To die for. No, not Eliot Jacobson, aka The Mayor, the sites owner, the site's URL www.cardcounter.com! If you have a site up that deals with counting, or became interested in counting and took a spin on the 'net looking for information, chances are you have probably punched those letters in and found yourself at Eliot's site before.

The first thing you will see when you get there is The Mayor's picture. Most counters try to hide their identity to protect themselves from being spotted by casino surveillance. Not The Mayor. "I encourage casinos, governmental agencies, and casino detective agencies to take down my name, take a good look at my photo, and to realize that integrity demands no secrets. You are targeting me. I am targeting you."

And I figured that it was because The Mayor had been barred a few dozen times and knew it no longer mattered. My picture is available on the 'net simply because I don't play much onLand blackjack. I have found the onLine blackjack so much more lucrative and available that I will take the chance of being found out the next few times I will appear in Vegas, AC, NY, or around Southern Ontario.

The Mayor continues: "I stand behind who I am and what I believe 100%. By using my real name, it makes a statement to others my belief in our right to play unobstructed. In particular, I do not believe that agencies such as Griffin have the right to use information I post under my real name against me, and this opens up the opportunity for direct action should such occur. Integrity is not a question of which doors remain open and which can be forced open, integrity is a way of living life. I am simply not willing to operate from the shadows. And if, ultimately, I help the community of proficient players in some little way, then it will be I who helped, and not some character created for profit or anonymity."

The Mayor has quite the education. He has a B.A., M.S., and finally a Ph.D. in mathematics. I'm sure that has come in handy with his blackjack understanding and playing. His primary research areas are Algebraic Number Theory, Elementary Number Theory, Computational Number Theory, but has also studied Von Neuman Regular Rings, The Burnside Ring, Profinite Burnside Rings, Galois Theory of Commutative Rings, Sheaf Theory, Linear Algebraic Groups, Algebraic Geometry, Lie Algebras, Uniform Distribution, Local Representation Theory. He holds three professional positions. Lecturer, Department of Electrical Engineering, Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, and Vice President, Integrity International. Eliot has 22 publications in research journals in mathematics. He is also a computer programmer.

The Mayor's Top 10 Blackjack Picks are Million Dollar Blackjack, by Ken Uston, Professional Blackjack, by Stanford Wong, Blackjack Attack, by Donald Schlesinger, The World's Greatest Blackjack Book, by Lance Humble and Carl Cooper, Knock-Out Blackjack, by Olaf Vancura and Ken Fuchs, The Theory of Blackjack, by Peter Griffin, Blackbelt in Blackjack, by Arnold Snyder, Burning the Tables in Las Vegas, by Ian Andersen, Beyond Counting, by James Grosjean, and Blackjack Wisdom, by Arnold Snyder. I have five of these books. I guess I should spring for the other five with the money left in my PayPal account. More on that latter.

Eliot had a few problems with his site and took it down for a few days. It is now back up and rolling along nicely. "After receiving almost 50 emails supportive of this site today, how it is being run, and all saying the same thing. They hope this site can re-open somehow. However (when) it reopens, there will be some very strong security features in place." I told Eliot that when you become the owner or the moderator of a site it's like hanging a target on your forehead. www.rge21.com and www.bj21.com have had the same problems. Drop by and help make Eliot's site one of the best out there!

The Fab Four Blackjack Boards

If you like to read and post about blackjack online like I do, then you may be interested in the web portal I have called "The Fab Four Blackjack Boards." I have taken the most visited sites I could find and placed them into frames so you can access them all from one page. You can open them up by right clicking a link then opening in a new window, or move the frames around to read each site as you please. It is easy to cut and paste from one board tot he next, or ask the same question at all four boards to get different answers to your questions. You have Stanford Wong, Arnold Snyder, Don Schlesinger, John May, and many other blackjack notables to get in touch with.

Don't Talk About It, DO IT!

How many hours do you spend in a day on trivial things that do not produce any type of positive outcome? A few minutes? A few minutes every hour? Half of each hour during every day? It is rather easy to waste large portions of your time and lose your forward motion in life. One you have come to a full stop, it can become hard to get rolling again. It can take some discipline and a new direction to get that happening for you.

New Year resolutions are only weeks away. Do you see yourself soaring to new heights, or reliving this past year? It all starts with your attitude, and then how well you can structure your time that you will spend working on that new goal.

PayPal Makes Move Early

Last month, PayPal let everyone know that they were getting out of the casino business on the 25th of November. At that point I had informed people to drop all of their PayPal money into casinos that will give you a good bonus and send you checks. It looks like that is what everyone was doing. "Abandon ship!" Before everyone could get off, PayPal stopped dealing with onLine casinos a week early! Since PayPal is owned by eBay, they would rather you spend your PayPal dollars on eBay auctions, which is what I will be doing with the few hundred I had left in there. So, they get their wish, but how they pulled it off was rather coy. The day will come when Internet gaming will be legal in the U.S. and PayPal will have had their reputation with this gaming community destroyed. There are so many ways of purchasing cyberchips now you can't keep track of them all. For now, I'll be sticking to using my VISA cards which continue to give me total fraud protection.

Aces and Faces on eBay!

Instead of buying Aces and Faces at the 2-4-1 special, I have listed it on Ebay to make it more accessible. I will be selling copies at the starting bid price of $7.77 for the rest of this month and then will place it as a "buy it now" item and use eBay as another platform to get the word out there. Click the picture to view the auction.

October was the first birthday of my book Aces and Faces Blackjack and we ran a 2-4-1 sale for people using the Book Rebate Offer. We will continue this offer into December for those of you that have to find something for that one person on your list that has everything. Almost everything! Here's a look at the chapter Hi Opt III: Infinity and Beyond.

Over the years that I have been counting, I have tried different counting methods to come up with the best advantage possible to beat the game of Blackjack. I started with Braun's Hi-Low, tried the Uston APC, came back down to Humble's Hi Opt I with an Ace side count, then finally settled on Humble's Hi Opt II. I had read in Ken Uston's Million Dollar Blackjack that Humble's Hi Opt II was as good as his three level APC count, and I found it much easier than his APC.

As time went by I was introduced to Snyder's Zen count. Basically the Hi Opt II with the Ace counted as -1 and the 6 as +2 instead of +1, it seemed simple enough. I didn't like the fact that the Ace was now included in the over all count, which effects the playing decisions. I also didn't like the fact that the 6 is worth +.45% and would be given the status the 4 has with its value of +.52% and the 5 with its large +.64%. The 3 is equal to the 6 with a value of +.44%. In my mind, its the 5 that should get this extra point added to it to balance the count out with the Ace included as -1.