big bets.
So in a 30-60 fixed limit game, a big bet would be $60. That means in the first two rounds of betting, every bet and every raise comes in $30 incriments. In the second two rounds, it’s $60. So 300 BB is 300 x 60 or $18,000.
Whatta chump. The real money is in hanging around the blackjack table looking for suckers who think they’re due for a Full House.
In one of the Richard Feynman books he mentioned his experiences in Las Vegas, speaking with a professional gambler. As Chronos said, the money was all on side bets. Standing at the craps table he’d some rube on whether the dice would come up (for instance) eleven before or after they came up ten “the hard way” (double-fives). He’d know the odds on each configuration of the dice so he’d know which bets to make, and how often he was likely to win.
bb stands for big blind. Every round, there is one big blind and one small blind. These rotate around the table and create a small pot at the beginning of the round.
Yeah, that was Nick the Greek, and that’s how I found out about him. Except I meant to type “craps” instead of “roulette”.
And then after doing this for some time, he started being recognized as a ‘professional gambler’ so amateurs and tourists would start seeking him out and taking whatever bets he offered just so they could say they’d played against (and possibly beaten) Nick the Greek.
And then, he met Johnny Moss.
I guess I will be the first one to mention Bringing Down The House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions. These young geniuses did indeed make millions in Las Vegas in the 1990’s by card-counting blackjack. However, their real strength wasn’t quantitative. It was in playing roles and switching their own “high-rollers” in and out of games when the odds became favorable. They built up a massive bankroll and amassed money much more quickly than the more typical stories given in this thread by placing equally large bets when the math indicated it. The hard part wasn’t cracking the strategy for a given casino’s blackjack tables. It was avoiding getting kicked out which is the biggest problem of successful card counters.
It is a good book if you ever want a true life suspense story. They didn’t do anything illegal and they really did make millions.
Do any casinos have single-deck blackjack anymore? With the multideck game it’s much more complex than it used to be.
You can find single-deck “blackjack.” I put blackjack in quotes because most places these days pay 6:5 on a blackjack instead of 3:2, and I can’t believe that there are enough people stupid enough to play it to make the game profitable. I mean, there obviously are, but you’ll never see me playing it. The difference in house edge is amazing, going from something like 0.05% to 1.44%. You’re better off playing a six-deck or even eight-deck game.
I don’t think this could be a profitable method unless the sweet spot was very wide, which I’m sure would be extremely rare. You are betting that the score lands in the sweet spot, and if it doesn’t you have to pay (typically) a 10% vig to the bookie you lost with. You would have to have the score land in what would probably be a very narrow sweet spot roughly one out ten times just to break even.
No, while BB can stand for big blind, in this case it means big bet. The big bet is typically twice the big blind, which can lead to confusion.
It should be noted that the team documented in the book wasn’t even close to being the first “MIT blackjack team” to take Vegas for a bundle.
[Bolding mine] This was the big question back when I was interested in blackjack. The blackjack newsgroups used to debate this question endlessly. All the casinos considered card counting illegal. Their attitude was that blackjack, like any other casino game, was only an amusement, a game. You weren’t supposed to try to actually make money from it. You were supposed to just enjoy the thrill of playing. Card counters, needless to say, didn’t agree. As far as I know, the state of Las Vegas didn’t actually rule that card counting was illegal. But it didn’t make much difference, because the state did give casinos the right to bar anyone they wanted. So card counters were out of luck and had to devise various strategies to cover their card counting.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m under the impression it doesn’t make any difference anymore, because even if you know basic strategy cold, even if you’re an expert card counter with a team, you just can’t swing the odds in your favor no matter what you do. The eight decks, the fact the dealer only goes so far into the shoe, the reshuffling and the local rules all ensure that the house retains at least a slight advantage. Which means, grind it out as long as you want, you will eventually lose it all. This wasn’t the case so long ago, but it is now.
You still hear about places where they use only two or four or six decks, etc., but I’m pretty sure all the serious gamblers are now in poker and sports, where they grind away as described in numerous posts above.
I read the Wired article about these guys, and I remember thinking that the winnings weren’t that impressive when you considered the amount of labor that went into the enterprise. And, as MIT grads, they presumably could have been earning good money at regular jobs, so there was a substantial opportunity cost incurred.
Thanks. I stand corrected.
A couple points about playing poker for real.
2BB is an ideal. I don’t think there are many who make more than that, but there are a lot who make less.
Also, making 2BB an hour might be easy in a 3/6 or 4/8 game. There are some really bad players, and at a 10 person table, you might only have 3 people who know how to play well. But when you get to money that you can actually live on. . .10/20, or ESPECIALLY 30/60 and higher, there are people at the table who are better than you, and at a full table, you’re probably competing with 7 other people for the dead money from 3 suckers. And you’re competing against the rake. You can be a good player, and break even at a table like that.
FWIW, the last time I was unemployed, I played 30-40 hours a week online. This was back in 2001. It gets boring, frustrating, and stressful, and I ended up making about $4 an hour over about 6 months. And, I got totally burned out on the game.
A piece of good advice I once got concerning this. After an hour of play, look around the table. If you can’t spot the sucker by then, get up and leave, because it’s you.
The Wired article is blocked at work, damn nannies, so I can’t see whether the article factors in the value of the comps the players received as part of their earnings. I saw a documentary on an earlier incarnation of the team and the comps they received were worth tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And having worked at a regular job and having partially supported myself playing online poker, I can attest that playing poker is way more fun than any job I’ve ever had. I wasn’t in it as a revenue stream long enough to get burned out the way some others who’ve commented have but I didn’t get burned out.
Betting on the horses is another good example of this; it’s considered a game of skill because it’s something you can learn if you apply yourself to it. Probably natural inclination helps, too. This is why racetrack betting has been legal in most places for years and years, while most other kinds are illegal except in NJ and NV, and on Native American owned properties.