Written by :
Published on :
In this week's installment of Be Better Bettors, host Spanky talks the Blackjack Ball, an exclusive gathering of the world's greatest gamblers. It's often considered the G2 Summit of gambling. But where did the name derive from?
Richard Munchkin is the blackjack enthusiast who runs the secretive event, now in its 25th year.
The Blackjack Ball is one of the most closely guarded secrets among advantage gamblers and for good reason.
Max Rubin held the first ever Blackjack Ball. It was an event to honor the best blackjack players, authors and experts of the time, hence the name. Among those was one Wally Simmons, who was awarded the Blackjack Cup trophy that year for World's Greatest Blackjack Player.
Renowned casino great Michael Shackelford would go on to win the Grosjean Cup trophy years later for World's Greatest Blackjack Player. Shackelford is known as "The Wizard of Odds" and founded an amazing website by the same name even prior to the time Gamblilng911.com first arrived on the scene (late 90's). He would go on to sell the site in 2014 for a cool $2.35 million to LCB Network.
Shackelford analyses and reviews strategies for casino games. The Wizard of Odds website would review the casino software providers of the time and their game winning percentages. Shackleford would regularly analyze new games for game developers and casinos.
No idea if Shackelford was among those present this year in Vegas, but certainly Spanky was in good company.
"I read a lot of the books and studied a lot," Spanky said of the blackjack experts emerging while he lived in Atlantic City during the late 90's when the Blackjack Ball first emerged.
"You gotta get dressed up. So I don't want to bring a tux or a suit on the plane," Spanky says. "So I went an rented a tux and wind up going. Everybody was dressed sharp. And it was pretty cool. A lot of people, the people that I met - I'm not going to drop names - but just if you go to the Blackjack Hall of Fame and if you just Wikipedia that, you'll see the names on there."
The event is so prestigious that nobody there even heard of Spanky.
"Some people I did know. Some people would give me an alias on who they were when I knew who they were. (It's) completely acceptable in a party like this."
Spanky also hits at plans for the next Bet Bash.
"There will be some exciting announcements pertaining to the next Bet Bash."
- Don Shapiro, Gambling911.com
