“device” is not very well defined in the statute. I was under the impression that if it isn’t part of your body, you can’t use it to affect the outcome of a game. If I get sone time soon I’ll look for legal cases to cite, but for now I’ll concede that pont.
You don’t need a ‘big player’ to form a team. One of the big advantages of team play is that it reduces variance. Because the tables are not dependent trials, each member of the team can bet the amount as a percentage of the bankroll as he would if there were no other players.
Let me explain: Sizing your bets in blackjack involves something called the “Kelly Criterion”, which is the relationship between the size of your bankroll and the amount you can bet for a given advantage. If you bet more than the Kelly maximum, you will eventually crash your bankroll to zero.
The Kelly maximum is found by multiplying your advantage by your bankroll. So if you have a 1% advantage over the house, you can bet up to 1% of your bankroll on that specific wager. Most players use a half Kelly bet to avoid unpleasant swings. So if you have a $10,000 bankroll, and the count goes high enough that you calculate that you have a 1% advantage, you might bet $50. And if you have a 1% advantage, that $50 bet has an expected value of 50 cents. Whoo boy!
But now add 10 people, each of whom has $10,000. Now you can pool your money, and each of you can bet as if your personal bankroll was $100,000. Your profit now goes up by a factor of 10, even though you aren’t commicating with your team in any way. They don’t even have to be in the same casino with you.
As for being banned, in my experience the casino will leave you alone so long as you’re not ‘betting black’ (i.e. your bets stay under $100). The only real risk to the casino’s bottom line comes from the very small number of individual players who have bankrolls big enough to be betting thousands of dollars per hand, or from teams.
Individual low limit counters are generally not a threat and are left alone. They’re good advertising. Most low-limit counters lose money because they don’t spread their bets enough, or because they are missing critical bits of understanding of the game or of how to count, or because they let their superstitions override their knowledge. And the ones who do make a few bucks at it go home and tell their friends all about their exploits and become a source of advertising for the casino.
Card counting is fun recreationally. Play $5 tables and spread your bets 8-1 when the count is high, and you can make a few bucks over the long haul and counting makes blackjack somewhat more interesting than watching paint dry. But counting for a living is really, really hard. I’ve done it. I don’t recommend it. I made money, but it was gross, tedious work.
If you want to make a living as a gambler, learn poker. Poker is orders of magnitude harder to learn (to the point where you can make money), but it’s more fun, and the profit potential is higher.
That, and the ones who made a few bucks are likely to still be poor players, and made their money the old-fashioned way: By getting lucky. But, of course, to them, the fact that they came out ahead is “proof” that their method worked, and they’ll tell all their family and friends about their “proven” method, and then their family and friends all use it and most of them end up giving the casino money.
Reshuffling only makes a difference if you put all the cards back into the deck. Merely reshuffling the remaining cards doesn’t change anything, since they were already sufficiently randomized.
So you’re saying you are in charge of kicking people out of casinos, but you aren’t really clear on the law involved in doing so?
Start with two million…
I’m guessing that Mosier just kicks out the folks his boss tells him to kick out, and trusts that the boss knows the law. It wouldn’t actually make any difference, though, since he’s not arresting them. Casinos generally just exercise their right to refuse service to anyone.
Actually, the question was whether someone who uses a device to signal a second player when to start betting is violating the law. I had a chance to read up on the law since my last post, and “device” is not defined. NRS 465.075 is the statute that appears to cover this possibility, which outlaws the possession with intent to use “any device to assist in projecting the outcome of a game, or in analyzing the strategy for playing or betting to be used in the game” inside licensed gaming establishments. I am not aware of any court case in which this statute was used to prosecute someone for using a device to signal a second party to begin betting, but I am not a lawyer. It seems clear to me that this statute makes it a class B felony to do so.
That’s not what I said at all. You don’t have to be breaking the law to get kicked out of a casino. Even if you were breaking the law, it’s for the police to enforce, not me. The most I would have to do with enforcement of the law is give a phone call to the agency in charge of enforcing gaming law to see if they wanted me to detain someone for them. I would not detain someone for any reason under my own authority.
To be clear, I work for a casino, not a government agency. The “back room” is a myth that might have been true 20 years ago, but only exists in hollywood now.