I’ve read “Bringing Down the House”, a book about how MIT students allegedly won millions by counting cards at blackjack, and how they used elaborate “team-play” schemes so that casinos wouldn’t ban them. But I’m convinced these works are pure fiction (indeed, the book actually was written by a man with several fictional novels to his name). If you really could win serious money counting cards at blackjack, then all the casinos would have to do to stop losing is simply shuffle the cards after every single hand. This wouldn’t even slow down the game – they could get a machine to auto-shuffle the cards. (Such auto-shuffling machines are already standard at most poker tables.)
The book claims the casinos used sinister techniques of intimidation on the MIT students (banning players, beating them up, even breaking into their homes as a warning) but why would any casino do that when they could distrupt the system by simply shuffling the cards more often?
This theory was semi-confirmed for me when a Vegas taxi driver once told me that he’d met thousands of people who claimed to be professional poker players, but never once met anyone who claimed to be a professional blackjack player. He says card counting is a myth spread by the casinos to make people think they can win the game.
Does anyone have any evidence confirming/denying “Bringing Down The House” is real? Is there any proof that card counting really is still possible in today’s casinos? And if so, why haven’t the casinos caught on and started shuffling more often?
In my experience, it is possible to win by counting cards. It’s very difficult to do, but I’ve won by counting cards before. My father-in-law is really good at it and has won more than $100,000 over the years, in Vegas and AC.
It’s legal as long as you aren’t using a device of some sort to keep track. However, you have to be VERY discreet about it. If a pit boss catches on they will have the dealers start shuffling the decks frequently and may even go so far as asking you to leave. Casinos may even ban players they believe are counting.
I don’t have any evidence to back this up besides my own experience.
If competent card-counters were sufficiently common, the casinos would probably do as you say. However, it is difficult to count cards, especially when the dealer is dealing from several decks. Most people just want to have fun, and don’t want to try to assemble a cabal of conspirators and attempt to avoid detection for a sufficient period of time to make a worthwhile amount of money. Moreover, casinos earn a lot of money from people who overvalue their perceptions of probabilities based on what they can see around them on the table, and who therefore think they have an advantage against the house. It is to the casinos’ benefit to let people think that. Sit around a blackjack table in Vegas and you will hear a lot of people who think they must get a face card because, hell, look at all the low cards showing.
In any event, some of what you describe is actually done. From Wikipedia
I don’t think there’s any basis to say that the author of Bringing Down the House concocted a big lie and sold it as non-fiction. Counting cards is just math. The difficulty is using that math to one’s advantage without being detected, and the genius of the MIT card counters was their ability to avoid detection (to a point).
The casinos HAVE caught on. They generally deal from 8 deck shoes & reshuffle at the halfway point, long before a card counter’s advantage could offset the vig.
They are also very aware of betting patterns. A true 1960s card ocounter bet the minimum over & over until the deck was favorable, then went for serious blood. Can’t do that now; you’ll be asked to leave.
Having said all that, the MIT crew is quite plausible for the era they did it in. Not today, but certainly doable then.
I read a friend’s book (forget the title) all about a blackjack card counter/mathematician who did make a good profit at it. He also included all the mathematics of why it works, probability-wise. (He did have the caveat that even playing his card-counting scheme to the letter, there always exists the possibility of losing big-time.)
His scheme, which he worked out in the early 1960s, was based on the rules back then, not on how blackjack is played today. It was based on the general rules that the more 10s and face cards that are left undealt, the better the odds of winning are for the player.
The tables he played only used one deck, which was used for several hands. So each card affected the probability significantly. Today, the dealer’s shoe contains 4-8 decks, so each card dealt affects the probability of winning only 12.5 to 25% as much as with one deck.
His betting strategy was to bet high when the odds favored the player, and bet low when the odds favored the dealer. This maximizes the wins and minimizes the losses. (You say, “Duh!”) But his high bet was $1,000 and his low was $1. Today, most tables have anywhere from $5 to $25 minimums and $300 to $500 maximum. This lessens the maximized wins and increases the minimized losses ; IOW, the profit margin is reduced.
His system was so successful that he initially tried disguise to keep playing. But after either running out of disguises or getting all the city’s casinos used to looking for his card counting, he started training college students with his technique and getting them to play for him. But now with the first two adjustments made, his card counting scheme is not as frequently profitable, and when it is, not so profitable. Card counting is hard work, especially with multiple-deck shoes, so when fatigue sets in, cards don’t get counted and profit goes down. Also, there’s a reason that drinks are free in casinos: alcohol=loss of concentration.
I’m guessing you haven’t read the book, because it details (IIRC) how having multiple decks actually make certain systems of card counting easier and how the team play avoided the typical signs of card counting.
To the point of the OP, although I’m not a mathematician, the explanations of the students’ system seemed perfectly plausible and effective to me. What reasons do you have for thinking it’s fiction?
Well, that just proves it then, doesn’t it? :rolleyes:
What really pisses me off about card counting is that it is essentially playing the game well, yet the casinos persecute and demonize people who do it and characterize them as cheaters. The casinos aren’t happy with their legitimate percentage, they want be sure they only play against stupid people. (As if there weren’t already enough of them filling the casinos!)
I have read it and it is real. The casinos did have elaborate systems in place to make sure effective card counting couldn’t be done and the MIT guys found a way to beat it through, not just mathematical skills, but also role playing and avoiding the systems that can get people kicked out permanently just for suspicion of effective card counting.
Here is the problem with the OP’s reasoning:
Casinos don’t adopt every strategy foiling measure that they can because they want normal skilled players to think that they have a chance of beating the house in the long-term. Once they put up state of the art card shuffling, word will quickly get out that particular casino has made it harder for anyone to win and they don’t want that. They want to give frequent players the idea that the casino is playing straight up and they can win. Gamblers tend to be delusional in many ways but they understand quite well how many aspects of the game work.
While casinos have adopted some of these measures, they need to keep the games customer friendly to keep the hoards coming in night after night instead of going to the next casino.
Just an FYI - This paragraph is really bad technique on this board. We generally don’t weigh second hand accounts from taxi drivers very high even if he truly never met one. There are only two casino games that you can make money at through skill. Poker is one and the casinos don’t care how much someone wins because the get their cut either way. Blackjack is the other and the casinos have adopted strategies to beat the vast majority of the card counters. The MIT students and their alliances simply attacked all their defenses at once and won. They even got caught a few times but card counting isn’t illegal. No one is known to have done the same thing before and the story is completely believable based on the techniques they explained. I don’t know why you are so skeptical of the story although I could believe that some aspects were combined or moved around to make a better story.
Card games like Blackjack (i.e. where there is no bluffing) all come down to mathematics (namely probability). And math is one of the few things in this world that does not lie.
Over time the house has a most definite and calculatable mathematical advantage in blackjack. Its only a slight advantage percentage wise, but its there. Always. So if they compensate for the tiny percentage with volume volume volume they will make money, guaranteed. But because the house/dealer advantage is so tiny, it only takes a slight increase in the player’s odds to shift the winning side over to him.
But the catch is to get that slight advantage you must use rigorous math, near-flawlessly, very quickly, and most important, consistently over a relatively long period of time. Plus, even after doing all that, you can still only increase your odds by a very small percentage. So the only way to win a significant amount is to bet a significant amount (and at the right times).
What this all means is that card-counting isn’t magic. And its by no means an urban legend. If you do it correctly and consistently over a long enough time you will win more often than you lose. Its not magic its math, combined with very difficult to acquire skills. Or, if you use electronic devices, a still very difficult (and then very illegal) method of cheating.
Yeah, I get that. I believe that counting might work if the casinos allowed it. But my point is that the casinos aren’t stupid. If they catch you card-counting, then they could either:
Ban the card-counter from the casino and risk scaring off non-counting players if the card counter makes a scene, or
Just shuffle the deck more often.
The second choice seems so much easier, so why in the world wouldn’t they always do that instead of banning anyone? In the book, the casinos had pictures of all the MIT kids and supposedly were even able to spot them when they wore disguises, too. Instead of banning them, why not just shuffle more? It would be easier on everybody. That’s why I suspect the whole story of casinos banning card-counters is fabricated…
Firstly, card counting is easy and doesn’t depend on the ammount of decks, but instead on the depth of the penetration of the shoe before a re-shuffle. Casinos don’t use continous shuffling machines because of the ammount of amature card counters that they can bring to the table.
I’ve been studying the stratagies, writing programs, and playing simulated games for about six months now. The only way that I can beat the simulations to date is to use a bet of 10x when the odds are in my favor. In order to get the rules to be in my favor a sufficient ammount of the time, the real casino games have a high minimum bet and a low maximim bet – not to mention my real bankroll – that I can’t think that I can make a profit playing for real.
The key to the MIT success was having people standing at each table and keeping a count while NOT playing. They would signal a BP or big player to come and sit down a start playing only when there was an advantage. THIS is the behaviour that is not allowed in casinos today. The “Woner”, named after Stanford Wong (a pseudonym), is the act of defying the minumum bet by not playing a hand. That makes all of the difference in the world.
In very high stakes games, continous shuffle machines are used because a house vulernability could open at long odds and be exploited.
The bottom line is that the casinos do in fact know the odds.
As an example, from the above references, a typical casino advantage is about 0.75%. That’s pretty good odds as far as gambling goes. If just one 5 card is removed per deck, now the odds are in the players favor by 0.05% (plus minus count of 8 in an 8 deck game). Each 5 card moves the odds by .80%. A standard plus / minus count is tracking the casino odds in .4% increments and can be done reliably by most people.
All the while that I would be betting $100 at a $10 table the odds still favor the casino that I will bus my bankroll unless I was backed by heavy investment interests and was playing in concert with a number of others to smooth out the monetary bumps. This is what I could not do myself today.
I’ll bet you that for every card counter who knows what he’s doing, there’s 50 guys out there who think they’re hot stuff but don’t have a chance. While Joe Vacation may not care if Big Casino is using a continuous shuffler, the real counters and the posers aren’t gonna come play. And those posers will probably drop some serious cash before they realize that they have no chance of making it back. I bet ya the casinos more than make up for the losses of the real counters with the bad counters.
Agreed, but my question remains – why ban the real card-counter from the casino? Keep attracing the poser wannabe counters who lose money, but as soon as the known real counter steps in the casino, just make sure the dealer always shuffles after every hand on his table (and his table alone). The posers wouldn’t be affected at all, but the professional counters would stop coming (achieving the exact same effect as banning them, but with less trouble).
Hmm. I think maybe shuffling more is worse. If someone is banned its because they get caught winning too much, the other gamblers (real or poser) can look at that and say “pssh, amateur! won’t happen to me!” But if they start shuffling more, then it looks like nobody has a chance. At any rate, if casino A stars shuffling more (even only for certain players), casino B won’t be… and you can bet that’s where the gamblers are gonna go.
The casino has all of it’s bases covered. The betting splits are small. They control the odds of the game. They keep tons of wannabe card counters playing.
I’ve practiced for 6 months and can’t get enough of an advantage to actually risk my hard earned money by myself.
The casino will always make money on all of it’s gambling games, and I have seen most people playing intelligently. You would be stupid to gamble without trying to gain this type of advantage in my opinion. Also, in my opinoin it is stupid to gamble in the first place.
Why not ban them, essentially? The casinos aren’t going to make any money from them, and they risk losing some. If they allow them to continue to play, but apply special rules while they’re there, they’d just be disrupting the play of everyone else - for no benefit to themselves.
They’re discreet enough about banning the card counters that I doubt there’s a public enough scene to affect anyone else. There’s essentially no reason for them not to do it.
As far as the story, it’s pretty plausible. A lot of the techniques developed today were designed specifically to counter the tactics of the MIT blackjack team and any copycats. The environment was different casinos were less savvy at spotting those tactics.
Others on the thread have gotten to the real answer though: card counting has made casinos far more money than it has lost them. The idea that you can card count makes millions of idiots (with no real understanding of the math) think that they can come up with a system to beat the game - that sort of mentality makes them far more money than the occasional legit counter takes, so they don’t want to rock the boat and change the way the game is played in a way that would give the idiots the impression that their system is as useless as it actually is.
Quite right, in fact the original MIT players were losing all the time until they met up with Bill Kaplan from Harvard who showed them how to win.
I can’t understand the OP’s idea that the team “allegedly” won millions. It is terribly well documented even apart from Mezrich’s book which attempted to protect real identities. Many have been identified including poker pro Andy Bloch.
And in a documentary I saw, the team members attributed the beatings and break-ins to other students/rival teams.
I don’t buy the argument that non-counting players would stop coming if the casinos shuffled enough to chase away the real counters. As evidence, I submit that most of the high-end Vegas Strip casinos have recently changed their blackjack tables so that they pay 6:5 on a blackjack rather than 3:2. And yet none of the tourists notice! They still put down their money anyway, even though the odds are now no longer in their favor, even with the best counting system.
If the tourists and wannabe counters are still willing to play after a change like that, then surely they wouldn’t be scared off if the casinos installed a machine that discretly shuffled the cards in the shoe.
Might that book have been “Beat the Dealer” by Ed Thorp? Although I don’t think he went in for disguises and such. Thorp is generally credited as being the father of card-counting.
; IOW, the profit margin is reduced.