The logic is coming from the legislators, and to me is pretty clear.
Do you give back the money of people that gamble “badly”?
If not, then you have to allow people who play “well”
It’s a basic issue of fairness in gaming.
So long as they don’t use any “aides” and just their brains. In any case - what right does the casino have to say when “good is too good”
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:50, topic:583641”]
Casinos already have such a policy. If someone is paying close attention to the game (i.e., card counting) or just plain winning too much, they can be accused of “cheating” and asked to leave. Are you telling me this doesn’t happen?
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Players have been asked to leave for employing a strategy that gives them a positive expected return against the house. Casinos will not ask someone to leave simply for getting extraordinarily lucky.
I know, because it is part of my job to remove people from the casino. I have never in five years been instructed to remove anyone for winning, or even for card counting, or even heard of such. I have been told to remove people for soliciting prostitution, cheating as defined legally, intoxication, making threats, showing too much boob, or a hundred other reasons. Never for card counting, and never for winning too much.
Huh, I’d have thought that would lead to a job application.
The one that I “reserve” when you want to “refuse service to anyone.” The one I retain as a property owner when I decide who goes comes in. Did “good gambler” become a protected class and I was unaware? What right do you have to force me to lose money by forcing me to serve customers?
Interesting philosophical discussion.
However in my jurisdiction somewhat moot because it was legislated that you couldn’t refuse service so long as the patron wasn’t cheating*.
And card counting didn’t meet the legislators’ definition of cheating.
But for me - if you wanna gamble (as house or patron) you gotta take the good with the bad - if someone has the talent to card count, then too bad for the casino, it is within the rules of the game so they must let him play. Just as if I want to play against a continuous shuffling machine is too bad for me, or if I am willing to play against a game where push loses.
Today I saw an item in a local newspaper saying that three men were arrested for “counting cards”, but the fuller story (here) indicates that they were also marking cards.
Wow, a Secret Code to blackjack! A system that gives the player an advantage over the house, despite what all those pesky mathematicians have said for the past few hundred years! And all you have to do is shell out $300 to an anonymous guy on the Internet!
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Card counting can be “considered” cheating. So using eenie meenie miney mo, or flipping a coin, or random guessing, or follwing the hand-out card on how to play the game.
That does not mean it is cheating. it is no different that paying the game using any other method of deciding when to hit or not. It is just, as mentioned above, “paying attention”.
the fact that it has been allowed to be considered cheating by the casinos, with the tacit approval of the gaming commission, has always seemed to me a case of back-scratching.
I haven’t read the book, but the movie “21” showed something that made me wonder. Once you get to colluding players in a game, secret signals, etc. are you not reaching the point of cheating? Yes, all the one person did was signal the other that the odds were good. However, by passing that informaton in secret, rather than publicly announcing it, you are to some extent “colluding”.
Are you suggesting that there is some kind of universal standard for “cheating” in a game? Isn’t cheating in any particular game defined by the people who set rules for a game?
Is it just simply “back-scratching” or is it the fact that to some extent, the gaming commission has to recognize that the only reason for the casino industry to exist is for casinos to make money and for players to lose money? And the way for the casino industry to legitimately make money is to set rules in such a way that the house has the advantage?
If the rules are out in the open and known (“We take steps to thwart card counters”) then can anyone seriously say that something unfair is going on?
Really? Where you play, the players tip as well when losing as when winning?
So what is the definition of “cheating”? This is the question, is cheating a subjective or objective one? If I say you are cheating, you are cheating?
I defy you to come up with an objective definition. What, remembering 5 hands back is OK, but remembering 20 hands back is not? “Sorry sir, your memory is too good for you to be allowed to play this game”?
This is the problem. With actual cheating, you can show how the person is doing something they are not supposed to do - i.e. peek at cards, swap cards surreptitiously, try to fake the amount of their bet with slightly hidden off center stacks of chips, mark cards, have a guy behind the dealer signal the dealer cards, etc. With card counting, all you are doing is a better job of what you should be doing anyway - watching the cards that are legitimately revealed to you. As GWR said, it’s just “paying attention”.
As mentioned above, if the casinos did not want card-counting to work, they could shuffle the old cards back into the shoe. If that discourages all players, then that’s an indicator that all players think of the imbalance they perceived as relevant - they are all card-counting to some degree.
As I recall from my days as a semi-pro blackjack player during the late 1990’s, all of the tips (although I’m not sure if “all” means all blackjack tables or all table games) for a particular shift were pooled and split evenly among all dealers on that shift, and due to the law of large numbers, the average total of tips per dealer for a particular shift was pretty consistent even though the player win/loss amount per dealer was anything but. So even if a particular dealer was scaring away players left and right because the standard deviation Ogs were favoring the house at his/her table for that particular shift, the opposite was probably happening simultaneously at a nearby table, and most other tables were mostly conforming to the mathematical house advantage of about .25-.50%, so dealer pay (including tips) tended to be fairly consistent.
A second house edge is that the player has a limited bankroll, or at least loss tolerance, while the house doesn’t. With perfect play, the players current funding will fluctuate up and down in a noisy fashion, with a net average trend downward as established by the odds already discussed. If the noise ever takes the player to zero, the house has won. There is no meaningful opposing factor. The player can never get so far up on the house that they are forced to quit playing, as long as the player is willing to keep betting, the house can patiently wait for it’s advantage to take it’s toll. It will prove psychologically difficult for many players to quit when they are winning.
But that’s not any kind of statistical factor in favor of the house. If anything, it works in the player’s favor, tending to limit his losses. The casino would be more than happy to allow you to continue betting after hitting the end of your bankroll, if you have friends/banks who would loan you the money.
ETA: Your post indicates a kind of thinking which I’ve seen before, that things like this will even out - if you’ve been losing, then you’re “due.” If that were the case, then it would be a house advantage for the player to run out of money before he gets a chance to have his turn at winning, but the sad fact is that even if you’ve lost all night, your odds looking forward don’t get any better.
My brother used to be a counter. He got kicked out of casinos, never banned, and went to the extreme of doing a drunk act while playing to try to hide his counting.
So I wouldn’t call counting cheating, but it does change what is a game of chance into a game of skill. Preventing that is perfectly reasonable. There is one clear game of skill in a casino, poker, but in that the house is not a player, but just a facilitator taking a percentage of the pot.
If counting were fully allowed, then mechanical aids to counting should be allowed also, and we would wind up with the game, not the players, being banned. That would seem a shame.
Card counting is not cheating.
When New Jersey first opened gambling they tried to say it was but a court ruled against them. NJ casinos can not ban counters so they take other countermeasures like using more decks and shuffling more frequently.
In Nevada the casinos can bar or ban any person at any time without stating a reason. The boss doesn’t say “You can’t play cuz you’re counting cards.” The boss says “You can’t play blackjack here.” If you try to play after the boss told you you can’t, you will be read the Trespass Act and walked out the door.
Kevbo is correct that the bigger bankroll has an advantage. Even in an even money game such as flipping a coin, the player with the bigger bankroll has an advantage directly proportional to the sizes of the bankrolls. If you start with two pennies and I start with a hundred pennies, it is obvious that if we agree to play until one of goes broke that I have a significant mathematical advantage.
The fact that the house sets a limit on how much you can bet at a time also adds to their advantage; even if your friends or bank will loan you more money after you lose your own, you still can’t bet enough to get even without being ground down by the house edge – no double up & catch up once you hit the betting limit.
But that’s between The Casino writ large, not having to do with the skill/luck involved with the odds. I don’t know the math, but it seems true that in any short-term gambling, you have to bet at higher antes or go deep in various multiples for a self-set number of times, depending on your current cash in hand and your money management plan.
No, it does not change it into a game of skill. It is then, by your definition, already a game of skill with an element of chance, just like poker - poor players just guess, good ones guess better based on a better knowledge of the current odds. Banning players because they are “good” is not correcting a problem, it’s getting rid of potentially winning players.
(Interestingly, as mentioned above, if it’s allowed in Atlantic City and the roof has not fallen in, the casinos did not go broke - then maybe the Vegas ban is unnecessary.)
It does not follow that mechanical aids should be allowed for any game; The whole point of games of skill with an element of chance (or vice versa) is to challenge the unaided human mind and body. It’s no more acceptable than using a computer to help suggest your next chess move, or springy foot attachments for the 100m dash.
(The really REALLY good chess players have memorized the most common chess openings, and as a result can clean the clock of a moderately good player in a matter of two dozen moves. that’s not cheating, that’s the skill of the human mind.)
I switched from blackjack to poker because playing against the house is not worth the hassle. However, blackjack tournaments, where you’re playing against other players and not the house, are a hassle-free way to make some easy money. Most blackjack players don’t even know basic strategy.