I am not a gambler but, as near as I can tell, no one was actually cheating. They simply came up with a system which would let them win at blackjack a little more than they lost. So, they made money.
For various reasons the scheme fell apart but, it worked for a while…the betting scheme worked. Why aren’t loads of people trying to do the same thing? The game is the same so the same scheme should still work…I think. So, why don’t we see this being done again?
While it’s not illegal (you can’t get arrested for it), you can get thrown out of a casino if they detect you doing it. And the playing and betting patterns you use for this technique are apparently easily detectable by casino operators.
Plus they’ve added things like multi-deck card shoes, shuffling more often, and automatic shufflers that offset the advantages of this betting system.
When you’re counting cards, the fewer decks there are, the easier it is to figure out when the count is in your favor. As soon as they shuffle, you’re back to square one in terms of your count.
While casinos do have several options that limit the usefulness of card counting, they also have an interest in maintaining the perception that blackjack is “beatable.” They probably make more from rubes with dumb “systems” or who can’t keep a count in their heads than they do from genuine card counters.
In fact, most casinos will actually sell books about card counting in the gift shop. The really bad card counters (of which there are plenty) are a steady revenue stream for the casino. The highly-skilled, big-money teams like MIT put together, nowadays they can detect and stop before they lose too much. There’s probably still some happy medium where you can count and make a little bit of money while still being low enough that the casinos don’t care, but they make it up from the other players.
Is there any rule about when the casinos may or may not shuffle? If a new player sits down at a table and starts off with a table-maximum bet (which could be a sign of a counter), is the house allowed to shuffle right then, after the bet is placed but before the deal?
One of the difficulties with them is ‘Who do you trust?’ The BP (big player) is walking around with thousands of dollars of cash and casino chips that change hands very quickly; some of them succumb to temptation (or suspicion) and the team falls apart.
While Counters can be trained pretty quickly and be easily replaced the BP requires considerable training and practice and is difficult to replace once he has been identified. Casinos do share information about known BPs and team members.
The fact that the BP gets all the big comps, penthouse suite, show tickets, gourmet room, etc., can cause friction among team members when trying to decide a fair split.
@Horatius
Multi-deck shoes don’t concern card counting teams; they more likely help. Count teams don’t use automatic shuffle machines – in fact most players won’t use them either.
@Chronos
In Nevada some casinos may shuffle up when suddenly seeing a very big bet. The boss will have to make a judgment call – is this a rich guy with money in his pocket we want to welcome and cater to or a professional team? Mostly they’ll choose to watch the action for a while and get lots of surveillance pictures in case they end up having to back the guy off. It’s the gambling business – you don’t want to run off the well-to-do players who came to gamble.
I can’t answer for other states, but in Nevada, there is nothing in the gaming regulations that specifies when a deck/shoe can, or cannot, be shuffled. In fact, a number of games are played with “card shuffling machines,” where the discards are pretty much put right back into the deck.
Nothing new about this; a Doonesbury comic strip from June, 1985 shows a game where Frank Sinatra is complaining that the dealer is shuffling the deck.
And while you can’t be arrested for counting cards, you can be barred from the casino, and subsequently arrested if you try it again in the same casino.
Meanwhile, what IMO is the biggest weapon against card counters is 6-5 - that is, if the player gets a blackjack, it pays only 6-5 instead of the normal 3-2. 6-5 started out with the single-deck games on the Las Vegas Strip, then spread from there. There is a tribal casino near where I live that advertises, “We pay 3-2 on blackjacks on all of our games!” Yes, it does have single-deck and double-deck, and How About That, those are the most popular games there.
Here is the transcript of a ten-year-old episode of This American Life about a group of Christian card counters. And here is a documentary about the same group.
Following that incident of cursing at the dealer the casino manager came out of his room wearing his bathrobe and punched Sinatra in the mouth. His (the casino manager’s) brother was still working at the Sands when the place closed in 1996. I was working there at the time; the story was told to my by the brother and is widely known classic Vegas.
If you’re wondering, yes, Sinatra called her a cunt.
I assure you someone somewhere is absolutely doing this.
The reason you don’t see them doing it is that they don’t want anyone to notice.
Continuous shufflers will eventually end card counting. They are not used in most places, though, because they’re incredibly expensive and at higher end games the players bitch about them.
The cartoon was based on a real incident, though……but IIRC it happened at the Atlantic City Golden Nugget Casino in 1984. Of course, other similar incidents happened over the years. It was surprisingly difficult to find a contemporaneous non-paywalled account of the story, this one was written several years after the incident.
but it was difficult because of all the articles that referenced this incident at the Sands
The biggest change for Sinatra came when Howard Hughes bought the Sands in 1967. The new management failed to continue the liberal accounting policies used to justify Sinatra’s casino debt, and the singer flew off the handle one night in September after his credit was cut off.
“He got up on that table and started yelling and screaming right in the middle of the casino,” says Anka, who claims to have witnessed the debacle. Hotel Vice President Carl Cohen was summoned, and when Sinatra threw a chair his way, the burly casino boss punched him in the mouth. The blow knocked the caps off Sinatra’s two front teeth, according to newspaper reports at the time.
The last time I went to Vegas, most of the casinos I visited had phased out most of the live blackjack tables for computerized ones where you place your bet on a touchscreen and the cards are dealt on a big screen in the middle of the table. I don’t know what the law is regulating those kind of machines, but in theory it could reshuffle the entire shoe instantly after every single hand and make card counting completely impossible.
I’ve also seen computerized tables for baccarat, roulette (where the wheel is under a dome and the ball drops in after bets close), and craps (where the dice are in a big Pop-O-Matic Trouble type dome and the shooter hits a big button on their terminal to launch them.)
