*snip. And it is almost always THAT guy who is drunkest and loudest and bitching about it. He is probably gambling his paycheck away at $300/hand and wants to blame someone else for his own gambling addiction.
I thought I was right about this (the OP) and made this point to one of the other players (a friendlier one) and he looked at me like a father looks at his son when he just wet the bed and told me that once I start playing more, I will realize that that poor play hurts the other players because there are more “10” value cards in the deck (10, J, Q, K, A) than the lower value cards. Therefore, there is a higher chance of taking the dealer’s bust card than not.
That sort of threw me and I did not have an answer for it on the spot. But I think the correct way of looking at it is that it doesn’t matter if there are 51/52 or 11/52 or 1/52 “bust” cards in the deck. My choice of taking a card, on a good play or on a poor play, does not affect the dealer’s next card. If the next two cards in the deck are K, 3, then it just as easily could have been 3, K.
Yeah, I’m not going to let this go by unchallenged. Unless you are playing in a private game with cheaters, it’s bullshit. Try dealing seconds from a shoe sometime. And if it was ever even suspected that a dealer had introduced a marked deck into a game at a casino, the State would land on them like you wouldn’t believe. Gaming permits would vanish, massive prison terms would ensue.
Casinos don’t need to cheat. The odds are in their favor to begin with.
It’s also possible for a rational person to play casino games even without house perks like free drinks or whatever, if they actually enjoy the game, and find the enjoyment to be worth more than the amount of money they expect to lose. It’s not for everyone, of course (to me, it’d be more like work than like play), but then, nobody says that all rational people need to play.
I know some people say that. But I have a hard time believing they really mean it.
Suppose some casino offered people a chance to play Blackjack and charged them fifty dollars an hour to play. But after the initial payment, there was no further money exchanged; there were no bets. People were playing to see whether they won or lost with no money at stake.
If a person is just playing for the enjoyment of playing Blackjack, this would be an ideal situation. But how many people would actually want to play under those conditions? They want to play for the chance of winning real money even if it means they end up losing more than fifty dollars.
When a boob makes a stupid play that costs other players money he is noticed. When the same boob makes an idiotic play that wins the other players money, people don’t make the connection. Thus math impaired people come to the conclusiuon “bad play by player x loses money for player y”
Here’s a discussion of shoes rigged for cheating. It was almost four decades ago that I played often in Las Vegas — conditions now may be very different (and things like high-tech concealable cameras may have led to changes) — but I witnessed considerable cheating circa 1980, both from single decks and from shoes. (No, I won’t detail a wide variety of evidence since it all may be “impugnable.”)
The argument that “Casinos don’t need to cheat” is silly. Is that why Jamie Dimond returns his payroll checks? Because he doesn’t need the money? Even if you make the (very wrong) assumption that a given gambler will lose exactly $X whether cheated or not, a pit boss may prefer that he lose the $X in his pit, rather than that of a competitor across the street.
Isn’t this at least slightly true? A dealer is more likely to bust when the deck is rich with high cards and less likely when the deck is poor. A person taking cards at random is more likely to take a high card during the instances when the deck is rich, thus, more likely to deprive the dealer of a bust card. The edge is very slight but sill non-zero.
At any given count all remaining cards have an equal probabilty of being high. So at the time the guy makes a bad decision, the card he gets is exactly as likely to be a high one as the card the dealer gets.
But part of the enjoyment of blackjack, as a game, is the gambling itself. Some people enjoy the uncertainty, even if the amounts are small enough to not matter. Such a person can walk out of an afternoon in the casino a few hundred dollars lighter, and still say that it was a good day, because they enjoyed themselves.
I’m probably not the best person to explain this, because I’m not one of those people who enjoys gambling. But they do exist.
My wife is like that. She goes in expecting to lose, and determines how much ahead of time. If she comes out ahead it’s a pleasant surprise, but otherwise she considers it the cost of entertainment.
She also plays casino games on her phone that don’t give any chance to win money because it’s just a game with only virtual in-game money at stake.
Yes, there are people who gamble because it’s fun. It’s the game that matters, not the result. Such people would play a game that has an initial buy-in and nothing at stake.
I don’t find gambling fun at all so I don’t get it, but my wife sure does. I guess it’s the same as when I was a kid and would go to an arcade, and I’d blow through a pocket of quarters in an evening.
This is true if we have an infinite shoe but finite shoes are what allow for card counting which is what makes blackjack a beatable game. Take this to the extreme, assume you have a control table where the other player never takes a card and variant A table where the other player always takes one card. Taking exactly one card will always tend to reduce the variance of the deck due to regression to the mean (you’re more likely to take a high card from a deck rich in high cards & vice versa). If you’re a card counter, you always prefer to play on the control table vs the Table A because variance is how you make your money. It shouldn’t make a difference to non-card counters.
The more interesting intellectual puzzle is variant B where the other player always takes cards until they bust. Since high cards are more likely to bust you than low cards, the chances are higher the other player will end on a high card. OTOH, the chances are also higher that they will draw more low cards before the high card. Depending on what the distribution is, taking cards until you bust will alter the rest of the shoe in predictable ways.
Oops, turns out I was wrong. I whipped up a quick software simulation of this and, no matter how I manipulated the variables, I couldn’t get the decisions of the other player to long term bias the deck. Ended up realizing I fell for a variant of this famous mathematical fallacy. The linked answer reframes the question in terms of cards to make it more directly applicable.
I’m glad you did this, because I was going to, because I was thinking that Ultravires’ friendly player could have been right - the higher proportion of “10s” in the shoe could be affected by a player taking too few or too many cards - poor play. But I didn’t think it does, and I’m glad you did the computer sim to prove it.
I find this hard to believe. I’m not saying that casinos wouldn’t ideally like to cheat their customers out of some extra money; I’m sure that’s true of all businesses. But unlike most businesses, casinos have government agencies watching them.
The scenario you’ve described involves bringing their low-level employees in on the cheating and having physical evidence like rigged equipment lying around - two huge vulnerabilities in a crime. And according to you, the cheating is blatant enough that average customers can spot it. How would any casino manage to this for even a week without being caught?
After being caught, the casino is in huge trouble. Even if it manages to avoid being closed down, the accusation of cheating will be enough to cause all its potential customers to move to the competitor across the street which you mentioned.
So why would any casino cheat when it’s collecting huge profits legally, stands to make only a small additional amount of money by cheating, is almost certain to get caught if it cheats, and looks to face huge penalties if it’s caught?
I think you could have saved that trip to Monte Carlo! Just imagine that the two cards next to come out are swapped — treat that swapping as part of the shuffle. If one of those cards, based on counting, has a 32.8% chance of being a Ten then the other card has a 32.8% chance also.
Actually there are two ways this could fail and the 3rd-base hit would affect the dealer bust-chance:
(a) If that hit reduces the stock below some threshold and dealer needs to shuffle before dealing to himself. But in practice the stock isn’t allowed to get so low — in hundreds of hours of Blackjack play I don’t think I’ve ever seen shuffle in the middle of a hand.
(b) some counters will know not only the average ten-ness of the remaining stock, but will have a rough idea of how those tens are distributed!! (This arises at casinos with an imperfect shuffling regime — I saw such a regime with my own eyes in a casino outside Barcelona.)
First: My experience was circa 1980. I speak only to what I observed during that era. And, to move the discussion forward, is there general stipulation that some single-deck dealers in Nevada, presumably in business for themselves, can mark, peek, and second-card deal from their decks, and do so with little risk of detection? (Even experts agree that it is hard to spot expert cheating directly; one relies on inferences.)
When supervisors are also involved in cheating, how far up the ladder does it go? If a pit boss is running a crooked pit does he try to conceal it from his shift manager? Or offer that manager a cut of the action? How easy is it to bribe the relevant regulatory honcho? How many employees does that agency have anyway? I don’t know the answers to these questions.
One of the simplest ways to cheat from a shoe — and easy for counters to detect! — is the ‘short shoe,’ a deck with extra 4’s, 5’s and 6’s and/or ten’s removed. It would be trivial for the regulatory honcho to detect a short shoe: just stop a game and sort the cards. In hundreds of hours of play, I never saw such an inspection.
Only once did I strongly think a short shoe was in operation; IIRC it was at the Tropicana or some place at the far end of the Las Vegas strip. I reduced my bets to a minimum (or stopped playing altogether) and counted 4’s, 5’s and 6’s. I kept getting counts of 14, 15 or 16 from the 4-deck shoe even though more than a quarter of the deck was unshown. Coincidence? If I’d counted up to 17 would you accept that or say I’d miscounted?
This barely scratches the surface of occasions when I felt or strongly felt that I was witness to cheating. Much of the cheating I witnessed was in direct response to a competent card counter sitting at the table. (You wouldn’t see that except by chance unless you or your friend is himself a competent card counter.) It’s a myth that barring is the routine response to card counting at all casinos; some casinos would rather get comeuppance with a profit.
In any event, please start another thread if you want to discuss this or other interesting casino gambling stories.
If I run a casino, I absolutely do not want a table cooled down. I want it jumping hot. I would love, love a short run of player luck where they’re all convinced it’s the best blackjack table ever. They’re going to start increasing their bets, and every hand they play, the house is likely to win.
No need to cool the table by cheating. ALL tables, in the long run, are cool.
Not to mention getting a bunch of onlookers excited about the action, and believing that this must eventually happen to them if they just keep playing in this lucky casino.
A casino’s long-term interests would be much better served by “heating up” a table now and then, rather than cooling down one that was hot. Players believe in luck, streaks, “hot”, “cold” and all sorts of imaginary silliness. Casinos know that all that matters long-term is the amount bet multiplied by their statistical edge in each game.