Are you saying if you count cards in a casino, and the casino is aware that you are doing so, it will not throw you out?
Counting cards is not technically cheating, but casinos in Vegas can and will throw you out for pretty much any reason (so long as it’s not illegal discrimination), especially if they suspect you of counting cards.
It’s not hard to get your action refused at the Barbary Coast. I managed it with a $5-$25 spread–I wasn’t even counting strictly, I was just getting lucky. (I was also a little drunk. And by a little, I mean a lot. And the Pit Boss was clearly in a bad mood. Maybe it’s not so easy.)
There is one way to win at craps–find someone who is betting the don’t but not taking all of their odds, and ask if you can bet the rest of them for them. That’s a positive-expectation bet. I’m pretty sure they don’t let you do that, though.
Dr. J
No it isn’t. So called “free odds” wagers on both sides of the line have a zero expectation. Don’t odds on 4/10 pay 1:2, 5/9 pay 2:3, and 6/8 pay 5:6, meaning that free odds wagers always pay at true odds.
One interesting note is that free odds can always be ignored when analyzing any betting strategy, because they will always net zero. In effect, the free odds wagers do nothing except increase your variance, often dramatically, thus running through your bankroll much faster.
Having said that, it is still mathematically correct to recommend always taking maximum odds.
I would recommend taking anything ccwaterback has to say about gambling with a grain of salt. He has been wrong about almost everything he’s said on this forum.
HAHA!!! Sam Stone you are a riot. You need to spend more time praising your own posts with one of your aliases, as you are so well known to do.
I suppose if you think it’s unfair for a casino to boot you out for being successful, you should remember that the casino is private property and it contributes mightily to political campaigns to protect its interests (in addition to straightforward corporate taxes) whereas you, Joe Gambler, are the equivalant of pond scum in the eyes of local lawmakers.
I’ll agree with Sam Stone here. This is the second thread having to do with gambling/Vegas that ccwaterback has posted this drivel in. I’d be interested in seeing something besides your own anecdotal evidence ccwaterback to support your assertion of “badgers”.
I’ve never heard the term “badger”, but I personally knew a “shill”. She was a very lovely young woman, employeed by the house, to loiter around the Bacarat table and generate interest. One of her other “dutys” was to keep certain people in the club, encourage them to drink and play. She was pretty good at it and caused many a poor sucker to loose a bundle of cash.
She told me the best ways to get a sucker to give his money back to the house was to have them “teach” her to play craps or blackjack (where she played with his money, very poorly) or by getting them drunk. (I had the misfortune to witness a few minutes of this once)
This chick was pondscum. Her moral character was equatable to the curd what thrives on the underside of municipal toilet bowl rims.
Catch and Release: Synopsis of the Criminal Justice System
At least you have the opportunity to write your memoirs and to take round trips through various talk shows telling about your exciting cosmopolitan life as a professional gambler. This will get you some money after being banned.
Anyway, I’m interested (not that that’s what I want to do, just curiosity) how making a living on sports betting is supposed to work. Are they middling bookmakers, searching for slight differences in odds for the same event at different bookies?
OK, I stand corrected. Vegas is one big Disneyland where all the smiling faces working behind the counter are cheering you on hoping you win a bundle. Vegas just loves people like you. But anyway, you just have to go there enough to see things as they really are.
Wow gatopescado, you have some big cahonies making a statement like that. Didn’t you know Vegas is a skeaky clean place that always plays on the up and up?
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bibliophage
moderator GQ
Sam Stone likes to throw a lot of facts and figures out about gambling. I think most of what he says is true from a theoretical standpoint. Although, I am beginning to wonder if he has ever actually gambled in a Vegas casino. Since he seems to be very sensitive to my derogatory remarks about Vegas pit bosses, perhaps his goal in life is to be one of those annoying robots? He seems to possess all the repulsive qualities they require.
Blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, can someone explain what the two rules above regarding craps mean, to a person who has never player craps befoe, but always thought it was interesting?
I assume by “bet the don’t pass” it means you are betting against the player rolling, betting that he will not make his roll? And when you say to take all the odds you can, does that mean bet on higher odds (like 8:1) as opposed to lower ones (like 3:1)? Or is it the other way around?
ccwaterback: I was a professional gambler for years. I have nothing to do with the casino industry. I’m one of the guys they don’t like playing blackjack. Now I play almost exclusively poker, but I still play the occasional blackjack game.
The stuff you are saying is just typical rumor and urban legend, typically propagated by losing gamblers to make Vegas seem sinister and mysterious, and to explain their constant losses.
Vegas isn’t mysterious. The math they use is the same math used by insurance companies. They offer a gamble with a positive expectation for the house. By and large, the games are honest, and the people that work there are just people with jobs like anywhere else. The mob is long gone, and the suits are in charge.
And they’re sitting on a gold mine. They’re not about to ruin it by hassling people and cheating on games to get a couple of extra percentage points.
If you want to find scandal in Vegas, there’s plenty of it. Just not where you are looking. Instead, have a look at the close relationships between the casinos and the government.
Schnitte:
Sports betting can be profitable for several reasons: First, the house likes to ‘balance’ their action. The handicappers for the house will examine the games and set what they think the line should be. But if the public bets heavily the other way, the bookmaker is at risk. So often they’ll move the line slightly to try to balance the action. Give enough odds so that people will be induced to bet the other side.
If the house had bets of equal volume on each side of a wager, they are guaranteed their 5-10% profit. Some people have claimed that the house ALWAYS tries to balance the action, but that’s not true - sometimes if they think the public is wrong they’ll let them bet one side, and essentially the house is putting up its own money on the other.
The other reason they don’t always balance their action is because in so doing they could get ‘middled’.
But in general, the house will set the line to roughly match what the public thinks it should be. But the thing is, the public is usually right. Most sports lines are pretty damned accurate, and there’s no profit to be made. It’s like the perfect market theory in action - the price is pretty close to the correct estimation of probability.
So where’s the profit? Well, there are a LOT of sports games in a day, and the bookmakers have only so many handicappers. They can’t follow them all as well as someone who focuses on individual matchups. So people who become expert in a certain sport can sometimes spot differences that the public doesn’t see, and the bookmaker doesn’t factor into the odds. That’s where the profit lies.
Typically, the profit in sports betting is made in sports where there are a LOT of games. College basketball, for example. It’s like a thinly traded market - given a small enough pool of investors and obscure enough information, the market is no longer ‘perfect’, and you can exploit it. Think about ‘value’ investors in the stock market, who study companies extensively and use information they’ve learned to make smart trades. Same thing.
However, if you’re not a true expert, and not willing to do the work, don’t go near it. The level of commitment required is tremendous, and does not consist of just reading the sports pages and following your teams. The guys I know who are successful have encyclopedic knowledge of their sport, have spreadsheets full of results and adjustment factors for things like weather and injuries, etc. And you have to be very good at the math.
I tried it for a while, lost a little bit, and gave up on it. Mostly, I just followed the plays of people I trusted. I don’t have the interest in sports that would make it fun, so for me it would have been tedious accounting work for little profit.
This looks like a good place to describe a rather interesting gambling scam:
There are people at horse racing tracks who will walk around and offer ‘hot tips’ on horses. Here’s how it works:
Let’s say there are 8 horses in a race. They’ll go around telling people, “I know a guy who works in the stables, and he knows something… Horse 1 is going to win.” Then for the next person, it’s horse 2, then horse 3, etc. Repeat for as many people who are willing to listen.
Now, after the race, there will be a few people who got the right horse. So now they come to you and say, “Hey, do you know who’s going to win the second race?” And the response is, “Look, the first time was a freebie, but I’m not here to give away my secrets. If you want my advice again, it’s going to cost you.”
Another variation: Walk around the track telling people you know who’s going to win, and you’ll give them the information in exchange for a percentage of their profit. You don’t want any money up front, which shows you’re honest. Just a percentage if you’re right. Do that for 8 people, and give each one a different horse, and youv’e just guaranteed yourself a percentage of a guaranteed outcome. And of course, now you have the opportunity to hit the guy for cash up front for the next piece of information.
The internet equivalent of this is companies that send out spam offering 'guaranteed sports betting insider information for big profit!". Here, the math is really on their side. They can send out 1,000,000 spams saying, “here are our FREE PICKS”. Then a random team or two. After the round, there will be thousands of people you sent the right pick to. Then send another one saying, “Notice we were right about last night’s game. Now here is your LAST free pick.”
After that one, you’ll have hundreds of people left. Now hit them up for your super-premier “Winners club”, for only $500 for a year. Point out that if they had followed your last two picks, they could have already paid for it! Imagine the profit over the next year!
There are numerous variations on these scames, of varying degrees of sophistication. The moral is that you have to be very, very careful in the gambling world when anyone offers you a good deal. Just remember, there are no systems that offer easy profits, no get rich quick schemes, no ‘surefire betting tips’, or anything else.
And always be wary of strangers offering advice. Hang on to your wallet.
That scam isn’t limited to sports betting and horse racing. I’ve also heard it used as a stock-picking scam – send out 100 emails or letters to various people saying “I know what company X’s stock will do next week,” with half predicting rises and half predicting losses. Repeat the next week for the 50 that got correct “predictions,” repeat the third week for the remaining 25, etc, etc, until you’ve got a handful of suckers willing to pay anything for your miraculous investment advice.
Of course, there’s always the pesky matter of staying one step ahead of the FBI and SEC.
Yeah, the stock market, that’s where I work and play nowadays. I go to the casinos once in a great while for a couple beers and giggles. Well the stock market actually does make casinos look like Disneyland. There is so much scandal on a day to day basis in the stock market, it’s just amazing. I mean you sit and watch a stock jump 20 percent, no body knows why, then ten minutes later a news release is issued. Now if that’s not dirty pool, I don’t know what is. But it happens every day, it’s just part of the system. Oh well, if you don’t want to play, don’t sit at the table 