Blackjack Therapy by Clarke Cant
Chapter 5, Psi blackjack is limited.
There is a big difference between the justified bashing of hunch players and those who use all sorts of bizzare divination schemes and voodoo to try to win at blackjack and the rationalizing of the so-called skeptic who in reality is only a conventionalizer. In truth the misslabeled skeptic is just as out of touch as the voodooer often; it is just that one is more politically correct than the other.
It is hard to justify the claims that there are no such things as magic and ESP. Let me begin by describing one who tried to apply ESP to blackjack and failed but was one of the developers and early remote viewers, in the military application of Remote Viewing back at SRI in Palo Alto California, and one who succeeded but found that he was paying a terrible price in emotional damage and disapointments, but where both are well documented to absolutely have such abilities (one hidden in his ability and still in part classified and one very well known). They are Danyon Brinkley, author of 3 books on the subjects of ESP and near death experiences, and (to use the penname he told me in 1988 he used when writing in the old Atari magazine, A.N.A.L.O.G.), Dr. Lee S. Brilliant.
I wrote to respond to a classified ad that ran in Blackjack Forum, in 1988 asking for teammates for playing in Northern Nevada. He identified himself, in the course of our 2 or 3 phone calls, as a California neurosurgeon (which I verified) and went over my qualifications. When I mentioned instances of trying to spot side damage from the effects in Wong type warps in cards (from the action of the dealer peeking under 10s and Aces to determine if they have a blackjack) I mentioned using the techniques Margret Corbett wrote about in, Help Yourself to Better Sight, and the tactics Peter Giles developed from that book, that Wong first disclosed in one of his early newsletters and included in his, Blackjack Secrets, book —
As an aside, Giles recommended that you take a shuffled deck of cards and remove one card with your eyes closed, and place it faceup, but unseen, into the deck at random. Now riffle through the deck as fast as possible, only slowing down enough to barely perceive the value of the card. The drill is designed to build vision speed and visual acuity by forcing the software that regulates our eyesight to engage while we are riffling though too fast for our concious mind to slow down that process. The goal is to also relieve eyestrain.
—he mentioned that he had been involved in a program that sought to do the same thing with ESP and wondered, since I was well versed in the Corbett methods if I wished to try to develop a way to apply this same method to blackjack play. That was a little too weird for me. He did mention however that the program did involve classified research where the consciousness labs, the industrial design center, and the cybernetics labs were all involved. Through the books by Courtney Brown (not too creditable I thought), and David Moorhouse (very good and honest, his book was Psychic Warrior), and Ed Dames (who I felt was very open about his work though a bit irritating in using Scientology type descriptions such as calling methods technologies, and giving possible disinformation in some of his predictions), you had revelations about one project that used these labs together: Remote Viewing.
Exactly like the Corbett methods for eyesight, RV tries to relax the viewer, with the assistance of a guide and stop the conscious parts of our mind from censoring and distorting some of the hunches and feelings that we all have from time to time that cannot be explained by conventional views. To avoid selective observation and tendencies to explain away perceptions various forms of relaxation are used. To extract the information that may be contained in those moments of perception, the subject still has to be conscious however.
The Remote Viewing proticals are designed to provide double blind target selection and have the remote viewer only describe to his guide, the aspects of his perceptions that first only relate to sensations of touch, feel, smell, taste and sight, and then finish with an attempt to see if all perceptions can be engaged without reawakening those parts of our conscious mind that tend to distort our perceptions (as mentioned above). A database of information is assembled from several remote viewers and the data is prepared and tested against known information about the target. In application there is a continuous cycle through such data to further refine targeting goals.
That is not too practical for casino use, in that there is a need to quickly change consciousness states, that while the remote viewer is going to be fairly fast at it, is not fast enough to apply live in any casino. When data is gained offsite it will be totally out of context. There should be applications however, assuming of course the validity of remote viewing, to possibly noting changes in casino policies and rules in the future.
The man who actually has been able to demonstrate being able to win using such methods in casinos, was Danyon Brinkley. He survived 3 near death experiences and developed medically verified (One medical handbook of Disabilities even has a listing of Brinkley’s syndrome, as developing an ability, often uncontroled and disrupting, to engage in ESP abilities due to high electricity exposure)abilities to perceive things like hole cards and developed an extensive track record of sports wins that enabled him to take care of expenses while recovering from his initial injuries in a lightening strike. In his book, Living in the Light, Danyon (he would prefer his first name be used and through personal experience has one hell of a sense of humor, I just wish I had known who he was when I met him), describes, reading hole cards in 53 straight times, in live casino play. He wasn’t catching views of the hole cards due to vision damage from the original lightning strike.
The major problems for him were the emotional grief he faced after trying to get players and bettors he would aid to follow through on promises to donate to various charities and the shear emotional pain he would feel from detecting the manner which average casino patrons would be actually trying to lose, where gambling was actually a bizzare cleansing ritual.
What this means for the open minded blackjack player is that it is necessary to admit the possibility that our hunches may hold some useful information, but to realize that there is nothing free easy or automatic. Lee gained his abilities through rigorous training and a hard nuts and bolts approach to life almost as demanding as the skeptic’s in analysing new data from perceptions. Danyon gained his abilities through terrible injuries to himself. Almost obvious, but somehow never said much before is that we need to test, analyze and practice using information from ESP with the same rigor that we would test our ability to detect flashes of hole cards. Nothing is going to be true or accurate just because it came from some psi related source anymore than information coming from Snyder, Wong, Thorp or Schlesinger, or me, is true, just because it came from someone having some standing.
The ability for psychokinesis to actually alter outcomes appears to be limited as well, despite the humorous claims from the webmaster of the bjrnet.com voodoo board, Zombie (who has been a great help to me several times). The most that any practitioner can do, it appears is alter outcomes from their means, by standard deviation measures proportional to their abilities. In simpler terms even the best practitioner of voodoo or magic, say someone able to perform the feats done by the characters in the movie, The Craft, is only able to disturb short run and not long run outcomes. They can bend the curve of results but not “hang it.”
What that means is that it is best even for the best Rver, literal frybaby, or a board certified witch doctor to stick to known or more conventionaly verifiable strategies.