At a Seattle coffee shop, a friend of mine is talking about an intriguing fellow that both of us know.
“Do you know how he pays the bills?” My friend smiles slyly. His half-whisper suggests that our mutual friend is up to something risky.
I’m surprised to say that I don’t know.
“He plays blackjack. And he’s good at it. He’s on a team of Christian blackjack players.”
Yeah, that was unexpected. Immediately I wanted to know more.
The very same hook is drawing attention to a new documentary by Bryan Storkel, which played at the Seattle International Film Festival last week.
Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians follows a team of churchgoing blackjack players from Seattle — including (full disclosure here) a friend of mine — as they express their loathing for casinos, lament the corruption that infests the gambling world, and then march in through those neon gateways, beat the system, and take millions of dollars from the casinos to feed their families.
These aren’t the rebellious youth who snark from the back row of the church youth group… although they might done so once upon a time. These are pastors and church leaders, “engaging the culture” in ways that, while striking and seemingly scandalous at first, actually bear a strong resemblance to many other vocations. We watch them study numbers and patterns. We watch them navigate complicated workplace dynamics and difficult coworker relationships. We see them thrill as they ride waves of success, and we watch stress plow furrows across their brows as they suffer lapses and slumps.
Does a team of card-counters who are Christians proceed differently than other gambling strategists?
Read all about it: My full review of Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians is up at Filmwell.