Because your hitting patterns give you away.
If the count is low, you will hit in cases where conventional strategies would say “stick.”
The math and strategy associated with betting with positive expectation is completely different from that with negative expectation. As others point out, in the former case variance is your enemy, in the latter case variance is your friend.
This also gives insight into the “paradox” that the higher-variance bet is best at roulette. Note that roulette bets are NOT all equal-vigorish if considered from house’s point of view. While casino has the same 5.26¢ expectation on customer’s $1 bet on either red-black or single-number, the casino is wagering only $1 on the red-black bet but $35 on the single-number.
There’s large variation from casino to casino. My very first bet at Barbary Coast was $5; my second $15; the floorman pushed the $15 back and told me to stop playing. :rolleyes: Many casinos recognized me after years and, rather than barring me, would play shuffle-up with a single-deck or “deal down” with a shoe. I was never sure whether I was “in the book” or my nerdy demeanor just gave me away. :dubious:
The average payout is not per person or per visit, it’s per bet. If you recycle your winnings, you usually end up with less than the stated payout. If you keep recycling your winning over and over, eventually you end up with zero. You can see the same thing play out much more quickly at your local lottery ticket store. Buy $100 worth of tickets and win $20. Use the $20 to buy $20 more tickets and win $4. Use that $4 to buy more tickets and win nothing. The average payout in this example is 20%. Now go to a slot machine with an average payout of 97% and the same thing will happen, just more slowly.
The payout is a good indicator of the fairness of the game itself. A totally fair game has a 100% payout. If the game were tilted in favor of the player, it would be over 100%. These don’t exist in casinos because the casinos write the rules to make sure the house always wins. But 97% payout is much closer to being fair than 40% payout.
First of all, you accuse me of just skimming what you wrote for keywords. I did not do that. This is what you said:
First of all, when you say that having a bigger bankroll than a player gives a casino an advantage, that generally means that the advantage is over someone else - in other words, that the player is facing an additional disadvantage over the house due to differences in bankroll size. You specifically said this in partial defence of Wallaby, who was definitely making the claim that this ‘advantage’ makes a big difference to all gamblers in that the casino makes more profit precisely because people bust out of the game due to their smaller bankroll sizes.
When talking about gambling, ‘advantage’ has a meaning that generally indicates how much for or against someone a game is stacked. Bankroll sizes are not considered to be part of a player’s or the house’s ‘advantage’.
And I pointed out that all you have to do is adopt the Kelly Criterion for proportional betting, and your chance of having your bankroll wiped out falls to zero, no matter what the ratio between your bankroll size and that of the house. Bankroll disparities in and of themselves do not mean one side must eventually face gambler’s ruin.
But one thing you never mentioned was that I allowed for the ambiguity in your post by saying that maybe you really meant to say what you are now saying above, and if so you would be correct. So maybe you are the one who just just skimmed MY message, because you didn’t seem to notice that, or if you did you didn’t seem to understand that my making that allowance is a pretty good indicator that I didn’t just skim your message for keywords.
But trust me, your post was pretty ambiguous regarding what you were actually trying to say - maybe just because you’re using the terms slightly differently than what I’m used to, or maybe you started out using them in partial defence of an idea that was wrong.
You know… If you are ‘always’ getting into trouble when people hear words out of your mouth and interpret them in ways you didn’t intend to the extent that it has seriously impacted your life, perhaps the problem lies with your communication skills, and not the stupidity or indifference of the people you are talking to. Just something to think about.
That’s generally true. The old rule was that you were safe so long as you didn’t ‘spread to black’, at least in the big casinos. In other words, you’re probably safe playing a $10 table if you are only spreading your bets up to maybe $80 or so, but as soon as you go over $100, the house starts to take notice.
I’m not sure if this is true anymore, and it wasn’t even universally true back in the day. How much the casino- sweats your play depends on the size of the casino, the mood of the pit boss, and whether you are being an asset to the house or not.
The last one is big. I have seen guys kicked out playing $5 blackjack and spreading to $25. They probably weren’t even playing a winning game with 5-1 bet spreads, and they couldn’t possibly hurt the house for more than a couple of bucks per hour. But they were kicked out because they coupled their counting with jerkish behavior - refusing to ever tip, lecturing people on how to play, rolling their eyes when people make bad plays, refusing to take a hand when the count is cold, etc. A lot of counters are mathy types who don’t necessarily have great social skills. They get caught and kicked out mainly because the casino wanted to in the first place.
I always made sure that the dealers and pit personnel liked me. I never gave them a reason to WANT to scrutinize my play. And I was never kicked out of a casino despite playing significantly higher limits at times than those we are talking about.
Whether any of this holds true any more, I’m not sure. I would not be surprised if casinos are now using machine vision and pattern recognition on every hand through the eye in the sky, and they know exactly who is counting and who isn’t at any given time. In that case, your only chance of survival is to spread low enough that they don’t care, or to get out of the place the minute you go through a shoe where your bets established a pattern.
This is in fact what a lot of high limit counters do now. If they get a shoe with a really high count and put out a big bet, then win or lose they get up and leave the casino. That gives the casino a sample size of one, which they can’t use to establish your pattern being tied to the count. Really high limit counters will roll into a place like Vegas, then hit the casinos one by one, playing until they get a really big count and put out a huge bet. Then they leave and go to another casino. Once they’ve made the rounds of all the casinos in a location, they pack up and move to the next one and don’t come back to the first place for a long time - and while wearing a different haircut and clothing style. They keep meticulous records of where they have been, whether they were noticed by pit personnel there, what shift it was, What they were wearing that day, etc.
That all sounds like way too much work for me, but there are a handful of people out there making really big incomes this way. I know of one who put on a big show as a ‘Whale’, and would bet as much as $10,000 on a hand. But his act was so good that no one ever figured him out. I’m not sure he’d get away with it today.
Should get a player’s card and get comps. Depending on the casino and the game, you can get as much as 60% of your losses comped.
I don’t go to the casino very often, but when I do, I never pay for food.
It’s also possible to count in teams. One player always plays the minimum bet, while keeping count, and once the count gets favorable enough, he secretly signals the “whale”, who comes over and makes a maximum bet. It’s much harder to detect, but it’s another tactic that’s not just against casino policies, but illegal, so if you do get caught, the consequences are severe. And even if you don’t actually get caught, some dealers will shuffle immediately whenever someone new comes to the table and makes a big bet.
I do not find any laws against card counting. It is against casino policies, and they can make you quit playing and/or leave, but it is not illegal, as far as I can tell. Do you have anything that indicates that it is illegal?
True.
I’m not sure about my decision making overall, but my decision to never go to casinos is looking pretty smart. 
Casinos are pretty cool. They have lots to offer, and you can play some of the games for very little investment. Some of the best restaurants in the area are likely to be found there as well.
If you consider it to be entertainment, and have a budget you are willing to spend on that entertainment, it can be a very enjoyable experience.
Just keep in mind that all that stuff was paid for by losses.
It’s not illegal in Las Vegas in the way he described it in that quote. It’s illegal if a device is used.
Yeah, let us know!
I’ll spawn a new thread - I am curious about street craps vs casino craps.
It’s my understanding that it’s also illegal to work as a team by secretly signaling a partner. I might be wrong on that, but I’m still not going to try it, anyway.
Just doing it in your own head, though, without a device nor a partner? That’s perfectly legal. And the casinos probably like it that way: There are a lot more people who think they can count than there are who actually can, and those people are a profit center for the casino. They even sell books on how to do it in the gift shop (another profit center). That’d dry up if it were illegal.
If you are perfect you come out slightly ahead. But any mistake will put you in a whole it’ll take quite a bit of work to dig out of.
They don’t mind the 1 in 1,000 that can actually keep up a perfect game, as it inspires the other 999 to try (and fail).
Actually, the biggest advantage teams have is bankroll sharing. And you don’t even have to be in the same casino to do that.
For example, If you have a 10,000 bankroll and are playing a game with a .5% edge, your average bet should be below $50, or you run into risk of ruin. And if you are a winning player, your bankroll goes up very slowly, so the rate at which you can increase your net worth (or rate at which you can extract money from the casino) also goes up slowly.
But now put 20 people on a team, and each one contributes 10,000 to the team bankroll. So long as you play at different tables, you can treat them as individual systems and each player can play as if they owned the entire bankroll. So now each player is playing with a 200,000 bankroll, and can now bet $1,000 per hand with the same risk of ruin. And 19 of their team members are doing the same at casinos all around town, so the rate at which the bankroll grows is also 20 times faster.
This is the real danger of teams - they tend to have huge bankrolls and can play a lot of hands and take a lot of money before the casinos have figured out what’s going on.
One of the newer things is Vegas and elsewhere is “Bubble Craps,” where all betting and rolling are done by machine. Quite a deal for the casino, since 1) it’s much less intimidating for newcomers, 2) they don’t have to pay three dealers and a pit boss, and 3) they tweak the payouts and only let you take 2X odds. But it was a great way to teach my wife craps (we got back from Vegas about 2 hours ago).
Full disclosure: After an hour or so of play, knowing how to play and what bets are the lowest house edge, I ended up even. The wife, who had no idea what she was doing (despite my explanation beforehand) was just poking buttons and betting on all sorts of crap, like Big 6/Big 8 and hard ways. She ended up +$120.
Just a correction to Corry El - Casinos don’t live off of problem gamblers. These days they live off of LA trust-fund douche bags, bottle service and “beach clubs.” When Tao at the Venetian brings in revenue of better than $60 million/year, gamblers are small change any more.
You’re missing the point.
If you are playing at a $5 craps table, for each time from come out roll to either the making or the crapping out roll, you have $5 in play. That’s it, $5. Takes a few rolls on average for the bet to be resolved. Then, you put down another $5, and do it again. Endless fun.
If you go on a losing streak (say, losing 10 in a row), that can take quite a while to occur.
If you are playing at the same table, and taking odds and placing new bets of come/don’t come on every roll, yeah, the end result is the same if you have plenty of bankroll. But you have to have a much bigger bankroll to do that. AND, if you end up on a losing streak, that money can disappear right quick, because you might well have five or six bets out at the same time, with odds behind each one. In short, each bet becomes not a $5 bet, but rather a $15 or $20 bet (depending on what odds are allowed). Starting from the same bankroll, the amount of time it would take to lose it all is shortened, because your making bigger bets.
Yeah, Vegas is not Vegas any more. It’s VEGAS. Ah, for the good old days when Caesar’s was the biggest place on the Strip, and the space between the casinos and the Freeway was used up by golf courses. <sigh>
Of course, there is a LOT more to do with a family there, now, than when I grew up in the 60s and we would occasionally visit.
This one sentence proves that you are EXACTLY the sort of customer that casinos want.