that with one deck of cards, let's say three extra little cards came out, and you know there are three extra big cards left in the deck, okay?
SPEAKER_4: So there's eight decks, you're going to want to see a lot more, you're going to want to see like 20 or 25 little extra cards come out, which will still happen the same fraction of the time, right?
SPEAKER_4: Like you just have to play long enough until that happens, and then you bet a lot.
SPEAKER_4: So, it's no different, the numbers are just a little larger.
SPEAKER_1: But you do have to reset every time they reset your brain computer every time they shuffle.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, that's right.
SPEAKER_4: So, to answer your other question, yes, if they start shuffling all the time, you can't, these techniques don't work.
SPEAKER_4: And, but however, this isn't like a modern sherman, the casinos knew about card counting since the 60s.
SPEAKER_4: They occasionally make the rules, and there's a bunch of other rule variations besides the shuffling that they could do to make card counting not work very well.
SPEAKER_4: But the thing is, millions of people know about card counting.
SPEAKER_4: It's marketing for the game, like Blackjack makes more money than any other card game in the casino, really anything else besides slot machines, precisely because people know it could be beat.
SPEAKER_4: And so I think there's competition between casinos.
SPEAKER_4: Players who think they're doing well card counting, they want the best possible rules, they don't want the house to shuffle all the time, and 99% of them lose money.
SPEAKER_4: And so the casinos eventually gravitate back to making the game be beatable at the edge, as long as it's only beatable by a small number of people, it kind of works for them.
SPEAKER_4: And as long as those rare people who could actually beat the game don't start betting table maximum, which is what we did, that is the problem.
SPEAKER_2: But that's brilliant.
SPEAKER_2: And what you're saying is that they use their vulnerability as a marketing tool.
SPEAKER_2: As bait.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: It's like, yeah, you know, we're not going to shuffle it all the time.
SPEAKER_2: Come on in and play.
SPEAKER_2: You know, you got a better chance here.
SPEAKER_2: Come on and sit down and play, because they're still going to win.
SPEAKER_4: That's exactly it.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, Semyon, the MIT Blackjack Club was just famous, infamous, choose it whichever way you wish, but you're a professional blackjack player.
SPEAKER_3: You are, you've left 10 grand during the summer way behind in the rear view mirror.
SPEAKER_3: Why then, if you're doing this successfully, did you decide to walk away?
SPEAKER_4: That's a good question too.
SPEAKER_4: So it wasn't because I was kicked out of all the casinos and the jib was off, because I was actually kicked out of all the casinos very quickly and continue doing it anyway.
SPEAKER_1: Or because you're missing your kneecaps, as Chuck had suggested earlier.
SPEAKER_4: There were a few threats here and there, but really, they're big public corporations, and they generally just don't do that anymore.
SPEAKER_4: It's not really worth it for them, we don't really win that much.
SPEAKER_4: I got bored of it.
SPEAKER_4: I just started feeling like it was kind of pointless.
SPEAKER_4: It sounds like we really made that much money.
SPEAKER_4: It was a few million dollars.
SPEAKER_4: It seemed like a lot.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, you're not.
SPEAKER_4: But by the time we were doing it, it was a few million bucks.
SPEAKER_3: This is the board line.
SPEAKER_3: That's a few million dollars in the early 90s.
SPEAKER_4: You don't understand what else happened.
SPEAKER_3: Back to that into today.
SPEAKER_4: You have to figure out what else happened in that time period.
SPEAKER_4: And where we came from.
SPEAKER_4: So, yeah, we were the MIT Blackjack team, right?
SPEAKER_4: I was studying computer science several levels.
SPEAKER_4: In my own particular specific example, I was in the process of completing a PhD dissertation on the very first way to transfer money over the Internet.
SPEAKER_4: Like that's the thing.
SPEAKER_4: I published it.
SPEAKER_4: You know, you could look it up.
SPEAKER_4: Like the people who then started PayPal, for example, right?
SPEAKER_4: They cited my paper as an earlier work that wasn't very good, perhaps, but it was first.
SPEAKER_4: That's what I dropped.
SPEAKER_1: Just to be clear, wasn't that Elon Musk?
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, Elon, Elon and the TNT and all those guys, you know, they do better, their technology work better.
SPEAKER_4: But it's because I quit, right, to play Blackjack.
SPEAKER_4: So, no, in retrospect, I mean, the $1 million I personally made and the $5 million the whole group made were not at all interesting or significant.
SPEAKER_4: And we had multiple people come out of the group who became billionaires in technology.
SPEAKER_4: So we just wasted a bunch of time, financially speaking.
SPEAKER_4: But then there was a whole other side to it, okay?
SPEAKER_4: We didn't generate any value.
SPEAKER_5: We had no customers.
SPEAKER_4: Nobody ever said thank you, right?
SPEAKER_5: We just moved the money from one place to another.
SPEAKER_4: And we felt really smart because we thought we were smarter than the people who worked for the casinos.
SPEAKER_4: And, you know, okay, so we were smarter than these people, but, you know, so what?
SPEAKER_4: That's not really something to be particularly proud of, right?
SPEAKER_2: It's interesting.
SPEAKER_2: What you're really talking about here is...
SPEAKER_1: He grew a conscience.
SPEAKER_2: Well, more than that, it's the value of purpose in what we do.
SPEAKER_2: The value of purpose in your endeavors probably outweighs any financial gain that you might glean from what it is that you do.
SPEAKER_1: The life counselor.
SPEAKER_2: I love it.
SPEAKER_4: The world is kind of funny that way, right?
SPEAKER_4: Because if you actually follow the sense of purpose and you succeed and excel at that, right, and deliver a lot of value to people who you want to help and get their grant in exchange, right, you're going to end up making way more money than if you just started to make money.
SPEAKER_4: Like at the end of the day, you're going to do better anyway.
SPEAKER_3: Semyon, you said there that the MIT Blackjack team basically was a hothouse for future entrepreneurs.
SPEAKER_3: Was it just by chance that this happened?
SPEAKER_3: Or do you think playing Blackjack the way that you did as a team was enabling people to develop certain parts in the future?
SPEAKER_1: Wait, wait, wait, just to be clear.
SPEAKER_1: Wait, Gary, Gary, we're talking about MIT here.
SPEAKER_1: Computer science people at the birth of an entire internet.
SPEAKER_4: And more than that, it's among the computer science people, there's lots of people who just became programmers of Microsoft, right?
SPEAKER_4: These are the computer science people who wanted to take risk, who wanted to be entrepreneurial, to think outside the box, to tackle something that's supposed to be impossible, right?
SPEAKER_4: These are all personal characteristics can do such a thing really, really well.
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: That's what I'm thinking was the case here.
SPEAKER_3: So, this game of Blackjack attracted a certain thinker, a certain dynamic within a person that then found another path to take itself forward.
SPEAKER_4: After that, it was the commercial aspect of it, the fact that we're trying to make money rather than play chess or play with paper airplanes.
SPEAKER_4: It was specifically motivated by generating profits.
SPEAKER_4: So that combination of the quantitative thinking and discipline and diligence and the desire to do well financially ended up being very lucrative for computer science.
SPEAKER_1: Was any of it to stick in it to the man?
SPEAKER_1: You know, Casino, do you know Casino?
SPEAKER_4: Definitely about sticking it to the man.
SPEAKER_4: That was a big part of it.
SPEAKER_1: A big part of it, because you wouldn't do that to a homeless shelter.
SPEAKER_1: You would do it to a casino, right?
SPEAKER_4: That's exactly right.
SPEAKER_4: I mean, we really did.
SPEAKER_4: You know, there was also a sense of teamwork.
SPEAKER_4: There was a little bit of a war going on.
SPEAKER_4: It was like us against them and we were the good guys, right?
SPEAKER_4: And they were the evil people who tricked all the poor people into losing all their money, right?
SPEAKER_1: Exactly.
SPEAKER_4: Getting drunk with free drinks and we hated them.
SPEAKER_4: We really hated them.
SPEAKER_1: All right, guys, we got to take a quick break, but when we come back, more conversation with Semyon Dukach.
SPEAKER_1: We're going to find out what floats his boat today because it's not the card counting anymore, but he's doing some really cool stuff.
SPEAKER_1: We're going to find out when we return on StarTalk Sports Edition.
SPEAKER_1: Bye We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition.
SPEAKER_1: And we've got our special guest today, MIT alumnus, Semyon Dukach.
SPEAKER_1: And Semyon, do you have a social media presence, or do you lead the private life of some?
SPEAKER_1: On Twitter, so S-E-M-Y-O-N, Semyon Dukach, D-U-K-A-C-H, we'll find you there on Twitter.
SPEAKER_1: So, Gary, take this thing home, where are we going next?
SPEAKER_3: Okay, so we've walked away from the tables with a big beaming smile on our face, but you weren't happy.
SPEAKER_3: You've become now a mentor.
SPEAKER_3: Why?
SPEAKER_3: Was the emptiness of being a blackjack player and just not really having any thanks and gratitude in your life in that regards a reason why you went to mentoring, or was there another dynamic in play here?
SPEAKER_4: I would say, I didn't go straight to mentoring.
SPEAKER_4: I first went back to technology and I started some companies that used more of my skills and knowledge than just blackjack.
SPEAKER_4: And yeah, I definitely sensed a contrast where customers who buy my software would not only send money, but would also say thank you, right?
SPEAKER_4: And talk about how the software helped them solve their problems.
SPEAKER_4: And that felt really good, right?
SPEAKER_4: In a way that blackjack hasn't.
SPEAKER_4: But then I also realized fairly quickly after a few years, by the year 2000 or so, that I didn't really want to build my company, a single company for a decade or two.
SPEAKER_4: I enjoyed doubling and many and I had made some money from selling my first one.
SPEAKER_4: And so I started to invest for the first 10 or 15 years personally as an angel, I would basically give a founder, the early stages, $50,000 or $100,000 of my money and I would try to help them.
SPEAKER_4: So the mentoring came as an add-on to the investing wherein in terms of putting a lot of money and I would try to help however I could.
SPEAKER_4: I didn't often know how to help, but you know, the effort, the motivation really matters.
SPEAKER_4: I generally wanted to help.
SPEAKER_4: It actually ended up being better for me financially as well because founders would appreciate the help I gave them and I would be referred to other ones.
SPEAKER_4: I would see better deals, more interesting companies than I used to see before then.
SPEAKER_4: And eventually, you know, I got to the point now where I run a venture capital fund and I have hundreds of people behind me and it's just a much more scalable, interesting thing.
SPEAKER_3: So that's One Way Ventures, correct?
SPEAKER_4: That's right.
SPEAKER_3: Explain to us as well as our audience what the ethos of One Way Ventures actually is and why it's so important to you.
SPEAKER_4: Yes, so at One Way, we have some beliefs.
SPEAKER_4: We really believe that people from anywhere in the world should be able to go wherever they want to build businesses, to get jobs, to create value, right?
SPEAKER_4: We fundamentally believe that.
SPEAKER_4: We don't think that the US, for instance, ought to allow more immigrants in just because on average, immigrants are more likely to create jobs and to add wealth and to basically give more than they consume in services over the long term.
SPEAKER_4: I mean, upfront, of course, they'll consume some services.
SPEAKER_4: Over the long term, there's a lot of evidence.
SPEAKER_4: All the economists believe that they're actually good for the country that they arrive in and that America's wealthier there is largely because over the last 200 years, it's taken in a lot of immigrants.
SPEAKER_4: So that's all true, but that's not the reason we believe that America should allow immigrants to come here and build companies.
SPEAKER_4: The reason we think so is that we're immigrants and we think it's our goddamn right to come here whether you like it or not.
SPEAKER_4: And we feel very, very strongly about that.
SPEAKER_4: We feel that the random documents that you get based on where you were born should not determine your potential, your outcome, your opportunities any more than the color of your skin or any other arbitrary thing you don't control.
SPEAKER_4: You don't choose to be born in America or to be born in some other country, right?
SPEAKER_4: You were just born where you were born and we think everyone should have equal rights.
SPEAKER_4: So that's why we focus on immigrants and it also so happens that immigrants make the best entrepreneurs.
SPEAKER_4: The majority of all the very successful companies in the US, I started by immigrants.
SPEAKER_4: That's an absolute fact.
SPEAKER_4: About 55% of the so-called unicorns have immigrant founders.
SPEAKER_1: Let me add, I'd like to add something to that because I do this calculation annually and it doesn't exist anywhere else except out of my shop that if you look at the Nobel Prizes and the sciences that are given to American citizens, a third of them have gone to immigrants to the United States.
SPEAKER_1: And so, that's an extraordinary number, far above the fraction that immigrants are in the United States.
SPEAKER_1: When you include not only those who are legally as well as undocumented, you add those two up, it's like 10%, 12%, so it's a factor of three higher than what that is.
SPEAKER_1: So, this is just another bit of information there.
SPEAKER_1: But you're saying, but Semyon, what you're saying there is not entirely realistic.
SPEAKER_1: Let me just, so you came to the United States from Moscow, from Soviet Union, Moscow, when basically there's a wall, I know the wall's in Berlin, but there's a philosophical wall.
SPEAKER_1: If that wall did not exist, and it was still the Soviet Union, and you didn't have KGB or whatever else, and borders stopped, do you think everyone would have left the Soviet Union the way you did?
SPEAKER_4: No, I think most people would never leave their home.
SPEAKER_4: There's tremendous social pressure, your network, your community, everybody wants you to stay.
SPEAKER_4: In order to permanently leave the place you grew up, you're gonna have to betray the whole community in a sense.
SPEAKER_4: You have to abandon them.
SPEAKER_4: And they're not gonna root for you.
SPEAKER_4: They're gonna hope you fail, because they envy you.
SPEAKER_4: And it takes a special kind of person who is willing to take on that hardship, who has an unusual level of ambition, believe in themselves, drive, an ax to grind, a chip on their shoulder.
SPEAKER_4: These are not ordinary people.
SPEAKER_1: Well, so these are people who are highly upwardly mobile because of their ambitions.
SPEAKER_1: And you're saying they should be able to exit their country and go anywhere in the world, wherever they are welcomed or embraced.
SPEAKER_2: I just want to know why they can't come from Norway.
SPEAKER_2: That's all.
SPEAKER_2: Where are the Norwegians when you need them?
SPEAKER_2: You know it, I know it.
SPEAKER_2: America first.
SPEAKER_4: Yeah, and I think in a logic, I think the gentleman who said that is severely underestimating the folks that are coming here from Africa and South America.
SPEAKER_4: I think he is judging them by stereotypes that fail to take into account that these are actually select individuals.
SPEAKER_4: Most people in South America don't make it to the US.
SPEAKER_4: Even if you take the really uneducated ones that will require a lot more services, not the folks with computer science degrees or whatever, but the really poor uneducated people who walk on foot in caravans and make it all the way to the borders in Texas and Arizona and California.
SPEAKER_4: You know, they're still extraordinary.
SPEAKER_4: And I would say if I had a construction business and had to hire a bunch of people for demolition, I would absolutely hire people from the caravan or anybody who had an easier time who was born here.
SPEAKER_4: Because it takes a very extraordinary person to walk 2,000 miles on foot.
SPEAKER_4: You know, it's just most people would not do that.
SPEAKER_2: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_3: So, are you telling, are you saying, Semyon, that an immigrant's life story is more predisposed to the probability of success in a startup because of all of the things you've just highlighted?
SPEAKER_3: That's why you get involved?
SPEAKER_4: And the reason, you know, we were able to raise the $100 million and invest it and now show, you know, more than tripling in the first five years kind of results, the reason it's working out so well is that we actually have hard data to support that.
SPEAKER_4: Like, I mean, we can guess, we have theories about why immigrants make the best.
SPEAKER_1: Says the man from MIT, we got data, right?
SPEAKER_4: Exactly, right.
SPEAKER_4: We believe that there's all these reasons that I'm talking about for why these immigrant founders are more likely to build big businesses, but it doesn't really matter what we believe or what those reasons might be.
SPEAKER_4: 55% of the unicorns were started by immigrants.
SPEAKER_4: A much smaller percentage of all companies in America were started by immigrants, but 55%, over half of the unicorns were started by immigrants.
SPEAKER_4: That's a fact, right?
SPEAKER_4: So it's no coincidence that with our thesis, our fund is having really great results.
SPEAKER_2: What you're talking about is an allocation of resources that we are the beneficiary, where we are the beneficiary to this allocation of resources.
SPEAKER_2: People coming here and making a contribution, and I forget this gentleman's name, but he's Indian, came here, and somehow the visa didn't work out.
SPEAKER_2: And being Indian, and this was under this particular anti-immigration administration.
SPEAKER_2: And I think it was his visa being revoked and had to leave.
SPEAKER_2: And so he said, here I am.
SPEAKER_2: I just got out of Princeton or Harvard, I forget.
SPEAKER_2: And I'm back in India.
SPEAKER_2: I'm basically kicked out of the United States where I just spent like 12 years in school.
SPEAKER_2: So what did I do?
SPEAKER_2: Well, I started an internet company.
SPEAKER_2: It's now like the second largest internet company.
SPEAKER_2: It's the largest in India and like third largest in the world.
SPEAKER_2: In other words, what he did was he took everything that this country had to offer and he planted it someplace else.
SPEAKER_2: So when you allow people to come here and you allow people to flourish and contribute, what you're doing is making everything better.
SPEAKER_2: But the only thing that stops that, believe it or not, I'm sorry to say it, is bigotry and bias.
SPEAKER_2: That's it, because there is no actual data that you can say, for instance, one quick little thing and I'll shut up.
SPEAKER_2: Oh, they're bringing crime.
SPEAKER_2: They're bringing crime.
SPEAKER_2: No, so sorry, guys, you know.
SPEAKER_2: These things feel good when you say them.
SPEAKER_2: They're like a rallying cry, but it's bullshit.
SPEAKER_2: I'm sorry, it's not true.
SPEAKER_1: This is Chuck Martin Luther King Nice speaking to us now.
SPEAKER_3: All right, so Semyon, we've done what you've, your past.
SPEAKER_3: We've looked at the now, what's next in your life?
SPEAKER_3: Have you got this map or is it just one day at a time?
SPEAKER_4: Well, we have a long way to go with One Way, certainly.
SPEAKER_4: We are still growing, we are opening more locations and raising larger funds down the road.
SPEAKER_4: But this year I've spent quite a bit of time as well on the non-profits.
SPEAKER_4: I actually started with my wife in February that helps refugees from the war in Ukraine get cash in their hands to actually improve their day to day to give them a sense of agency.
SPEAKER_4: So I made several trips down there and I'm heading over there again soon.
SPEAKER_4: And beyond that, I mean, I have six kids, so there's plenty of stuff to keep them busy.
SPEAKER_2: Wow.
SPEAKER_2: Just six.
SPEAKER_2: I'm gonna say, you better be rich.
SPEAKER_4: Rich.
SPEAKER_1: Unless he's taken his playbook from your daddy, that's a different...
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: No.
SPEAKER_1: So, this has been a wonderful story just to hear, and the story is a certain uniqueness to it.
SPEAKER_1: So, take us out with some reflective thoughts just to make a better world, because there's a lot of crap going on out there in the world right now.
SPEAKER_1: What wisdom do you have based on your life experience?
SPEAKER_4: Well, I think as a person, you know, I mentioned earlier that when I stopped worrying so much about how can I make the most money and actually started caring more about doing some good to others, together with my existing skill set, you know, I was able to do better.
SPEAKER_4: And I think the parting thought is that perhaps as a nation, we can do the same, that if we think a little bit more about how to make the world a better place, and when to do the right thing, right?
SPEAKER_4: And when you think about foreign policy, you know, what's actually right, what maximizes human rights, not only short term, what's the best for our national interests, but what's the right thing to do?
SPEAKER_4: In the very long term, we're going to do the best ourselves as well.
SPEAKER_4: In the story told about immigrants, it's just one example.
SPEAKER_4: Let's not worry about the fact that they create walls here.
SPEAKER_4: Let's just let them in because we recognize their right to come in, right?
SPEAKER_4: And what will follow from that is that they'll come here and not somewhere else, and we're going to all the way better.
SPEAKER_2: Great.
SPEAKER_1: All right, dude.
SPEAKER_1: Semyon, thank you for joining us on StarTalk.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_1: Gary, Chuck, always good to have you there, dude.
SPEAKER_3: Pleasure, Neil.
SPEAKER_3: Thank you.
SPEAKER_1: All right.
SPEAKER_1: This has been StarTalk Sports Edition, all about card counting and doing the right thing in the world, before, during and after.
SPEAKER_1: You take the casino to the bank.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.
SPEAKER_1: As always, keep looking up.