Of course, if you’re not counting and just playing solid basic strategy, the CSM is a double-edged sword. There is a slight reduction in house edge, but it comes at the price of more hands per hour, thus increasing the expected loss.
Casinos do sometimes shuffle more when they suspect a player is counting. In the milder form, the dealer will sometimes shuffle upon seeing the player put out a big bet. They can also just shuffle every hand while the player is there (I had this happen to me once). My experience is with single-deck games in Nevada.
Shuffling after every hand would slow down the game, even with an automatic shuffler.
Is banning counters legal? I seem to remember that there were court cases about this.
Casinos can refuse service to anyone for any reason other than discrimination against federally protected groups.
Well you and I agree that the casinos definitely overreact to card counters, but what you don’t seem to understand is that the casino is a business that is open to you to gamble. If you are counting cards you are not gambling. If everyone was counting cards the casino would be out of business. Noone likes casinos (at least noone sympatizes with them as they get bigger and more ostentatious) but they can’t allow counters free rein. It would be insane.
BTW do you know how to get a “card counter” off of your porch?
Pay him for the pizza.
Jumping back to the OP for a moment:
The he must never have driven such professional blackjack players as James Grosjean, Dave Stann, Stanford Wong, Kami Lis, Erica Schoenberg and the like. Unlike professional poker players, who casinos welcome because they get their rake regardless of how the player does, casinos hate having professional blackjack players at their tables for the reasons laid out already in the thread. Unless the players are there for blackjack tournaments, which have been getting more popular and visible lately with such TV exposure as The World Series of Blackjack, Ultimate Blackjack Tour and the like.
Nitpick, federally (and state-) protected classes. But Skeptic42 is correct that in some jurisdictions there have been court cases. The New Jersey supreme court, in Uston v. Resorts International Hotel Inc., ruled that the state controls gambling so completely that casinos may not bar “skilled players.”
I remember reading about that. In response, New Jersey’s games follow extremely counting-unfriendly rules, right?
Well if you really want to nitpick they can bar anyone (except New Jersey) except for being a member of such a class. I am sure some of those barred for being counters are over 40 and/or black. They can still be barred as long as their race and age are not the reason.
There is one surefire way to prevent the casino from noticing that you are counting cards - the ‘hit and run’. You sit down, and play the game with minimum flat bets so long as the count is negative. During this time, you might try walking away from particularly bad shoes to get a drink or go to the bathroom. When you finally get your ‘killer’ shoe where the count is really high, break out the table limit bets. Then when the shoe is over, you leave the casino. And you don’t come back for a long, long time. You do this whether you win or lose. To the casino, this looks like a gambler who is ‘steaming’ away his last money. And since you don’t stick around after the shoe, even if they are suspicious of you, they can’t watch you to see if your bets fluctuate with the count.
This is the kind of stuff high-dollar professional counters have to resort to now. They’ll blow into a place like Vegas, and plan out a list of casinos to move through. One good shoe and you’re out of the first casino. Then you go to the second, and play there until you hit a good shoe. You continue doing this until you’ve gone through all the casinos. Then you get out of dodge and go to Reno. Then to other towns with casinos. You might land in Vegas again in a year, when hopefully everyone has forgotten your face. This is the only way these days to survive as a high-limit counter for any length of time. By ‘high limit’, I mean the guys who are betting $100-$1000 per hand. The casino watches those gamblers carefully.
Even that can be difficult now, because the casinos are connected through organizations like the Griffin detective agency. If they think you might have been a counter, they might just forward a picture from the security camera to the other casinos, and they’ll be watching you the minute you come through the door. And once one casino makes you for a counter and bars you, the others will get the information and you’ll be barred from all of them. So it’s a high-risk lifestyle.
This is kind of a variation on the ‘big player’ strategy, where the counter signals in a big player who puts down huge bets when the count is high. The counter himself never bets anything but the minimum. So even if the house knows that the ‘big player’ was likely working with a counter, they have no way to know which person was the counter, unless they can spot the signal.
The real defense the casinos have against the ‘big player’ technique is to disallow mid-shoe entries to the game - a rule I’m seeing more and more of these days.
That said, the casinos are only really worried about high-limit counters and teams. If you’re a counter varying his bet from $5 to $30, and you’re pleasant and tip the dealer and in general you’re an asset to the house, they probably won’t bar you. They’ll write you off as a small loss leader - good for business because you’ll tell all your friends that you’re a winner and they might try to do the same thing and most likely lose.
I’ve seen counters get barred betting low limits, but it’s usually because they were obnoxious and the casino just wanted an excuse to get rid of them. These are the kind of guys who brag about how much better they are than everyone else at the table, who refuse to tip the dealer because it cuts into their profits, who lecture others at the table on how to play, or who give out tips to the other players to jack their bets up when the count is high.
Put a smile on your face, be pleasant to all, and bet small. Then you can count and have some fun, and maybe make some beer money. $5-$10/hr can be earned without much heat from the casino. Push it any further than that, and you’d better know how to hide your play.
Get hold of a game called Dr. Blackjack. Dr. B will teach you how to count cards, and you will quickly learn that the card counting strategy is based on the “True” count, not the “Actual” count. In essence, you divide the actual count by the number of decks used to get the true count. Casinos these days use 6-8 decks in a shoe, which means that it takes a looonnnngggg time for the true count to turn in your favor.
And if you watch the dealer load the shoe after the shuffle and cut, you’ll notice that they stick the dead card into the stack just past the halfway point. That ensures that, even if the true count goes your way, it won’t last long enough for you to really cash in.
The game will also, if you wish, teach you how to bet, split, or double a hand. Sometimes the count comes into play, most times it doesn’t. That part of the game is really worthwhile.
Dr. B makes another point that I think is the most important. Don’t bet more than $40 a hand and the casino will take no notice of you even if you are counting. You can’t do enough damage to them to make it worth their while.
We get to Vegas once a year and one of the Lousiana casinos once a year. When we go gambling, SWMBO and I take $100 each and no more. The object for her is to have fun and make it last as long as possible. Same object for me, but I do the card counting, etc. with an objective of winning at least her $100 that I know she will lose. Anything more is gravy. I’ve been a consistent winner over the years, winning back her lost money and another couple of hundred per session. That extra money goes either for a nice show on the Strip or pays for the hotel room or something.
I have noticed that in the casinos that have the auto-shufflers that keep the deck constantly churned, counting goes right out the window.