Autism stereotype and Counting Cards

In your opinion, how common is it for an autistic person to be a card counter?

I myself have high functioning autism, hence why I call myself the stereotypical card counter. 

Of course, I don't tell this to casino personnel because they would include it in their database/bolo reports, and develop a little more fascination with me than they would other APs. 

One of the great blackjack math authorities, and a good friend, Bob Fisher, has Asperger's. He's one of the really good guys. Another friend, now deceased, Dan Gordon, who wrote blackjack books under the pseudonym Stuart Perry, also had Asperger's. He was one of the greatest NFL and NBA handicappers of all time. Both, of course, it goes without saying, were accomplished card counters.

Don

Don Schlesinger,

Thank you very much for your response.

Love your book Blackjack Attack! Those win rate charts are extremely practical for card counters, myself included, and also helps explain why some games are trap games (more closely scrutinized).  

Join the club. 

It helps to be able to compartmentalize, and be one thing on the inside and something else on the outside. When I play on the inside I have my matrices, indices, sidecounts and all, and on the outside there is a drunken degenerate, cheering the wins, cursing the losses, and trying to pick up the cocktail waitress. It's good for you because the important part of your mind is still on the right stuff, while if you have autism you are developing the monkey part of your mind you probably haven't used much.

If you don't think you're good at this you can practice. Being good at it and pretending you are good at it are the same thing. Go to the bar and play some cheap quarter VP using the correct strategy. Get drunk, use profanity (without directing it at anyone), converse with people, try to pick up girls. When you can do all that without losing the strategy you can transfer this valuable skill of compartmentalization to the tables, and to other areas of life.