Here is an excerpt from Repeat Until Rich, a new memoir by Brooklyn’s Josh Axelrad about winning and losing $700,000 as a card counting Blackjack player. It was reviewed and excerpted in today’s New York Times.

They called themselves Mossad after the Israeli intelligence agency. The key honcho was a guy named Jon Roth. I met him just once, and then everything started. I took the subway one evening to Park Slope in Brooklyn, buzzed at the address my contact had given, and was let in by a tiny brunette who introduced herself as Bridget Gould.

She showed me up the stairs. The building was a brownstone, singleresidence — all Roth’s. He was a retired millionaire from Wall Street. Israeli-born, charismatic, three to six years older than myself. I knew these things from Garry Knowles, my mentor.

At the second fl oor, I saw a person dealing cards. A dining-room table had been converted into a blackjack table. There was green felt spread over it like a partial tablecloth. Two strangers sat on the player side, chips in the betting squares in front of them. The dealer was Roth, to whom Bridget presented me.

“You’re Garry’s guy?”

“Right.”

He shrugged in response — not without warmth, I thought.

I can’t say what I expected, but he was certainly a human being: large head, heavy build. Either he was muscular or he used to be. His hair was a few inches long, and his brow was pronounced. He might in a previous life have been some kind of ape king, a silverback.

The others sat watching me quietly.

Roth said to one of them, “Chuck, you want to check this guy out?”

“For spotter?”

Roth gave the thumbs-up. The person named Chuck was dark-eyed, perhaps Greek or Latino. He was physically attractive, and it bothered me. My habitual nervousness had been about doubled since I got off the subway, but as I shook Chuck’s hand, it grew worse. I would never fit in with these people.

He led me to a sofa at the end of the room, where he handed me a “shoe” to count down. That’s a big deck made of multiple decks mixed together, six in this case. As we sat, he went over the rules. He would remove a dozen cards or so, then time me as I counted the rest. I had to do it ten straight times, pretty fast, with a limited number of errors.

I passed this test. Shortly after that we had a pizza break. Roth ate standing up, as did Chuck and a bearded guy, Aldous. They were discussing an upcoming trip.

No one addressed me again until Roth had finished his pizza and lit a cigarette. “Ready for the table test?” he asked.

“I hope.”

This was the final exam. Crusts and paper towels were stuffed into the grease-bruised pizza box. Roth began stacking the deck. The Aldous guy sat on one side of me, Chuck on the other.

I was sitting among strangers in this big brownstone house, playing two hands — perfect basic strategy — and trying to go plus-one, minus-one in my head the way I’d been taught. There ‘s nothing too unusual about that, I guess. Millions of people take blackjack tests every day, or some kind of test. But I was less talented, at least than most card counters; this set me apart. Math has never been a strong suit, honestly — I’m more of a speller. Yet I’d had this dream ever since I first met Knowles, when he spilled the beans to me about Thorp, MIT, team play, basic strategy, the High-Low count, and all the rest of it, two years before. . . . The dream was to go the full distance, all the way to Moscow, as Napoleon might say: turn pro. Steal money from casinos for a living, and gamble full-time. Scamper around tiny back roads in a forty-eight-valve Italian coupe, looking for games. Up and down the Nevada desert, through the bogs of Mississippi, with so much cash in my Levi’s that I couldn’t walk. It had stayed a dream, and it might have stayed that way forever if Knowles hadn’t met Roth, or if he hadn’t played on a trip with Mossad and come back with the stories he did, or if the year 2000 hadn’t been bearing down with the slim but notable off chance God might show up — none too amused — bringing apocalypse, or that the “Y2K problem” really would turn the computers either off, or against us, with planes dropping out of the sky and self-realized cruise controls carting pleading families to their doom, exactly at midnight on New Year’s . . . or if I had been a little steadier, say. But, sensing opportunity with blackjack — along with the slippage of time and my own steady drift toward dullness — at the end of ’99 I quit my job. Mossad, Knowles had told me, eventually might take recruits. It was the only lead I had. I lived off savings, wrote my novella. January passed, and the world carried on. February passed — God was late. Then, last night, with exactly no warning, the call I’d been hoping for did come: here I was, in the legendary hombre’s dining room, on the fourth and soon the fifth and last shoe of the checkout, the count throbbing in my head like a disorder, each new card a separate problem I had to dispense with instantly, when Roth stopped dealing. He asked for my count, and I told him. He rocked his head back and forth thoughtfully, then looked over at Aldous, who said, “Okay.”

The tension rushed out of my body. I’d started to shake. Roth shrugged again. He asked what I was doing next week. I said, “Nothing.”

“Better buy yourself a ticket for Vegas, my man.”

It started as quickly as that.