Holy Rollers
March 25th, 2012I backed Holy Rollers on Kickstarter, and I just got to download and watch the film.
You guys might be wondering why I would support a film about Christians, but the fact is that I’m just interested in stories about people who attempt to find cracks in The Matrix, whether they believe in a vengeful skygod, or not.
I also considered counting for a while, in the late 1990s, and, to my surprise, my mom laughed, sat me down and had a little talk with me. She didn’t discourage me from trying it. She just told me what would happen.
“How do you know so much about this?” I asked my mom.
It turned out that my mom had dated a very good counter in the 1960s, who also happened to be a “rocket scientist” at JPL. She said that he would get booted from one casino and by the time he arrived at the next one, guys would be waiting for him to turn him away. She told me all about the costumes and cat and mouse antics familiar to all counters. Again, this was the 1960s, decades before automated facial recognition systems.
So, I was far more interested in Holy Rollers as a movie about blackjack, rather than as a movie about Christians. I really enjoyed seeing how they tried to manage the team, test players, handle cash, evade casino security and all the rest of the nuts and bolts of it. I would have liked to have seen more of the nuts and bolts, particularly how the team worked live sessions. (They left out a lot, but this wasn’t intended to be an instructional video.) I laughed as I watched how ridiculously fast they were getting backed off toward the end.
My mom died back in 2003, but I could see her subdued, “I told you so,” smile very clearly.
Related: Holy Rollers Official Site
Back in the 80’s I read a fascinating book called “The Eudaemonic Pie.” It was about a group of idealistic hippie physicists in California who built an early 8-bit microprocessor into a shoe, and went to Vegas to take on the roulette games. And they won… for a time.