Could a World-Class Card Counter Win Big in a Single Evening at a Casino Before Being Thrown Out?

Factual Questions
1

We all know casinos reserve the right to eject card-counters, as they (a) upend the rules of any game of chance (b) scare off honest gamblers, and (c) imperil the casino’s revenue stream, but if one were a spectacular card-counter, is there a way to lose enough games to throw casino management off the scent, while still prevailing long enough to walk out with a few million dollars? What if you lose a few smaller hands, then go big on a few final hands using your counting skills?

I imagine that, as stakes get higher, if the Powers That Be see anything amiss, Security will be tapping your shoulder in seconds. I also imagine the casinos know every trick in the book.

2

You will get tossed out as soon as you dramatically raise your bet in one hand, especially if the pit boss is also counting and sees that your bets are in sync with the condition of the deck.

3

I’ll be the first to point out that, for a single player (not a team) who is not using any artificial aids (eg, hidden computers), only (c) is true. Card counting is not cheating or dishonest in any way, it is simply playing very well. Nevertheless, casinos prefer to play against bad players, not good ones, and so they kick them out and spread the myth that card counting is cheating or bad for other players.

As for your question, I doubt there are many opportunities for anyone to walk away with millions in just a few hours. Also, casinos share info about actual or suspected card counters, so your theoretical player would have to have never played in a casino anywhere before.

4

The rules don’t derive from any fundamental moral principles. Surely the casino sets the rules for the games they offer. If they say it’s against their rules, it seems to me that makes it cheating.

Or are the rules for casinos set by some regulatory body? But if that’s the case, how is the casino allowed to kick you out for counting?

5

As far as quickly making millions, I’ll note that if you play basic strategy without counting, the house has an advantage of about a half a percent. So for every bet of $100, you can expect to lose about 50 cents.

If you do count, depending on your system, you have an advantage of about a half per cent to 1.5 percent. So at best, you can expect to win about $1.50 on each $100 you bet. You can’t quickly make millions with those odds. The best you can do is play many hands over a long time to gradually build up your winnings. There is no way to make a quick jackpot.

6

No. World-class card counters move around. If they win a bunch of hands after spreading more money, they get up and leave, not to return for weeks or months.

You cannot intentionally lose hands to throw the casino off the scent, because the edge in blackjack for a counter is too small. You are playing with maybe a .5% to 1% advantage at most. Make one mistake every 50 to 100 hands, and all your profit is wiped out. And if you make lots of mistakes while betting very small, then play like a champ when the bets are big, that in itself is a tell. As you say, the casinos know the tricks.

In the modern era, there are exactly two ways to remain a card counter: One is to bet small enough that the casino doesn’t care. Spread your bets $5-$50, and you can probably card count to your heart’s content and no one will bother you. The casinos take an interest when the bets go above $100, generally.

The other way is to never be in a casino long enough for the casino to track your play. If you are getting bad shoes with low counts, you’ll bet the minimum and play like anyone else. But once you get that high true count, you want to have at least eight to ten times as much money in play. As soon as you raise your bets, you become suspicious. So at the end of that shoe, win or lose, you pack up and leave and go to another casino.

The real professional counters will show up in Vegas, play for a few days at different casinos, then leave and go to another location, They may come back to Vegas in six months or a year or more. They will also keep copious notes about the behaviour of the security in the casinos, whether they took an interest in you or not, etc. Casinos that maybe paid a little too much attention last time you showed up get skipped. They also take notes on what they wore, what their hair style was, whether they were wearing glasses, etc. Then take pains to dress very differently next time

The true great card counters are ghosts. They can’t afford to be made as counters, because the casinos all use the Griffin detective agency, which means if you get busted in one casino for card counting, you may get banned from all of them.

The really high limit counters are rare. Maybe only a half dozen or so. Because when you start betting $5,000/hand, you have to act like a rich person or ‘whale’ or you’ll be i,ediately scrutinized. The holy grail for the best card counters is to take a casino for a lot of money while also being comped the executive suite, all meals, and even a private jet to pick you up and take you home. I knew of one guy who did that and got away with it for a long, long time. Maybe he still is.

Campuflage and staying under thr radar is by far the hardest part of card counting for serious money. In the modern era, the casinos can simply record every hand from the ‘eye’, and if someone exhibits a pattern that matches a card counter, automatically alert security. There’s no escaping that. You could play like an idiot for hours, but the first time you spread your bets and change your play a computer could flag your play as suspicious. Hence the need to get up and leave before they gather enough data to positively make you as a counter.

7

Is this hiding in plain sight by dressing very flamboyantly during the pride parade?

8

They don’t say it’s against their rules, though. Generally speaking, most card counters are bad enough at it that casinos are content for people to come in and try.

And “cheating” as its colloquially used implies some form of asymmetry. Counting cards uses information that all players have access to, so it’s just an extra skill that some players employ.

They rely on the fact that they’re allowed to kick you out for any reason whatsoever, as long as it’s not because of your membership in a protected class. It’s private property and they’re not required to let you play.

9

It would be hard for a single player, yes. Card counters typically work in groups. Someone counts at a table and then signals to one or more other players when the table is “hot.” Those other players can bet big from the get-go, thus avoiding some level of suspicion.

10

I don’t agree. Your relationship with the house is inherently asymmetrical. Cheating just means breaking a set of established rules.

If they kick you out for counting, it’s de facto against their rules. If they don’t kick you our for minor infractions when they are not significantly harmed by the cheating, that’s just using discretion on enforcement, which is common with many systems of rules.

It just seems like a weird semantic game to me to say that it’s not against the rules, it’s not cheating — when the casino has the right to decide what the rules are, and when they clearly think (based on kicking you out if you do it) that counting is against their rules and constitutes cheating.

11

You’re claiming that winning is cheating.

12

If it were actually against the rules, then they could not only throw you out; they could have you arrested. But it’s not against the rules. And one big reason why it’s not is because it doesn’t scare off other gamblers. Quite the contrary; it attracts them. Even if there are only a half-dozen highly successful card counters in the world, the existence of those half-dozen sends the message that it’s possible to beat the house, and that a clever person can make money. And that’s good for the casino, because there are a lot more people who think they’re clever than there are people who actually are. The people who are drawn to the casino because they think they can count but can’t more than make up for the actual card counters.

Of note, team counting, where one person stays low and counts and then calls over the whale when the odds are right, is harder to detect, but it is actually against the rules, meaning arrest if you’re caught.

13

IMHO, the essense of “cheating” is some form of dishonesty or taking an unfair advantage. The card counter is not doing anything surreptitious or obtaining information that is not also available to the other players or the house.

And not all forms of breaking the rules are cheating. For instance, if the casino’s rule was that players had to play naked, and you sat down and played clothed, would that be cheating?

Finally, if you Google “rules of blackjack,” I’m pretty sure that you won’t find card counting explicitly outlawed in the common standard rules. The casinos aren’t claiming that card counters are breaking their rules, they’re just throwing them out because they can.

14

That casinos are allowed to kick out anyone who is winning, regardless of how they do so, isn’t strictly because of the rules they set up. Casinos have always ensured their place by providing big money to governments at various levels. I don’t necessarily mean bribes, although those used to be standard business. Today the big money comes from taxes on a casino’s revenue, along with all the adjacent money that is spent by outsiders lured by casinos and also taxed.

Las Vegas was built on money that went from the casinos to the government. Few wanted to cut off the sugar. State and local law allowed casinos almost full reign, independent kingdoms within local rule. (I’ve always assumed that Disney saw what casinos did and created his Reedy Creek Improvement District in Florida in imitation of them.) The money from casinos overrides all normal morality.

Can playing sensibly enough to win consistently be called cheating? Obviously not in any other context. It’s cheating in this context only because once you set foot into a casino you are in an alternate universe. They are outside of our world.

If the saying, “the answer is always money” is truly universal, casinos are Exhibit A.

15

Card counting exists in a ‘grey area’ that suits both the casinos and the card counters. The casino could probably lobby the government to have it made illegal, and in Atlantic city a card counter sued - and won - to prevent the casino from kicking him out. It wrecked the game.

If the casinos didn’t kick out the counters, they have to either shut down blackjack, or they have to change the way it’s played - continuous shuffling machines, 6-8 deck shoes that are reshuffled halfway, preventing mid-shoe entry of new players, all that stuff. It slows the game down and annoys the other players.

If the casino bans card counters completely, it puts the lie to their claim that blackjack is beatable. And this is why I don’t mind card counting - the casinos promote blackjack as a strategy game, and they are happy to admit that it can be beaten. They’ll even give you a basic strategy card and let you use it at the table. It brings players to the tables. But after claiming that blackjack is a beatable strategy game, they won’t let you play if you actually use a winning strategy, even though you are playing within the rules. That’s dishonest.

BTW, casinos rarely kick out counters. What they’ll do is have a pit boss sidle up to you and quietly say, “I’m sorry sir, but we’ll have to ask you to stop playing blackjack, because your play is too strong for us.” They won’t accuse you of cheating, because you aren’t. And they won’t kick you out of the casino, because they are happy to let you play all the sucker games. They just won’t let you play the game you’ve actually studied and know how to beat. But if you kick up a fuss about it, THEN they can boot you from the casino. Not for counting, but for the disturbance.

16

They will not throw you out if you tell them you’re counting cards. They will throw you out if you’re winning too much, even if they don’t know why.

17

No, they generally won’t. They’ll just stop you from playing blackjack. And even then, they’ll probably let you play if you are spreading bets below $100.

Nope. Do you know what they actually do with whales who win a lot of money? Offer to comp them another week, or even offer to fly them home on the casino’s private jet if they’ll just stay a little longer.

If you aren’t playing blackjack, the casinos are very confident that they’ll get your money if you stay long enough. And they are right.

There was a case of a player in Europe who learned how to spot and ‘clock’ defective roulette wheels, and he scored big in a number of casinos. They kept inviting him back and comping him, certain that he’d lose eventually. When he didn’t over a long time, THEN they suspected cheating and refused to pay up. He sued and won.

In general, casinos don’t care if you win or lose. They look at the total amount of action that goes through the casino. They have had ‘whales’ win so much that it actually affected their P&L statements and hurt the stock price, and still comped them to everything to get them to come back and keep playing. They know that eventually the casinos get it all back, and then some.

18

I don’t think they’ll stop you if you’re losing. Count away, they’ll say.

19

But many tables on the Vegas strip (and elsewhere) do not allow new players to start playing “mid-shoe”, or in between shuffles of the decks. this is precisely to ward off group counting.

Often it is less “throwing them out” and more of a polite (at first) “suggestion” that perhaps the counter may enjoy playing the roulette or the slots or craps instead of blackjack.

20

Everything in your assumptions is wrong. Card counters aren’t affecting the odds of the game at all. They aren’t dishonest. They don’t scare off other players. Okay, they do threaten a casino’s revenue stream. But they don’t walk off with millions.

The edge you get from counting cards at blackjack is tiny.

When casinos were first legalized in Atlantic City, my uncle decided to try his hand at card counting there. He was successful. He said he won a couple hundred dollars, and he’d never worked harder for a buck in his life. He wasn’t caught, but he never did it again.

I can believe that people working in groups and placing large bets can actually win a lot of money. (From the house, not from other gamblers. They don’t affect the odds for other gamblers.) A lone card counter can’t do that, not without risking a ton of money and/or getting caught.