While in North Dakota as a rising agrochemical executive at Monsanto, Arnold Donald learnt how to win at blackjack from people who were training to become croupiers.
He became so good at it that he would pay for his family’s cruises by playing the game of supposed chance — except he wasn’t taking chances at all.
For him, it was all about winning through calculated strategy, an approach he has taken to turning Carnival into a profit-making machine.
“Let me put it this way, I didn’t take a lot of risk when I played blackjack,” he says with a smile. “I counted and I only played in games where the dealer would go deep into the shoe.”
The shoe is a device from which dealers put several decks of cards into play. Card dealers on cruiseships used fewer decks and shuffled them less often than Las Vegas casinos, so Donald would watch dealers with a six- or eight-deck shoe and wait until they took it down to a deck or so before they reshuffled.
“That was a game I’d be in, because if I’m counting and they go that deep, then eventually I’m going to catch him, so there wasn’t a whole lot of risk in that.”
His old trick of counting the cards doesn’t work at Carnival now: by the time he took over, the company had already noticed the ploy and made sure its croupiers shuffled their cards more. ‘I definitely would have changed it, though,’ Donald told Quartz website.
