Professional blackjack players

I recently watched a bit of the Ultimate Blackjack Tour, and the strong impression I got from it (well, aside from the fact that it’s desparately trying to cash in on the popularity of poker) is that there are some number of professional blackjack players in the world. How can that be? Isn’t blackjack always negative EV?

(I also, even more bafflingly, once heard a competitor in a poker tournament described as a “professional slot machine player”. Is that just a euphemism for “guy wasting his inheritance”?)

It’s possible to win at blackjack if you count cards. Most people can’t do this - it takes some skill to be able to count when the cards are flying by quickly, and casinos train their dealers to handle the cards quickly. They also shuffle together several decks, which makes things harder on card counters. And casinos consider counting to be cheating - they will permanently disinvite any player they suspect of counting.

I don’t know anything about the Ultimate Blackjack Tour. Do the players play in a regular casino against house money? In any case, I suspect they allow the players to count for the sake of the tour. Casinos must like it when gamblers are shown winning lots of money on TV. It’s good advertising, and will draw in lots of people who will lose much more than the professional gamblers win on TV.

I’ve gotten the impression that if you’re doing that with only one person, ie, not a team, (a) it’s phenomenally difficult, and (b) it gives you such a low rate of return that you’d be better of doing just about anything else.

Not really. It involves multiple players playing simultaneously, with whoever has the smallest chip stack every N hands being eliminated, last man standing wins. Which adds quite a bit of strategy based on sizes of people’s stacks, kind of like on Final Jeopardy when the third place guy can end up winning because the first and second place people have to bet so much that they eliminate each other.

There’s also the point that your betting pattern will disclose the fact that you are card-counting. Basically, you must bet the minimum most of the time, when the odds are against you; when the count says the odds are in your favor, you must bet big.

To clarify that: They can temporarily or permanently disinvite any player they choose, at their discretion, for any or no reason at all (so long as they’re not deciding based on membership in some legally-protected class). They could, if they wanted, kick you out because you’re ugly, or because you’re the tenth person to walk through the door. Alternately, if they do notice you counting cards, they can choose to let you stay, and might, if it looks like you’re bad at it (so you’re still losing), or if they think you’ll brag about it to everyone you know (which is good advertising).

A group of MIT students made millions at the Las Vegas blackjack tables in the 1990’s. However, they were uber math geeks as well as good actors and con artists. It is hard to see how one person working alone could pull it off especially since casinos are even more wise to that type of thing now.

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N50/50bj.50n.html

You don’t need advanced maths - you’re only keeping track of how many high cards have been played. Concentration is the rquirement.

Also the gains are much less once the casinos use multiple decks and shuffle before the stack is exhausted.

Couple things…Often times in TOUNRNAMENTS rules are changed to give a +EV (since it doesn’t matter to the casino whether you won or lost, your chips have no value). Also, you don’t have to WIN chips, you just have to survive longer than the other guy. So if you both started at 10,000, and you only have 150 left, it doesn’t matter if he only has 25 left. Tournaments are also usually a specific number of hands long. 21 hands isn’t nearly enough time to gaurentee a loss given the game’s standard deviation.

Playing traditional Blackjack is different. Yes, you must count cards. No, there is no other legal way to do it.

The following information is dimly recollected from an article I read several years ago. I think it was written by Stanford Wong.

Slots are almost always negative EV. Once in a great while casinos may hold promotions where, for a brief time, it is possible to get something like a 1% return on your money through special comp packages. These don’t occur often enough to make a living at.

However, slot tournaments are a different story. In these, though everyone is making negative EV bets, a skilled player can gain an advantage by knowing the amounts to wager at particular stages of the tournament. By choosing less-risky bets when he is ahead and making big gambles when he is in danger of being eliminated, he may stand a better chance of staying alive than his opponents do. (This is a big simplification, but I think the basic theory is sound.)

It is thus possible to show a positive long-term return by playing tournaments, even if the game itself is negative EV.

And, on preview, it looks like Cyberhwk beat me to it.

Well, (b first) it depends on the casino management. With good rules for counting (such as only one or two decks, used up completely before reshuffling, no limits on changing bet sizes), counting is solidly positive expected return, even for one person alone. The problem isn’t low return (after all, you can just make bigger bets if you want to make more an hour), it’s the short-term variance. Even though over the long run you’ll be a winner, the advantage is small enough that even a particular year can be a big loser for you, just by random chance.

But the real problem is that casinos don’t want you taking their money. The whole point of teams isn’t having more people counting, it’s have more people betting (at different times), so that the casino doesn’t realize you’re counting and throw you out. Casinos also change rules to make it harder to count. For instance, at the extreme, if they reshuffle after every hand, counting is impossible.

I read Bringing Down the House last year, and it was a very engrossing book. I couldn’t help thinking “that’s incredible!”

Which then made me think - did it really happen that way? What evidence do we have the MIT students really did what’s in the book (and made as much money as described there)?

A team is not required to count cards and tip long term blackjack odds in the players favor.

A single player can count cards and do well…once. It will be very obvious to the house that this is happening. The player will bet the table minimum until the deck (or multideck shoe) is “hot” then start increasing his/her bet as the odds progressivly favor him. As soon as the security staff see the player upping his bet, they will review the video tape (EVERY table in vegas has a camera over it) and see if his bets corrilate to the count. If so the player will be invited to leave, and threatened with prosicution for trespass if he ever returns, and his photo will be distributed to every casino in vegas, Atlantic city, etc.

The reason for using a team is so that the “counter” can keep making the minimum bets regardless of the count…playing well, but over time losing at the predictable rate. Another team member poses as a “high-roller”, always making large bets. But the high-roller comes to a table and plays only when signaled by the counter that the table is ripe. In this way security sees two different players, each betting the same amount on every hand. With elaborate enough signals, the counter can convey the current count to the 'roller who will be flirting with the cocktail waitress, etc, and pretending to be too distracted to keep the count. In this way the 'roller knows when the table has gone cold and it is time to cash in.

One for bad…two for good!!! :smiley:

It’s not that hard to figure out whos counting. The TV shows make it seem like every table is being prodigiously scrutinized for card counters. They’re not. However when someone bets $5 per hand and then jumps up to $75 on each of three spots… :dubious: Things I personally look for…
[ul]
[li]Their eyes follow every individual card as it comes out of the shoe.[/li][li]They usually have stacks of multiple colors (i.e. stack of green, couple stacks of red, stack of fifty cent pieces even).[/li][li]HUGE bet swings ($5 to $75)[/li][li]They take insurance (sometimes they even ask for time to think about it)[/li][li]They don’t tip very often.[/li][/ul]

Honestly this would be very under the radar if you weren’t betting very large amounts. Casinos usually look for HUGE swings in bets which is why the situation you give in your second paragraph is so dangerous to casinos. It’s VERY hard to catch when people are playing as a team. You bet they keep an eye on their big bettors though. Person A always seems to come to the same table as Person B, ALWAYS midshoe then takes off? :dubious:

The house isn’t necessarily going to know what he’s doing. If he’s a real professional he’ll camouflage his play well enough to avoid detection. Basically, he does this though a combination of an act, making small -EV plays to mask his patterns, and mostly importantly, by hitting and running. Don’t play long enough for them to A) start watching you, and B) collect enough data to know if you’re a +EV player.

That means if you want to be a professional blackjack player, you have to travel a lot. You play a casino for a couple of hours, then leave and it goes to the bottom of rotation. You run through all the casinos in town, maybe twice if you lost the first time around and therefore gave the casino no reason to watch you. Then you go on the road and hit the next town. It’s very, very hard to get spotted as a counter this way, especially if you’re also keeping your eyes open for ‘heat’ and leaving once you get it, and if you are smart enough to give up some EV for camouflage.

But you need a huge bankroll to make serious money like this, lots of skill and discipline, and cajones of steel, because you’ll be wagering a lot of money with a lot of variance.

There was a documentary on TV last year about the MIT students and the millions they made. At the conclusion of the program it was stated that casinos now use cards with electronic markers that allow scanners and computers to constantly calculate the card count. This enables the casinos to almost immediately identify teams of players.

As the previous posts indicate, you can win if you know what you are doing. From what has been written, it’s also clear why nobody could be expected to make a living from it.

I used to play occasionally in Reno and Lake Tahoe when I was a student back in the 1970s. The conditions then were much better as most of the games were single deck, the penetration was good and the casinos weren’t as vigilant as they are today. Probably the only reason I was never asked to leave was because I was never betting that much. As a poor student, I could hardly afford to play at the $1 tables and rarely bet over $5.

But the main reason why you wouldn’t want to make a living from it (IMHO) is because it’s so boring. The concentration required means you cannot easily converse with the other players or drink very much. For any given situation, there is only one “correct” play. After several hours of that, even the slot machines start to look good.

Sam Stone, Cyberhwk, and Quercus already said what I was going to say. I’ll just relate back to the OP and say that the type of play you see on TV (tournament play) is vastly different from the play you will see from card counters. As others have alluded to, the point is to survive. Also, you don’t see every hand of the tournament (I guess they don’t want people to practice their card counting).

Whew, you are giving way too much credit to the casinos, which is a sure sign of their PR machine working.

It has taken many casinos many years to catch up with some scams. Usually, the scammers accidentally tip off the casino security teams. (I am chiming in with my conjecture only because others have offered it.)

The perception of the almighty eye-in-the sky cameras, backed by slick casino security hot shots wearing shiny suits routine is comical. A big red flag and arrows pointing to the perpetrators is required, then casino hawkeyes can begin to catch on to what is going on. And when they act, everyone assumes they are right. Ain’t no trial. They dismiss as they see fit.

The reason the perps are treated with such disrespect so often is because the perps routinely outsmart the security gods, and the security gods are bitter over it. Something has to drop into the lap of the security gods for them to notice.

Lots of other people saw them gaining mega amounts of cash. More importantly, they would have declared it on their tax returns as gambling winnings. If they were that smart, it wouldn’t have been too cool to not pay taxes on it and then have some IRS agent read the book and then peak at their returns.

I’ve heard that lots of casinos are either switching to continual shuffling machines, or just not letting people sit in in the middle of a shoe. Problem solved.