In fact, variations in bet size are generally limited in order to curtail the use of betting systems (some of which would, in theory, work if an unlimited range of bets were possible and permitted).
Wait, what? Is that a song?
[/confused and extremely OT]
A bit reminiscent of the Knack huh?
Thought you might be familiar with the folk tale. How did you acquire that handle?
Eh? This is the sound of your reference whooshing over my head. Do explain.
Oh, yes. I’m terrible at picking SNs, and I’ve been lurking here for ages and ages, and I resolved that as soon as I thought of a semi-decent username, I’d register here. This one popped into my head, and here I am! But unlike our anti-heroine, I have no children, nor any homicidal tendencies, and I’ve no desire to be a ghost–fear not!
If you’re talking about Martingale progressions and other ‘systems’, you are wrong. If not, what do you mean?
Sorry, tdn, I’ll be brief.
La L, I was expressing fear that you were lurking so closely.
Although you’re eloquence is a whole new side of you I was not aware of.
And the allusion was to My Sharona by the Knack.
This is the part of the “counting is moral” argument that I don’t understand. As long as casinos are allowed to boot counters, they can have less restrictive rules for the game and offer excellent odds. Once the casinos are made unable to bar counters, they have to screw with the rules of the game to even be able to offer it anymore.
Before you go off and blame the casino, it is a business. They can’t offer a game where the edge is to the player, and card counting puts the edge to the player. Blackjack already offers the best odds in the casino when you don’t count and just play proper strategy. It is somehow moral for card counters to swoop in and force the casino to change the rules, making the game worse for every other player?
If you don’t mind, I’d also like to reiterate that counting is not a skill. My 5 year old nephew can count cards. Not getting caught at it is a skill. Your definition of a skillful card player is “doesn’t get caught doing X”. That’s a good definition for a person who cheats at cards, but is not really a good definition of a person who is just skilled at playing the game.
Why don’t they just use a fresh deck for every hand? Or have 3 shoes from which the dealer may randomly choose AFTER the player makes his bet.
They tried this in New Jersey. The Gaming Commission said no.
Because the dealer may not be choosing randomly. He may be choosing from the “hot” shoe when his accomplice bets big.
The primary way in which they screw with the game to prevent counters doesn’t really affect non-counters - and that is to change the rate at which they shuffle the shoe. A six-deck game with only 1/2 of a deck cut off is eminently beatable by a counter - a six-deck game with three decks cut off and no mid-shoe entry is almost impossible to beat. Yet the basic strategy odds do not change one bit. In fact, cutting three decks off saves money for the other players, because it lowers the number of hands per hour the house can deal, and therefore the hourly cost to the losing player goes down.
One area where counters do change the odds for other players is when they are allowed mid-shoe entry. Counters who do this force the other players to play more hands with poor odds and fewer hands with good odds. Again, if it’s within the rules to do so, it’s moral. If it’s not, you shouldn’t do it, period.
Sure they can offer a game where the edge goes to a GOOD player, as long as the majority of players aren’t so good. There are some video poker machines that will return a small positive expectation with perfect play. The casinos can offer that because 99% of the players do NOT play perfectly.
In fact, there is a general rule in the casino that the games with the best odds are the ones that take an understanding of the game to attain those good odds. The games that are essentially a coin flip (slots, roulette, etc) tend to have the biggest house ‘rake’.
If everyone played the skill games with an equal amount of skill, the casinos would be forced to lower the odds for them or stop offering them. For example, the casino can offer pass-line bets and odds bets in craps, which have very low house rakes, because they sprinkle the game with real sucker bets that players routinely take. Likewise in baccarat - the bank/player bet has a very low advantage for the house, but the tie bet will kill you.
The fact that they count on players to be stupid does not mean it’s immoral to be smart.
Of course counting is a skill, and no your 5-year old nephew cannot count cards profitably. Are you under the impression that counting cards is just a matter of adding a one to a running count when a 2-6 comes out, and subtracting one when a face card comes out? If so, you’re missing 90% of it. Here’s the mechanics of what a counter actually does:
First, he calculates the running count. I agree, a 5-year old can be taught to do this. However, I’d like to see him manage to do it while the dealer is firing out 13 cards in rapid succession. Then he has to estimate the number of decks still in play by looking at the shoe, and dividing the running count by that to get a ‘true count’, which is the real measure of the player’s advantage.
Once the player has the true count, he has to refer to his memorized table of strategy changes to see if the count affects the way he should play his hand. There are 18 different strategy changes that are important to the winning player. Things like hitting a 6 vs a ten on a negative count, while standing on it when the count is positive. Should he hit his 12 against the dealer’s five? (yes, when the count is -2 or lower) Etc. Some systems have dozens of strategy changes that must be memorized.
Then you have to know how much to bet. Knowing that requires an understanding of the ‘Kelly Criterion’, and one of the biggest causes for blackjack players to fail is the lack of understanding of how bet size correlates to bankroll growth. Bet too much, and you’ll lose your bankroll no matter what your advantage is. And if you don’t spread your bets enough (i.e. betting 1 unit at neutral or negative counts, and 8 units at high counts), you won’t beat the game.
Then there’s game selection. Knowing how to vary your play based on the various rules at various tables. Knowing what to look for, such as deep penetration.
And finally, there’s the huge skill of being able to do all of this in real time, with near perfect accuracy, and all the while maintaniing conversations with people around you, putting up with distractions like the waitress showing up to ask you if you’d like something in the middle of a deal, etc.
Yes, it takes real skill to be a winning blackjack player. Enough of it that for every winning player there are probably a dozen who have learned how to add and subtract one and keep a simple running count, but who don’t do enough to break even, let alone win.
Having the dealer choose from three shoes would enable the players to blame the dealer’s choice for their losses, rather than it be the luck of the cards. Plus, a dealer could count the three shoes and select the shoe with the count favoring the bets on the table in order to increase their potential tokes. If a computer picked the shoe for the dealer, the players could suspect that the computer is counting the shoes, and picking the shoe with the worst count for the current bet levels.
Actually, I believe Craps has the best odds apart from card counting Blackjack.
In addition, some casinos will allow a [url=“http://www.casinocenter.com/htp/craps/crp2.html"]"free odds” bet
[/quote]
, which can reduce the house’s edge.
Though I have to admit, how the house’s edge (1.4%) is determined is mathematically escaping me.
Preview escapes me often, too.
I’ll second what Sam Stone said. Not sure what you mean by “a skill”, but card-counting is EXTREMELY difficult to do. Even after you have memorized the technique and then spent hours and hours drilling, and feel that you have mastered the rudiments, you will find that actually doing it at a casino is near impossible. At the rate dealers go, you’ll be lucky if you manage to even see all the cards, much less keep an accurate count. And let’s say by some miracle you manage to do all that, your play still has to 100% perfect. A couple basic strategy mistakes and you can wipe out your entire advantage. I tried to learn card-counting, and believe me, you’ve got to be a fanatic to want to put in the amount of effort it would take to do it successfully.
It’s not cheating. This sounds exactly like the incessant whining about “cheating” I heard during the heyday of Street Fighter 2. Of course, blackjack involves a lot more money, so naturally tensions run a lot higher, but using what works for Guile or Chun Li or Zangief is. Not. Cheating., and neither is counting. And as far as I’m concered, it’s only immoral in the sense that any kind of gambling is immoral; it’s only a question of who profits.
It does give the player an unfair advantage. However, it’s the responsibility of the casnio to find the counters and take them out or find some way of negating this advantage. Thankfully, this is what they do, rather than going to the courts or some other ham-fisted measure.
Personally, I have a very hard time sympathising with a casino that gets taken. It’s their choice to have the game, and if it’s one where a few smart, dedicated players can make a killing, they gotta be prepared for that. If they use multiple decks or shoes, they have to deal with the gripes (and really, any casino that can’t handle gripes doesn’t deserve to be in business). If they ban popular high rollers, there’s backlash to deal with. These places rake in tons of cash every day; an occasional loss on one lousy game isn’t the end of the world.
Otherwise, I’m with the consensus on counting: If you’re gonna do it, be as discreet as possible and get the hell out while you’re ahead.
Little nagging aside…I can understand giving a harsh lecture to a suspected cheat, maybe even a little intimidation, but is a forced trip to the back room actually, well, legal? (Much less BATTERY, and let’s not try to sugarcoat this.) I saw the recent bio of Ken Uston on the History Channel, and what happened to him was downright chilling. I was flabbergasted that nobody even attempted to press charges over that.
Let me put it this way, basic card counting, which WILL put the edge to the player, is to keep running count / true count that Sam mentions and altering your bet for the hand based on it. Complex variations are complex, I won’t claim they are simple. Is this basic card counting strategy really harder than memorizing basic strategy? That’s the basic strategy chart, and you need to learn that cold before you even think about counting. There are 160 different possible plays to memorize on this chart, and apparently the chart changes depending on the specific rules of the casino.
The reason playing basic strategy is not a “skill” is that there are no rules against it, no restriction on discussing it with other players, no restriction on keeping a crib sheet with you at the table. If card counting were legal and allowable, I’d put together a little clicker thing like baseball umpires use and just click my way to profits. Or keep a public running count with the other players at the game. Hey guys, we’re at +3 for this hand.
That’s the inherent difference between something being legal and something being illegal. Card counting is a skill today because you have to do it on the sly. Put it out in the open and it becomes no more a skill than playing basic strategy.
Card counting is not immoral, but for casinos to allow it is impractical. Casinos exist to offer you unfair bets; they continue to exist only because you take unfair bets; if they cannot offer you unfair bets, there will be no casinos. If you dislike this, play only among friends (or against enemies you are prepared to watch like a hawk). Personally I do dislike it. YMMV.
And the ‘basic’ level of card counting you mention isn’t enough to win. Again, unless you understand bankroll management, how to calculate your advantage so you can apply the Kelly criterion, and how to do all this very quickly, you’ll still lose money. You’ll just lose it more slowly.
Basic strategy is also a skill. Why are you trying to define that away?
That’s a ridiculous way to define a ‘skill’, and by that definition playing chess well is not a skill, and neither is being able to build a bridge. There are no rules against building a bridge, no restrictions on discussing it with other engineers, and engineers use ‘crib sheets’ and even calculators and computers while using their skill.
Again, card counting IS legal. The only reason it’s not ‘allowable’ is because the CASINO is not acting ethically. You’ve got it backwards. The casino is offering a game of skill advertised as such, but kicking out players who are A) playing within the rules, and B) exhibiting skill. I have NEVER seen a sign that says, “Card counting not allowed”.
As for using a ‘little clicker thing’, using a mechanical device while gambling is a felony in most states.
No, the difference between something being legal and something being illegal is whether the rules are being followed, and NOT whether you are good enough at a game to make the casino decide they don’t want you playing it any more.
Casinos behave with borderline ethics in many ways. They set up sucker bets to fleece the stupid and ignorant, and bury them within the normal play of games. They ply their customers with free alcohol to screw with their judgement and make them lose more. And they advertise a game of skill, then instruct their pit bosses to sneak around and quietly kick out anyone who shows enough skill to actually win at the game WHILE PLAYING BY THE RULES. If you have any outrage at all, it should be directed at the casino, not the players.