wow, awesome post, ty.

Great post; a person with a passion backed by enthusiasm, patience and intelligence. Makes me realize how uncommitted, uncommitted and uncommitted I am. I've never been thrown out of a casino!

If I get that far, my 600th post will be on fly fishing.

I didn't employ a true martingale, I modified it and spent most of my practice time on it and the math behind it. I busted a few times with simulations about 1 in 20 if I recall. 5% risk of ruin on a hard cap of 300 bucks was acceptable to me. Hard to imagine I was once good at math, but I was. Ranked 150th in Ontario out of 200k students in Grade 12. Long time ago. I have never been delusional about variance. Leaving the casino up bucks was a huge high for me at the time, I figured I got the best of it, had fun, never regretted the time spent studying it and moved on. Haven't played blackjack in 12 years.

I never trained with distractions like you did, however I don't think it would have helped. If I was that riled up with one measly pit boss it was never going to happen. That is why I admire what you accomplished.

Today it would be for peanuts and fun, I can't remember my own daughter's name half the day so to think I can remember a count would be ludicrous. I would just try and play perfect strategy(and would probably hope to hell I could still do that) and flat bet and I would probably be very happy to lose 3% an hour and getting some drinks.

I realize with a team you can disguise it, but how can you do it solo and not get noticed? They definitely react when people don't flat bet regularly so that part is something I was curious about.

wizowzers, vnh bella. This post was fantastic. Thank you for sharing!

This is the main reason I never learned / practiced card counting. I have absolutely no patience for something that requires so much concentration in such a distracting environment, let along doing this while pretending to not do it! Contrast this with poker, which is more of a social game. You never get thrown out for winning. Chatting up players actually improves your game because you learn about their personality, besides the fact that it is pleasant to talk to people.

Great read. I randomly bought a BJ book at a store when i was around 15, which got me interested in gambling...I bought' Black jack your Way to Riches', or something along those lines. Then i bought 'Black Jack Attack' by Don Schlesinger. By the time i was 18 and old enough to go to the casino, i had lost interest though....

A story about counting that just came to mind that puts things a bit in perspective.

The CEO at my dads workplace told me this at my dads 40 anniversary at the job. He said his mother was in accounting working with pencil and paper. She could do multiplications for each row and then when getting to the bottom of the page she would just write the sum of all the multiplications. She wouldn't even have to concentrate on doing this, it was second nature to her.

The point being is that you can make card couting a job that just runs in the back of your mind, leaving you free to talk to people etc. without being distracted.

I did a bit of the same when I played bridge, I did not focus on which cards where gone in each suit, I more or less had a counter in the back of my mind.

Great post. Pissed-off misanthropic female gamb00lers = HAWT.

I've never heard of this.

Again, , and not just 'cause you meant "at most" instead of "at least." Do you mean actually at the table? Or sitting at home, taking one deck, and counting through every card until you get the 52nd? I'm not sure how that would help too much, considering you're always going to end up at 0, right?

I don't doubt the dealer errors, but I can't imagine the edge is that great. The ones at 4W are WPT-themed, so they may be different, but there you make an "Ante" bet blind, then get your cards. When you do, your options are to fold and surrender your entire bet, or "Raise" and quadruple your Ante bet. If you beat the dealer HUHU, you win even money. Which would be fine, except the dealer has to qualify by having any pair, any Ax, Kx, Qx, Jx or Tx, or any two cards that add up to 11. So he auto-folds weak hands and when he does, your bets push, not win.

Of course, the real money on those games are the side bets. You get paid 20-1 if you get AA in the hole, or 40-1 if you wind up with quads. lol highwayrobberyaments.

Yeah. That's pretty much the only reason why I would. Same reason why I have a Powerball ticket in my pocket: I'm only really after the $200 million. Speaking of which, the drawing was last night, let's see if I won . . . ****. Oh, well, nobody else did, either.

lol, I had to look up the word misanthropic. Seems fitting...

Thing is with California card rooms, that they cannot offer house banked games, like in a normal casino. So they kind of just rent out the blackjack table (you pay a fee to pay) and everybody that wants to be a dealer can be one. A player pays a bit less percentagewise than the dealer, because it is perceived as always that the dealer has an advantage (wrong).

It's just a stupid ego fulfilling ego exercise counters have to say they're good. When somebody says:"I can count cards" you ask "Oh, yeah. How fast can you count down a deck?" I've had contests with many of my counting friends...
Anyway, there are two ways of doing this. The ideal one is where you have 2 identical decks and shuffle them randomly and then hand the person who's counting 52 cards. Based on the 52 cards that you have, you will be able to deduce the count that the other guy has (it's not going to be zero, since the deck is shuffled). Then the counter has to go as quickly as possible through the 52 cards and tell you the count at the end.
If you have just one deck then you remove a couple of cards at the end, but then you are not really counting down a whole deck.


I just looked on the internet. Apparently there are like 1000 variations to this carnival game. Sorry, I just know that somebody told me one of those versions is beatable... ooops

Funny to think about that, because when I played competitive bridge I also eventually got to have an instinctive count on the cards. It takes a lot of repetitions, though. I probably played three to six hours a week for a year before I got to that point.

I guess it's a lol that my competitive bridge years were in my early twenties when I was always the youngest player there and I was playing against a bunch of blue hairs - but it's actually a really challenging game that has unfortunately fallen out of favor. Many of the dynamics are the same as in poker - primarily skill over the long term with plenty of short-term luck thrown in; tilty behavior; grumpy nits calling the floor. The main difference is the presence of a partner who you have to rely upon completely. The trick is to work out any issues and move on, because if it festers it will wreck a good partnership. In the case of my playing partner who has also been a longtime friend he put up with my mediocre bidding and atrocious declarer play because we were scary good on defense - like we had some sort of ESP thing going. We often had opponents walking away from their table shaking their heads.

I decided to sit down and actually read the tl;dr

My question is why does serious Blackjack forge a hatred for a casino and your fellow players? Emotion seems pretty irrelevant to gambling as a whole, tactically. In fact, it seems like you should be as emotionless as possible. Tilt is bad, yeah? What makes blackjack different?

"What makes blackjack different?"

In my experience, more hot asian chicks play blackjack than poker.

The casinos use every measure possible to get losing players to play with them. Comps, spiked drinks, mailers, "fun pits", almost topless waitresses, perks, etc. etc. etc. They thrive on gambling addiction and they produce nothing of value.

Ah, but the SECOND they realize you can beat them without even cheating, they bar you. Granted, my barrings have not been nice, but I got out of the casino ok. Many others have not been that lucky. Beatings have become rarer since the 70s, but don't think for a second that a corporate entity cannot be as much as a scumbag as a mafia run operation.

The fact that they associate you with known cheaters and other scum, when sharing information, when in reality you are just counting. COUNTING IS NOT CHEATING! Sadly, many police officers in Nevada seem to think so. Casinos pay them off and pay the gaming comission off. The fact that they refuse to cash your chips, just because you are a known card counter. The fact that they can smear your name, convict you without reason, just because you are a succesful AP (be it counter, sports bettor or promotions hunter). And they do it with a smile...

Do you want me to go on?

Grunch

I liked that story.

Didn't realise you only had 600 posts bella.

Well are they cute waitresses?

Yeah I could see how that could get annoying. Hypocrites can be hard to get along with, especially when their intent is to take your money. When it's an entity of the industry and not some person you run into, that would be a constant strain. I dunno how quickly I'm going to rush off to expand my gambling habits into Blackjack.

If your record was 17 seconds you are doing cumulative math for 3 cards every second?

How many seconds would it take to simply deal the 52 cards? Not counting? 15 seconds or so? 13?

It was never my intent that this post produces new blackjack counters. It's just more to keep your eyes open and realize that when chasing even the tiniest minuscule fraction of a BB, there are many opportunities abound in the gambling world.

Also, just that a good amount of scepticism in the world goes a long way. For a casino the poker player is a little thorn in their eye (they could fill the poker room with so many slots), but it's their necessary evil, so that the wife of the poker player actually plays those slots. Don't ever think that you are "valuable" to a typical Vegas casino, which happens to have a poker room.

It's mostly pattern recognition. No way could you do 17 seconds, if you went: 4... 3... 2... 3... 3... 3... 4... 5... 4... etc.
It's about cards cancelling and chunks which you quickly add up.

To deal them face up? About 25 seconds for a competent dealer. When I said "count down" you have the deck in your hand and quickly shuffle through it.

In a real casino environment, with ploppies playing, the count becomes second nature if you are used to it. The dealer is just too slow for you. But it's always good to pretend you are not counting and get the running count from a quick glance to the table. New counters are often revealed by their stare to the table and how the don't want to miss a single card being dealt out.

uh, wtf -- define 'spiked'

I don't get bitterness over this part ... if they didn't they could just as well mail anyone money who can show them they can beat the game? Would you prefer they made themselves unbeatable?

My guess is that it would not take many cases of corruption or other illegal activities to bring down even a 'respectable' casino if they were dragged all the way through the judigal system -- if what you say is true could you speculate as to the extemt of the corruption to keep these places in busines?

you know we do :* I'll send you a cent on stars for every good anecdote in this thread I'm sure others will as well

uh, wtf -- define 'spiked'

I don't get bitterness over this part ... if they didn't they could just as well mail anyone money who can show them they can beat the game? Would you prefer they made themselves unbeatable?

My guess is that it would not take many cases of corruption or other illegal activities to bring down even a 'respectable' casino if they were dragged all the way through the judigal system -- if what you say is true could you speculate as to the extemt of the corruption to keep these places in busines?


Oh, one more, how many people hang at the [high stakes?] black jack tables day in and day out losing money if winners (AP) can go unnoticed for years?


you know we do :* I'll send you a cent on stars for every good anecdote in this thread I'm sure others will as well

Bad word maybe? If I order a Cuba Libre in a casino, I will hardly ever taste the coca cola, almost the opposite of a bar. They are trying to get you drunk. Sorry, I did not imply any drugs here.

As I said in the beginning: The casinos make FAR more money out of wanna-be counters than they lose with counters.
They lose far more money not giving deep penetration (which takes long shuffling and pisses off ploppies) than they scare off counters.
The hyprocrisy comes from the myth they portray: "Come play this beatable game", but when you actually beat them, they get angry. The idiocy is that in their paranoid quest to out counters they back off many ploppies at some places *cough... El Cortez... cough*, *cough... Plaza... cough*...

Counters and Casinos have the same interests, really. They want fast paced games (more hands per hour, when you have the edge is in everyone's interest), with deep penetration (no loss of time due to shuffling). It's just their stubborness that they don't even want to lose that little investment.

There's a casino near San Diego (Barona), where they have understood that. They have a SD game that with basic strategy has a 0.01% house edge (break even) and with card variations (stand 77 against T) has 0 house edge. They make money in ****loads and the highest limit players go there thinking they can beat the game. They are very curteous when backing off players and it seldom happens. There is a difference and they get it. I can't explain it better.

I UNDERSTAND that casinos have to stop a counter eventually, but right now that are spending way more than the counter will really hurt them. It's like an EGO thing. It's like you have a money printing machine, but every 50 sheets or so, the machine screws up. Instead of just throwing that one sheet of paper away, the casino goes on and spends thousands and thousands of dollars getting a new machine.

The 6:5 game (i refuse to call that Blackjack) is a perfect example of this. The ploppie will lose so quickly in that game, that he'll have no fun and then nobody ends up playing blackjack. Everybody loses in the long run with the 6:5 game, the counter, the casino and the ploppy. Only the casino is so interested in their short-term return, that they burn the long term game.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_ho...s/2184716.html

Here's a story where it ended well for us. But the XXXX that Russo and Grosjean were dragged through during the trial is attrocious and it took 3 years for Bob N. to finally clear his clients of any wrongdoing. The coruption level between security, the NVG and the casino managment is amazing,whejn it was put to light...

BTW, his book Beat the Players has many examples on how you can be dragged through the mud, just for counting cards or exploiting other casinos weaknesses (stupid offers, faulty payoff structures in slots, sports betting, etc.)

Again, I'm not claiming I hate all casinos, but hey with consolidation and the strip being run basically by two corporations, it's a safe bet you'll know which ones I hate

Well, for one, the mixed drinks you get in a casino are generally stronger than you'd get at a bar. While a bar wants to water down drinks to maximize their profit per drink, a casino realizes that they could just give you an entire bottle, as long as it made you play dumber. The first time I was in Vegas, I was 22 and getting drinks that were not just stronger than any bar I'd been to, but stronger than I'd make for myself, and I practically minored in Alcohol Studies in college. You order a Crown & Coke and get a CROWN! (and Coke).

Also, I've heard an anecdotal story of people getting Red Bull and vodka when they only wanted Red Bull. Now, obviously it could just be a misunderstanding . . . but you never know. It doesn't take that much liquor for that notorious impaired judgment to start kicking in.

It's not the banning that bothers her so much as the attitude behind it. Obviously anybody that counts cards is fully aware that they're instantly persona non grata if they're caught, but there's a difference between just getting kicked out and being treated like a thief.

This is a -EV bet.

I wish my casio did that. In fact, one of my friends refuses to drink post-mixes (he drinks JD) at the casion because he maintains they are always weak. He has to drink the pre-mixes.

I should probably add - Gambling is quite restricted in my state and from what I can tell, the casio has some pretty tight restrictions. Some of the bars have to close at 3am. No NL poker. Anti-gambling pamphlets everywhere. etc.

hey, bella. out of interest, whats the biggest loss you've had on a single hand of bj?