My take on it is that the casinos love the winners who will go home and tell everyone about the great time they had in Vegas. If that means that a few people who actually, truth be known, put down thousands of dollars of bets on a weekend make out with a couple hundred bucks of winnings, well that’s okay.
And if too many people started winning too much through even the most legitimate means - well, there just woudn’t be that much purpose to building all of those casinos. So something would give.
But mostly, Vegas would be hard pressed to come up with a better advertising campaign than Lucky Joe Vacationer telling all his friends that Lucky Joe thinks he’s somehow found a way to beat Vegas.
When I was there they hit Downtown, but stood on the Strip. Since they also hit soft 17 in Reno, etc., it led to a simple rule applicable to the entire State:
Dealer must stand on soft 17 if he/she is South of Sahara Ave.
Fair or not, they do tend to get tipped better if a player wins. The house always wins in the end, so they like seeing an individual player or two having a good session.
In terms of general probabilities, the Wizard of Odds is a pretty good site if you want some numbers.
Not sure how long ago that was, but dealers hit soft 17 on the strip now, too. It must have taken the math geeks awhile to figure out what a big advantage that is.
Absolutely no effect. The folks who were winning last game will do exactly as well in the next game, on average, as the folks who were losing last game.
Have you, perchance, read the book Bringing Down the House? Or the Wikipedia article on card counting? Or every other story I’ve ever seen of people implementing legal card counting systems and being forcibly ejected from casinos?
No, because the people who were winning last game were doing so by counting cards or some other perfectly legal system, and were forced to leave.
There are blackjack variants that have a dealer wins ties rule, but that’s mostly to counter the player advantage of the other rules. I used to play quite a bit of Pontoon online, and it always seemed like the variance was higher in that game. But I agree, unless you give me a whole host of rule changes to offset that hit in the odds, I’d never play the game.
I was last in LV circa 1998, but paid little attention to Blackjack as ours was part of a vacation trip to Grand Canyon, etc.
BTW, best strategy for the House is to hit soft 17 except in the case where Six is up and Ace is the hidden hole card. (I dimly recall reading that a few casinos do adopt that variable rule.) The players have stood on their bustable hands (12, 13, 14, 15, 16) and you can hear the groans when the Dealer flips that Ace in the hole. (And no, hitting bustable hands against Dealer Six is not a viable countermeasure! :smack: )
Here’s another example where casinos don’t always follow odds: For a while I was interested in Pai Gow (the tile game, not the poker variant). Caesar’s Palace had a rule always to keep Je Joon when available “because it can’t lose.” But even without doing computer study, it’s easy to see that if the other tiles are, say, 5 and 6, splitting the Je Joon is much more profitable. (Splitting is also very unlikely to lose, but is also much less likely to tie.)
Oh, I thought you meant people who weren’t actually cheating. And yes, card counting is regarded as cheating by the casinos. It’s legal (meaning that you can’t get arrested for doing it), but it’s still a perfectly legitimate reason for them to kick you out of the house if they deem it necessary.
Mr. Robson’s comment applies even without card counting. The expectations of a player who follows (or nearly follows) Basic Strategy are much better than those of a poor or average player.
And, while denying play to counters may be legal in most (all?) jurisdictions, that doesn’t make it “cheating.” We never invited Grant Baze to our rubber bridge game, but it wasn’t because we thought he was cheating!
Card counting is really just “paying attention.” There is no way that can be considered cheating, any more than memorizing odds tables for Texas hold 'em or five-card draw. Effectively, what the casinos are doing is throwing out anyone who’s good at the game.
Thanks to all who pointed to the Wizard of Odds site. Fantastic!
When it says the dealer edge is .43%, am I to take that as meaning that I will win back $99.57 out of every $100 I bet? Or that I will win the equivalent of 49.57% of bets made?
You want to argue that it shouldn’t be considered cheating, I’m right there with you. But it obviously can be considered cheating, as evidenced by the fact that the casinos actually do so.
I’m puzzled by this. When you win, they indeed keep a certain amount that “ought” to be paid to you. But when you lose, they keep everything you bet. They will obviously do better if you somehow manage to place a disproportionate number of losing bets, or if in a game with player options (e.g. Blackjack) you pursue a sub-optimal strategy.
In the long run, of course, it’s reasonable to presume that poor payouts = few gamblers = low casino profits.
But when you lose the casino keeps everything. What you’re saying makes no sense. If you win the casino keeps nothing. They give you money. If you lose, the casino makes money, they take your money.
The casino’s profit comes from the delta between winners and losers; the odds of the games ensure L>W. They don’t make money from W, they make money from the difference between L and W.
This is so obvious I can’t help but think people are overthinking themselves into a logical error so let me set up a scenario:
You and I decide the play Coin Flip. But we set it up so you have odds similar to casino’s odds in blackjack; if the flip is heads, you get $100 from me. But if the flips is tails, I get $99 of yours. I flip the coin. Do you want it to come up heads or tails?
