Acting convincingly stupid or drunk is a key facet of most casino scams. Acting like an MIT math major while playing is likely to lead to a street door, even if you are too dumb to count.
My brother used to be a counter. (He know plays poker against people not good enough to be in tournaments.) He said that some casinos, especially downtown, used to advertise blackjack games that were amenable to counters, on the grounds that it drew in business especially from those who thought they could count better than they can.
I think the problem is that the casinos are not making money whenever there isn’t a hand going on, which includes time shuffling either a big deck or a single deck. Thus it is cheaper for them to look for counters and escort them out rather than giving up money at every table through reduced betting volume.
My brother did get kicked out of some places, politely, but also counted while doing a drunk act.
What if you’re a big-time high-stakes gambler, and the casinos wanted to get you to play, so they offered you a 20% rebate on any losses you have? That would shift the EV way onto your side. You’d think they’d never do that, but that’s exactly what several Atlantic City casinos did for Don Johnson in 2011. There’s a big article about it in April 2012’s The Atlantic. In a very short time, he took the Tropicana for $6 million, the Borgata for $5 million, and Caesar’s for $4 million. And he did it without card counting.
OK, when I read that book a few years ago, I wondered about that. Everything was secret, so how did the author know that the people telling him weren’t exaggerating or just making it up? And how do I know that the author didn’t exaggerate or make it up?
So what are the real facts behind it?
Ok, but the point I presented was that casinos are worried about cheaters. Cheaters will try to bribe dealers, engage confederates, try to pass counterfeit money and chips, mess with the machines, create distractions for someone else doing something illegal. I don’t think they care about the idiots with a system, but they don’t know if he’s a rube or someone who will use any weakness in the casino to steal.
Real facts: there were (and are) several different blackjack teams associated with MIT. They have been (and continue to be, to a lesser extent) successful at counting cards using the group “big player” strategy to mask their bet variation. And casinos are wise to this strategy now and are more likely to be suspicious of high-rollers moving from table to table.
A lot of the stuff in the book is based upon interviews with Jeff Ma and embellished from there.
I read that. I’m curious how much that guy has lost over the course of his gambling career. The variance in blackjack is huge. It’s easy to go on a hot streak, even with poor play. (And it’s easy to play perfectly and still lose 30 hands in a row.) In my experience, the kind of people who get this level of treatment from casinos are not long-term winners.
The basic issue around banning card counters is precisely what the Wiki link says:
If every idiot and his grandmother could rent a space, buy a table and a few decks of cards, and set up shop as a blackjack dealer, then who is allowed in or not is irrelevant. Since casino licenses are generally tightly rationed by the state, then those lucky enough to acquire one cannot suddenly start to exclude a class of customer simply because it makes profits bigger. They are the equivalent of a public service.
thanks for all the discussion on my original question
I used to work as a dealer back in the mid nineties.
We had 6 deck shoes, normally cut 1-1.5 decks deep.
Only had a counter once at my table, he wasn’t asked to leave, but at the next shuffle I was directed by the pit-boss to cut the shoe to at least three decks.
I went back to the same casino next year, and I see that they are now using automatic shuffling machines.
Moved to the Game Room.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I worked in casinos in Vegas and Reno on and off for decades. One of my best friends in the early 80s was an infamous security head at a giant casino. It’s amazing how superstitious casino bosses are, and how totally power-mad. Back then, the floor man would fire a bartender for wearing red socks, even if it wasn’t in the job handbook. He’d shrug and say “Red is unlucky.” The management at casinos have pretty much the full cooperation of the owners, the local government, and the police. There isn’t too much they can’t do on a whim.
My point is, even if you were a bad counter, they just resent the attempt. To them, it’s like an affront, like making eye contact with a gang-banger. They also think any kind of confrontation or competition is bad luck, and these guys have “luck” on their mind most of the time. Casinos may now be mostly corporate, but the floor bosses and shift bosses are still pretty old-school. At their level, the games aren’t run as normal businesses … why would they be? The “business model” of the casinos has worked for a long time.
The “best” game is heads-up against a dealer with a single deck. You needn’t actually increase your bet when the deck goes good. Instead you start after a shuffle with big bets and decrease them if the deck goes bad. Nevertheless, it’s a difficult game: dealer and/or floorman is likely to suspect you’re counting; a key may be to make friends with, or somehow “hypnotise,” the dealer, not skills that I possessed. In a few cases, at single-deck tables, the dealer was instructed by floorman to shuffle after every hand when I was playing.
So most of my play was against a shoe of 4 decks or more. Much less favorable overall, but it led to long streaks with favorable odds which the house was unlikely to shuffle away.
I rarely saw as little as 1.5 decks of a 6-deck shoe cut-away. Often I’d not be seated for the cut; I was a “one-man team” so walked around tracking multiple tables. In an earlier thread I mentioned that you could sit at the bar in the Las Vegas Club downtown and, with good eyesight, count three 6-deck tables simultaneously using an overhead mirror! Unfortunately they caught on to me quick – I walked over and sat down at a good table but floorwoman immediately came over and ordered a premature shuffle.
There’s one (little-known?) trick that worked in some casinos due to their rigid shuffling regime. Starting with a six-deck pack whose composition into ten-rich clumps and non-ten clumps you know because you just observed the complete previous round of deals, the dealer separates the pack into two halves, each with about 156 cards. The top 26 cards or so from one of these halves is combined with the top 26 from the other half and shuffled (however thoroughly, it doesn’t matter) and the result is placed aside. This is repeated with two more 26-card chunks, and the result placed on top the previous result. And so on. The completed 312-card stack is presented to a player for the cut. (It’s often easy to arrange to be the cutter.)
Do you see? If, for example, the 2nd twelfth of the starting deck and the 8th twelfth were both ten-rich (which you will know if you observed previously), then the 2nd sixth (from the bottom) of the new deck will be ten-rich! Obviously you need to watch the player’s cut. This will give you a huge advantage over ordinary card-counting.
My play was decades ago. The only casino I remember with certainty to have used such a shuffling regime was the Casino near Sitges, down the coast from Barcelona. (This may be one reason why, during the long-ago aeon when I traveled in Europe, Barcelona was one of the few destinations I chose for holiday rather than by employer command. It was a happy period for me – part of a brief interlude between callow hippy boy and jaded approaching-middle-age man. :dubious: )
Just to clarify things a bit, the effort spent by casinos attempting to identify card counters/advantage players is effectively nil. Hollywood has glamorized the whole issue to make you think there are fat men twisting their mustaches in smoke filled back rooms while poring over hours of video surveillance trying to spot these people.
Reality is that card counters are obvious, and take no effort at all to spot. Of the few people who are counting correctly, almost none of them are adjusting their play accordingly. Of the few that are counting correctly and adjusting their play accordingly, none of them are worth the casino’s effort and reputation to intervene.
From the casino’s point of view, catching card counters requires less effort than writing the dealers’ break schedule, or changing the signs on a table, or documenting chips moved on to a table from the cashier’s cage. It’s a non-issue. There is pretty much zero effort from the casino expended on it.
Couple of questions if I may -
What does this mean (what’s a “gang-banger”)?
What is the point of card counting if their play isn’t adjusted accordingly?
Cheater’s justice!
I’d always heard that the casinos liked the “typical” card-counter just fine, because, as Mosier points out, the “typical” card-counter sucks at it. What you have then is an over-confident player, which will do just fine for the house. Rather surprised by all the talk in this thread to the contrary.
Much the largest share of a counter’s advantage comes from varying bet size, not varying playing strategy.
Optimal playing strategy does vary with the count however. Among strategy changes most important against a favorable count is to stand (or surrender if permitted) with 16 (or perhaps 15 or 14) against Dealer’s Ten.
One strategy change – which is a tell-tale of a counter (or a foolish player) and not to be attempted with a weak heart unless you’ve taken your beta blockers – is to split Tens! This is normally a very bad play, but becomes good against Dealer Six or Five (etc.) if the deck is sufficiently rich in Tens (and Aces or Nines). Since you’re likely to get resplitting opportunities in a Ten-rich deck this can become very scary very quickly. 
Okay, but does this really happen that often?
No casino could throw out someone who merely has a run of wins or else they’d soon have no customers at all. I’ve had nights when I seemingly could not lose, and nobody threw me out.
I believe Mosier is right; casinos don’t give a crap about blackjack card counters. Few people do it, most people who try it are bad at it, so why would they worry about it?
Casinos have a lot of security problems that need to be prioritized way, way in front of card counters.
It seems to me that there could be significant marketing value in loudly making a big deal about card counting. It gets the suckers thinking, “wow, those counters must be able to make some serious money!”
Counting is easy. Anyone who can count to ten can do it with five minutes of training.
Knowing what to do with that count and sticking to the strategy are much harder though. It’s not a question of “what’s the point?” It’s a question of having the ability to detach your emotions from the game, and having a LOT of patience. Card counters will have “streaks” just like everyone else, and occasionally will be betting quite a bit of money where they have a slight advantage, but lose anyway. It’s not an easy thing to remain analytical and calculating in the face of such dramatic circumstances.
You go home now. You been here four hour!