Blackjack at the casino: "He/she took the dealer's bust card!"

[Chronos]

Splitting is only a good idea with paired aces or paired 8s, though, isn’t it? It seems surprising that it would be common enough to make a difference in the number of cards dealt.

[markn_1]

No, Basic Strategy says to split in a number of cases besides Aces and Eights. You ALWAYS split Aces and Eights regardless of the dealer’s card, but there are other cases where you should split depending on the dealer’s card. Here’s the full chart: 4-Deck to 8-Deck Blackjack Strategy - Wizard of Odds
As you can see, the only pairs you never split are 5s (where you should double in most case) and 10s where you should stand.

[jsc1953]

Yeah. If the dealer has a 6 showing, you want to shovel as much money on the table as you can. Split everything (except 5’s and 10’s), double on everything (within reason).

[markn_1]

BTW, if you ever see someone split 10s when they otherwise seem to be playing reasonably close to Basic Strategy, they’re probably counting. Splitting 10s is sometimes the right move when the deck is 10-rich. I never had the guts to split 10s when I counted. It seems to be a guaranteed way to grab the pit boss’s attention.

[Kyrie_Eleison]

@Little_Nemo

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.

FWIW, I used to play pretty regularly at a table a lot like this. About 25 years ago, there used to be a gaming outfit in Tampa/St. Pete that would set up tables at nightclubs where you would pay $20 or so for a stack of chips. When you lost your chips, you were done, but you could play until closing if you managed to keep ahead. When it was time to go, there was no payout; you simply turned in your remaining chips and left.

It wasn’t tremendously popular, but I wasn’t often playing alone either.

[friendlessboob]

@Mr_Shine

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”

Heyyyy!!

[Atamasama]

@friendlessboob

Heyyyy!!

That’s why you have no friends.

[kinoons]

@septimus

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.

I have a very good friend who was in surveillance and worked his way up to shift supervisor during the early to mid 2000s. While cheating by both players and dealers/employees was real in the past the house now (at that time, presumably now even more so) watches everyone like a hawk. The “eye in the sky” watches the employees as much as the players. Not saying someone couldn’t cheat or have a partner, but it’s going to be damn hard to pull off for any period of time.