Every card counter quickly learns about the dreaded Griffin books. Initially, it was just a single book. Now, in its fifth "volume," the Griffin books are a virtual library of photos and information about professional casino gamblers. In fact, the mug books of card counters’ photos that are published by Griffn Investigations in Las Vegas have become so well known among professional blackjack players that they often don’t even use the proper name when referring to them. One counter might ask another, "Are you in the book?" And the other will immediately know what he’s talking about.

The book.

An annoyance for every advantage player.

To be fair, it’s not all card counters’ photos. There are some actual cheaters and thieves, purse-snatchers, and slot machine "sluggers" in the Griffin books. But it’s more card counters than any other category, and for a good reason. There just aren’t very many real crooks in the casinos. And casinos aren’t scared of purse-snatchers. The security guards will take care of them. The casinos fear the players who can blend into the crowd and legally take money from their gaming tables simply by playing with intelligence.

Intelligence is not a trait any casino is looking for in its customers. And the Griffin books are essentially mug books of the intelligent players, the customers the casinos definitely do not want playing their games.

But where did "the books" come from? How did the concept originate? Most counters today have no idea. It seems the Griffin books have been around for as long as card counting itself.

Well, almost. . .

The timing of their arrival was perfect.

It was 1967 when a young Las Vegas private detective, Robert Griffin, first got the idea for the books that have plagued card counters now for almost thirty years. Ed Thorp’s Beat the Dealer had just gone into its second (1966) edition, and the casinos were frantic to find an answer to the growing problem of getting rid of this new crop of professional players.

They had tried changing the rules of blackjack in 1963, but it didn’t work. Their main consultant, John Scarne, was valiantly trying to convince the public that Thorp’s system was a fake and that card counting didn’t work, but the public wasn’t buying it. In fact, it was ruining Scarne’s reputation as a player advocate, which he clearly no longer was.

So, throughout 1964 and 1965, Scarne began advising the Las Vegas casinos to stop dealing single-deck games and start dealing blackjack from four-deck shoes, which he believed would be far more difficult for card counters to keep track of. At the same time, Scarne was warning players that the single-deck blackjack games were too "dangerous" for players because skilled card mechanics could cheat too easily in a hand-held game.

Many of the Las Vegas casinos did, in fact, switch from single-deck games to four-deck shoes. And it was nearly impossible for any player to use Thorp’s ten-count in a shoe game. But when Thorp’s 1966 edition of Beat the Dealer came out, with the new Hi-Lo counting system that could be used to count cards with any number of deck, the casinos knew they were in trouble. Thorp was not letting up-more and morel books and counting systems were being sold, and John Scarne had no solution.

Robert A. Griffin did.

In 1967, Griffin started a company called Griffin Investigations, Inc., "for the purpose of providing surveillance and investigative services to casinos," according to their promotional brochure. Prior to the Griffin Agency, casinos had always provided their own surveillance, and they had rarely shared information with each other. But now, casinos had a common enemy-card counters-and Griffin’s main product was a mug book of names and photos of counters who had been identified and barred. I

Most card counters learned about Griffin the hard way, when they found them-selves being ejected from casinos where they had never played before, shortly after arriving at the blackjack tables for an initial play. Elaborate disguises and fake IDs soon became a necessity for high-stakes pros once they were "in the book." Some players who were not card counters also found themselves being identified as countets in the Griffin book, as they had been misidentified to Griffin as such by paranoid pit bosses. Other non-pros had their names and photos entered into the Griffin book as "associates" of card counters simply because they had been seen socializing in the casinos with other players who were already in the book.

The casinos’ fear of counters, and the failure of John Scarne to provide any workable protection from the threat, opened a huge market for Robert Griffin’s services. Griffin was essentially telling the casinos that they did not need card-counting experts on their staffs to identify counters at their tables. Griffin would compile the names and photos of counters from all of the casinos in Las Vegas, updating his mug book monthly, and the casinos simply had to subscribe to his service to get the book. Just about every major casino in Las Vegas subscribed.