Here is a very interesting article about casino security from Popular Mechanics:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/computer-security/4341499?click=main_sr
From the article:
I know a friend of a friend that quit his job to become a professional black jack player. When my friend told me that, I said WTF!!! I’ve heard of professional poker players, because you aren’t playing against the house…but blackjack is against the house and the odds are in favor of the house over time.
This friend claimed to have made $200k in about 3 months, quit his job to start gambling full time. What really happened was he was gambling on the weekends, had some good days…winnings of $20k, $30k here and there. Got fired from his job, because he was bored and unproductive. He was also having some bad days, losing $30k, $50k here and there. Finally when his fiance finally kicked him to the curb, he had lost $250k in savings, and was in debt to a couple of casinos for about $200k. He sold his house, recouping about $50k in equity, which he used to pay down his casino debt. Moved back home with his parents and got a sales job, working for 100% commission. Enrolled in gamblers anonymous and is slowly…slowly working his gambling debt off.
Well I knew a guy who supplemented his income by card-counting. According to him, the counting itself was easy (just a little memorization and a bunch of practice); the hard part was disguising it so he wouldn’t get thrown out of the casino. He also stopped because the variance was too high: even playing perfectly at 3% advantage all the time, it’s way too likely to have a losing year just by chance. He wasn’t comfortable with that much risk for that amount of money. And this was several years ago; from what I understand most casinos have made it much more difficult to count cards since then.
I am a well known high stakes BJ player. It is not a get rich quick scheme, it’s a slow grind using your brain and a little skill to reverse the house edge. In a given hour a high stakes player may have the expectation to win $300 but may actually win or lose 30x that due to variance. If you play long enough, skillfully enough, against decent games, and have enough bankroll to withstand swings of 500 to 1000 betting units then you might be able to make a living at it. You will not, however, turn a small bankroll into a large bankroll without an incredible amount of luck or a giant advantage (like Mohegan Sun’s recent triple down promotion) or a serious work ethic with almost no personal overhead or expenses.
Todays blackjack is not like the blackjack of the 1970’s and 1980’s when there were single deck dealt to the bottom games everywhere. Playing those games it was indeed possible to turn a small nest egg into a large bankroll. THe blackjack of today is mostly 6 and 8 deck games with $50 and $100 minimums required to play the truly beatable games. You need a large bankroll to grind out a good enough profit to stay ahead of personal expenses. Thankfully I play for an infamous team.
Casinos can get pretty paranoid and see counters where there aren’t any. I’ve seen many players get tossed over the years for counting when all they were doing was playing progressions and hunch betting and getting lucky. This is why the casinos that make the most money are typically those that just let the players play and don’t worry about giving up 1% to maybe 1 or 2 players a week.
Don’t waste your money, buy a good book, subscribe to Wong’s BJ21.com website, and study at your kitchen table. Mathematically challenged? There are count systems out there so simple anyone can do it.
The Windsor Canada casinos had a law suit against card counters. When the judge reviewed the case he found that counters lost frequently. If they played perfectly ,for a long time, they may wind up a little ahead. But it was still gambling. The judge said it was not illegal but reserved the casinos to ban whoever they wanted to. That is what they do. They send other casinos info on good players and attempt to ban them everywhere.
I am the person responsible for ejecting people from a casino on the strip in Vegas. In the two years I have had this job, I have never (as in not even one time) observed or even heard about someone ejected for counting cards or cheating at a live table game.
In the (admittedly frequent) case where Security is asked to remove a person from a game or eject them from the casino, your interpretation of the reason for the ejection is probably not accurate. You might see someone successfully counting cards and getting ejected, where Security might not even be aware the person is counting and is ejecting the person for another reason. An average of 4 or 5 people a day are trespassed from the casino for various reasons, like trying to scam other casino patrons, disorderly conduct, refusal to provide identification when asked, undesirable activity (like the homeless people trying to claim credits from untended machines or take cigarettes out of the trash), and a hundred other reasons. When you see a card counter being ejected, it’s likely because we recognize him (or, very rarely, her) as having been previously trespassed, and not because he is counting cards.
The strategy being used by the MIT crew who won a few hundred thousand at blackjack is not something you can pull off as a single person. It’s not even something another crew using the same strategy could get away with again, and parts of their strategy are actually illegal. Counting cards is not illegal of course, but using any “device” in your card counting scheme IS illegal. Using a device to signal your friends to sit down at a “hot” table could get you arrested. The MIT crew used devices to alert each other when a table was “hot”, and then the second player would sit and make much larger bets. This fooled the surveillance people because it was not one person varying the size of their bets based on the card count, but it is not legal, because a device was used.
Individual card counters are not a threat to the casino. I’ll bet a hundred people a night win some significant amount of money playing blackjack at the property I work for, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that none of them are banned just because they won.
That was going to be my observation. And wouldn’t card counting be next to impossible once you get 7 or 8 decks going?
The odds are the same no matter how many decks you use. The difference is instead of playing all the way through 1 or 2 decks, casinos will reshuffle partway through a multi-deck shoe. And maybe(not sure, anyone know?) put back cards that were already played.
Right. But counting cards (if I understand the general principle) is based upon observing the number of high cards versus low cards in the stack, and thereby betting big when there are lots of Aces and face cards versus comparatively fewer small cards. In a 7 or 8 deck stack, there are so many possible variables that I don’t see how any system, or rain man-esque level of mental fitness, can help you calculate an advantage for more than a few hands out of hundreds.
The mid-way shuffle makes sense, though. Part of me thinks that the casinos themselves love the card counting lore. For every successful card counter, how many dorks who failed high school math do you think lose their shirt at the casino thinking they can count cards?
It’s too much work to either add or subtract 1 to a given number?
Isn’t team counting illegal? And if so, should you really be talking about it here?
Why would it be illegal?
You apparently work for a more progressive casino. Let me tell you that Caesars and many other properties 86 counters on the first offense as company policy. I’ve been kicked out of my hotel room in the middle of the night by security guards.
Nobody is required to show ID to a casino mall cop. You are not required to have ID to be in a casino. A casino can request to see your ID and you are within your right to deny their request. A casino can of course always ask you to leave in response. I hope and pray for casinos to attempt to backroom me for refusing to cooperate with them…it’s the highest EV play there is and I have a bunch of lawyers in various parts of the country ready to take their 40% cut of the resulting lawsuit settlement
Finally, the MIT team never used devices. They generally just had spotters at tables who signaled the big money players when the count was good. There were other teams who used a variety of hidden computers, cameras, and devices and that all came to a halt in the mid-1980’s. Now if someone uses a hidden computer they are arrested for cheating, as they should be. I suggest you read “The Big Edge” by Mark Billings about a major computer team in the 1980’s.
Neither illegal or immoral. Team play simply involves 2 or more players combining bankroll to allow for lower risk and bigger bet sizes. It is quite legal, and quite normal, for people at the same table to share information and playing advice with each other. If you’ve ever played blackjack people chat back and forth constantly about how to play their hands, how much to bet, whether to double down or split, or all sorts of other stuff. Teams just communicate other information and do it on the QT to avoid casino countermeasures (like kicking them out).
Generally it is legal to share almost any information, including what the dealers hole card is if you happen to see it, with the rest of the table as long as you are actually playing at that table. What is not legal is “spooking” which is someone not playing at that table getting a some sort of hidden edge (like seeing the hole card) and then signaling that information to players in the game.
In response to Mosier: I doubt a signal to someone else that the odds are good at a table is considered a device in the same way a card calculator or computer of some sort would be…
Shoes are just as easy to count as a single deck game. They just don’t provide an opportunity to get an edge as often. Maybe 1 shoe in 3 gets hot enough to bet more than the table minimum. Most shoes stay neutral during which time the house has the advantage. Only 1 shoe in 5 or 6 gets hot enough to bet your maximum wager.
If you can add and subtract the number 1 from another number that is how hard it is.
OK, when you said you were part of a counting team, I thought you meant where one player keeps making minimum bets and then signals a big-money player when the odds get good.
This is why Team-Based play can be more profitable, the big player can surf from one good shoe to the next while the single player has to wait things out.