dhanson sez…
Right on. It truly amazes me how so may people think it’s the first or the last person at the table that ruined their chances, or kept the dealer from busting or [insert excuse here].
It’s all about math.
Enright3
I live within a few hours of driving distance or a $49.00/50 minute plane ride (With the time difference, you actually get to Vegas 10 minutes before you leave SLC.) and loving Vegas as much as I do, I go there 7 or 8 or 10 times a year. In fact, there is a big possibility that I will be there this weekend for our annual office softball tournament/wild-ass party.
Anyway. . . .
Yes, the place has turned into much more than gambling. They are taking your money in other ways but even so, you can find some pretty good deals on quality rooms, food, entertainment, etc. You just have to go through certain avenues to get them. For instance, you can get a $140 room for $65 dollars if you don’t use an agent and go on a weeknight. You can get the same $20.00 meal for half (or less) the price if you walk across the street to another casino. In fact, I have found that the cheaper the price, the better the food. Entertainment can be a lot of $$$ (Seigfried and Roy are $80+ if I remember right - I may be wrong), but there are other things that are low or no charge (Treasure Island pirate show (hint: Nab yourself a patio seat at the lounge before the show starts), the Medieval dinner at the Excaliber ($35 ?), Volcano at the Mirage, The God/Goddess show in Caesar Palace Mall, the magic shop in New York, New York, and one of my favorites, the rocket ride at the top of the Stratosphere.
Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that with a tiny bit of research, Vegas can be fairly inexpensive with little or no change to the quality.
As far as the Roulette, betting against yourself (same color chips) would keep you even, the house doesn’t win, you don’t win, therefore, you are taking up space and wasting time (that sounded snottier than I intended - sorry).
Dealers want someone sitting in the seats who are going to donate some cash or win enough to keep them interested in donating some more cash. You were doing neither.
JMHO - With two of you, you should have been betting craps.
>^,^<
KITTEN
Coffee, chocolate, men . . . Some things are just better rich.
Diane Says:
<HR><BLOCKQUOTE>As far as the Roulette, betting against yourself (same color chips) would keep you even, the house doesn’t win, you don’t win, therefore, you are taking up space and wasting time (that sounded snottier than I intended - sorry).
Dealers want someone sitting in the seats who are going to donate some cash or win enough to keep them interested in donating some more cash. You were doing neither.</BLOCKQUOTE><HR>
Not true. The casino always gets 5.26% of your money in roulette (if the wheel has a 0 and 00. A single zero roulette wheel has a house advantage of 2.63%). In the case of betting red and black, you lose both bets when the ball lands on 0 or 00.
Beeruser: You say that the casino has an interest in preventing you from making really stupid plays… That’s not true either. There are some games in Vegas with truly horrendous odds. The field and hardways bets in craps, the big six wheel, Keno, the tie bet in baccarat, etc. In fact, the casinos routinely ‘salt’ otherwise good games with sucker bets in order to fleece the especially stupid.
Atrael: The subject of the ‘correct’ plays in blackjack is simply not open to debate. Blackjack can be completely dissected by computer, and the mathematical expectation for every optional play is known for every composition of the deck. The exact correct strategy for every combination of dealer’s and player’s cards has been known since the mid 1960’s. Arguing that your way is better is like arguing that 2+2=5.
For the record, splitting two face cards is correct in a multi-deck game under the following circumstances: If there are six extra 10 value cards for each deck left, you can split 10’s against a dealer’s 4, 5, or 6. If there are five extra 10 value cards per deck, you can split against a 5 or 6. If there are 4 extra 10’s per deck, you can split against a 6.
Note that your way of doing it ‘when you see a lot of low cards go by’ almost certainly isn’t good enough. True counts of +4,+5, and +6 are quite rare. In a six deck shoe, you would have have to see 30 extra low cards go by in the first couple of hands to make the bet correct against a 4, for instance.
I played professional blackjack for a long time, and even though I was willing to split 10’s in some casinos I still only got to do it perhaps once in a month, playing 8 hours a day.
Thanks everybody for their answers, I believe I have more insight know into the reasoning behind the “no black and red” rule.
Steviant: I thought “smurfs” (aka “schtroumps”) were the little blue men invented by comic strip artist Peyo, not money launderers. I would hope that children aren’t watching cartoons promoting illegal activities!
dhanson: Thank you for the tutorial. Maybe I should take the time and memorize the “basic” blackjack rules (i.e. those not involving card-counting), and stick to that. I’ve always been told that blackjack has the best odds, as long as you stick to the rules and don’t follow your “hunches”. Though a friend of mine claims that “pai-gow” has better odds than blackjack.
Jacques Kilchoer
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
dhanson sez…
This reminds me of National Lampoons’s Vegas Vacation. It cracks me up when they’re at the ‘casino’ where they have games like: “Guess what number I’m thinking of”, and “How many fingers am I holding up behind my back?” Now THAT’S funny!
Enright3
Diane says:
I agree with you 100%. However, when you’re with your girlfriend and two other couples, there is the “peer” pressure of not wanting to look cheap. I already felt embarassed for insisting on a $80 hotel room when our friends were staying at the Paris for $190. (They did have to fight for that price though, since the Paris hotel claimed that the rate was $290 and they had no record of a $190 reserved room.)
Again, that’s probably true. But I make the common mistakes that most beginners probably make, viz.
- High stakes scare me, so I go for the low stakes games, which are probably the worst odds (I’m ashamed to admit I even played some slot machines and video poker!) I realize it’s probably smarter to risk $50 on a craps table than $10 on a 25cent slot machine.
- I don’t understand most casino games, only the simple ones like blackjack and roulette, so I’m afraid the other players will get impatient and/or I’ll do something really stupid (like we did on roulette, which I though I understood.)
Jacques Kilchoer
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Pai gow has a terrible vig, almost as high as roulette. This is because they rake 5% of the winning bets. Even if the game is played with true 50/50 odds, you lose 5% over time.
The absolute best guaranteed odds in the house are almost always at the craps table, assuming you are allowed double free odds or more (in Vegas, almost everyone allows at least that). In a true indication of how a gambling establishment makes money, you won’t even find a space for this bet on the table. If I remember my stats on it correctly, the vig gets lowered to something like .63% with double odds on a pass/don’t pass bet. Blackjack, without counting, won’t get you below 1%, again if I recall correctly. Someone with a book on the subject could fill in the precise #s.
Vegas has sure changed from when I first went there in 1967!
FWIW,
At Casino Niagra I went to join my husband who was winning at craps. They would not let me play with his chips, but he could hand me a stack, I put them in my own area, and made my bets myself. I think it’s just casino policy that each better must be playing with their own chips, that’s all.
Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
http://www.angelfire.com/ny3/zettecity/index.html
mon cher Jacques, “Smurfs” is cop slang for low level drug money launderers. It’s generally used for people whose occupation is wandering from bank to bank all day and making small cash deposits, deposits too small to require reporting to the authorities.
DsYoungEsq: The exact house edge in blackjack depends on the rules, and is almost never above 1%. Some single deck games with good rules actually give the basic strategy player a slight edge without counting. Your average Vegas multiple-deck game probably has a house edge of between 0.4% and 0.7%, putting it in the same range as craps with double odds.
An average blackjack player who doesn’t do anything horrible like stand on a 12 against a 6 or double a hard 15 against a ten, but who DOES make common errors like standing on a 16 against a 7-10, not hitting a soft 17 or soft 18 against a ten, doubling down on a hard 8 against a 5, etc. is probably playing with about a 1.5-2% house advantage.
If you play ‘mimic the dealer’ and always hit anything below 17, the house will have close to a 6% advantage.
I don’t think Pai Gow is as bad as you make out. I’m not a Pai Gow player, but as I understand it you only pay the 5% when you are banking, and the banker has more than a 5% edge. The house banks for one round and then the bank rotates around the table. Since you have the advantage when you are banking, and play against many other hands when you are banking, it is actually possible to gain the advantage in Pai Gow if the other players don’t know what they are doing, or if they bet a lot more against you when you are the bank than you do when they are the bank.
If you want to play an ‘even money’ type of game where you have roughly a 50/50 chance of winning, stay away from red/black on roulette. Your best bets for this are to bet the bank in baccarat (house edge around 1.17%), or bet the pass or don’t pass line in craps and take odds (house edge around 0.8%)
Any other game in the casino that offers odds as good as this also requires some skill. Baccarat requires no skill, as there is no strategy (despite the losers you see frantically writing patterns down on the little sheets the casino supplies). Just put your money down on bank or player (bank is slightly better) and hope you win. In blackjack, you better have completely memorized the basic strategy table for the game you are playing, or you’ll be giving the house at least twice as much of your money as the other games.
Stay far, far away from slot machines. Some of them actually only have a house edge of 1% or so, but the problem with slots is speed of play. You can pull the handle 400 times an hour, so your bankroll will be eaten away very quickly. A $1 slot with a 2% house advantage will cost you $8/hr on average, but that includes the jackpots. While you are waiting for a big jackpot you’ll probably bleed close to double that. In contrast, if you play basic strategy blackjack very well, and play at $5 tables, you’ll only play maybe 50 hands in an hour, at a total long-run cost of maybe $1.25/hr.
Not many newbies in Vegas will realize that playing the $1 slots will cost you 16 times as much money per hour as playing $5 blackjack. Playing the .25 cent clots still costs you five times as much as $5 blackjack, and probably more than that because the lower-cost slots have a higher house advantage.
If you go away for a weekend and play 16 hours, the house profit in the blackjack game will only be $20, yet you may put $4000 in chips into play during that time. You can see that your luck only has to be slightly better than average for you to come home a winner.
If you play $1 slots, you’ll put $6400 in cash into action, but the house profit is $128. It takes a lot more luck to come out ahead in that case. Oh, and I should point out that to get the best odds on a slot machine you always have to pay the maximum amount of coins, so you’re putting $5 per spin into the slot machine, and a weekend’s worth of slot fun will therefore cost you $640 vs $20 for $5.00 blackjack.
Here’s a quick hint for saving money in Vegas: The next time you book a room, tell the front desk that you want the ‘casino rate’. They will transfer you to the casino floor, who will tell you the requirements for that rate. It may be something like 4 hours of blackjack a day with a $25 bet or something similar. Maybe a lot less, depending on the time of year. If you agree to that, you will be a preferred guest of the casino. When you arrive you can go to the VIP line, etc.
The last time I was in Vegas, the casino rate for a suite at the MGM Grand was $119, while the regular rate was $379.
Casino rate at the Mirage is $79 per night. Some of the smaller casinos like the Stardust have casino rates as low as $39.
It is correct to stand on 12 against a 6, unless the true count is less than -1. Right?
I stayed at the Imperial Palace for four weeknights in August. It was $20/night for the first two night, free for the third, and $35 for the fourth. No minmum play. I wouldn’t call it luxurious, but it’s clean and it’s right across from Caesar’s and the Mirage. Can’t beat it on the college budget.
The single-deck game at Slots-A-Fun (outside Circus Circus) is in the player’s favor. It is also home of the Giant 1/2 Pound Hot Dog for only 99 cents! Oddly, after playing blackjack and drinking until 5:30 AM, this sounds like a good idea. It is not. At least I didn’t add cheese, chili, and sauerkraut for 50 cents each, which would have sent me directly to the Toilets-A-Fun.
The Tournament of Kings at the Excalibur is fun, in a WWF-meets-Renaissance-Faire sort of way. Each section represents a country, and you can yell for your knight. We were Austria. Where else can you yell “France sucks!” and “You suck, Spain!”?
Dr. J
er, yeah. I meant HIT a 12 against a 6, but this isn’t even a very good example because that play happens to be very close. A better example would be to hit a 14 or 15 against a six, which would be a big error.
But the most common errors are doubling errors, splitting errors, etc. One of the costliest mistakes is to not split aces, but I’ve seen a lot of players do this. You should always split 8’s, but a lot of players stand on 88 against a ten.
Maybe the most common error is to stand on a soft-18 against an 8, 9 or a ten. The correct play is to hit. Taking insurance also costs a lot of money, unless you are counting.
With all due respect to dhanson, who seems quite knowledgeable on the wonderful world of gambling (“human fantasy meets mathematical reality with inevitable results”), the correct basic strategy play for soft 18 is hit against 9 and 10, and only hit against ace if the game you’re in requires the dealer to hit soft 17. Do not hit soft 18 against 8. Soft 18 is also an excellent double-down that most players miss. If this is going to turn into a blackjack thread it might as well truck on over to Great Debates.
True. I’m glad we have resolved the 12 against dealers 6 question.
dhanson, my point was this: there are a lot of sucker bets in the casino (if you even play roulette, you are a sucker), but for the casino to condone stupidity on top of the sucker bet is going too far. Like I said, casinos would prefer “fair” play to promote an image of good guy than to milk every dollar out of their customers and ensure their never coming back. Pointing out a dumb play will always look good, and in the long run will benefit the casino. After all, it’s all about the long run.
As for the casino’s actual policy on this, I don’t know. But advice from floormen and dealers seem to reflect this.
As for the big 6 and big 8 on craps. Hell, everyone knows you get better odds on the place bets. But gamblers in heat don’t care about odds, they go for the emotion of winning, even against the odds. But the red/black doesn’t fit into this, it’s just plain stupidity.
There’s always another beer.
Stevient’s right. I’ve gotta stop drinking so much cough syrup.
Blackjack question:
I saw a $5-$5000 limit table when I was recently in Vegas. To me there is a no-lose strategy as long as you have lots of “walkin around money”. This involves always starting out at $5 and each time you lose simply double your bet until you win. After you win, and each time you win, immediately drop back to $5. I’ve often wondered if this strategy would work and would like to get the opinion of the more experienced blackjack players out there.
In this scenario you’d have to lose 10 hands in a row before the system breaks down. Doesn’t that seem pretty unlikely following the basic strategy rules? Or is it?
The bets would be (assuming you keep losing):
5
10
20
40
80
160
320
640
1280
2560
This would require you to have $5115 of “walking around money” to play. Remember, you always bet only $5 after each WIN. It seems you would slowly build up money in $5 increments. Each double bet (after a loss) gets the previously lost money back.
Would this work??? Opinions?
I can personally attest to losing streaks of 7 or more hands in a row at a Blackjack table. Sometimes, that’s just the way it goes. There is certainly a better chance of losing 8 to 10 hands in a row than there is winning 8 to 10 in a row (due to the inherent house odds). Yes, there are times when you can gain a slight advantage based on counting and correct strategy, but overall the player is at a disadvantage (else, the casino would not offer the game).
According to your theory (called the Martingale system), a person losing 8 hands in a row would have to bet $1280 just to get back to a net of zero! Who among us has the nerve to plunk down $1280 at his point? Remember, the cards have no memory of the previous 8 hands. And what if the deck has an unfavorable count? You should be lowering your bets, not raising them.
Any bettor in this situation would be best advised to cut his losses rather than chase them. I speak from general casino experience. Believe me, the theoretical breaks down under actual playing conditions of a sustained losing streak.
It’s called the ‘Martingale’ and in the long haul, it’s a loser. You can see detailed explanations by doing a Deja search with alt.fan.cecil-adams in the forum field.
Stephen
Stephen’s Website
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Your ‘can’t lose’ system is called the ‘Martingale’. If it actually worked, roullette wouldn’t exist in any ‘for profit’ establishment.
Stephen
Stephen’s Website
Satellite Hunting 1.1.0 visible satellite pass prediction
shareware available for download at
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