Blind blackjack ace in TV tournament

Saturday, March 13, 2004

JEAN SPENNER
THE SAGINAW NEWS

Regina Guzior doesn't need to the see the cards to play them.

The legally blind Midland woman is ranked among the best blackjack players in the country.

"She's an incredible blackjack player," says Kevin Belinkoff, vice president of programming for GSN, the new moniker for the Game Show Network.

"She plays at a level that players who can see can't play at. It's fun to watch her play and watch her mind working."

Television viewers will have that opportunity at 10 p.m. Monday when they tune into the "The World Series of Blackjack from Mohegan Sun" on GSN, Channel 65 for Charter cable subscribers.

The seven-week program features 25 world-class blackjack players who will vie for the championship and $250,000 in winnings. Guzior's table of five players is featured in the first installment. She is the only competitor from Michigan.

Gaming consultant and blackjack expert Max Rubin, who provides color commentary for the tournament, helped select players.

"We scouted a number of big tournaments in Las Vegas," Belinkoff says. "We saw her competing in a million-dollar tournament in Las Vegas. That she's blind is only part of the story, that's not why she's there. She can play blackjack with the best of them."

Guzior, 53, grew up playing card games. She lost her eyesight in 1979 to retinitis pigmentosa and macular degeneration. She fell in love with the challenge and strategy that blackjack presented.

"In blackjack there is a strategy besides an element of luck," says Guzior, a native of Albany, N.Y.

She is assisted by a "reader," usually her husband, John. However, the reader can tell her only the cards dealt and the amount of money bet.

"There is strategy in betting and in the cards that are played," she says. "I have it organized in my head, but sometimes there is so much going on I do forget."

Guzior, a mother of two, has a business degree from the University of Michigan. She operated a staffing service, RBG Professional Resource, from 1990 until 2002. She travels several times a year to Las Vegas to compete in tournaments.

"When I first went to Vegas I would go to the (blackjack) tables, I could see back then, and I slowly learned the game," says Guzior, who competed in her first tournament in 1995. "Then I found out there were strategies to it. I knew I was losing my sight, the slot machines didn't excite me and I needed a challenge. I found out I was good at it."

The televised tournament took place over two days in January at the Mohegan Sun Casino on an Indian Reservation in Connecticut.

Neither Guzior nor Belinkoff would comment on the results.

"I can't tell you that," Belinkoff says, "but I will say she gives us a lot of fun."

Source: MLive.com