js_africanus:
First, the game Epstein is describing is a single-deck game with all the good rules. As I said before, you can sometimes find this game at very low limits - it’s a loss leader for the casino. You will NOT find that game in the high limit pit where serious money can be made. In fact, you’ll almost never find it anymore at all.
In Reno, you can find a reasonable number of single-deck games that have a small house advantage of around .25. More common are the four and six deck shoes. A 4-deck game that allows double after split generally has a house edge of around .5. The six-deck shoes have a house average generally a little higher, at maybe .6-.7.
BTW, the reason the advantage moves towards the house as you add more decks is because there are fewer blackjacks dealt out.
As for Epstein’s playing strategy-only technique, that is mostly true in single deck games. Playing strategy variations are critical to beating single deck games, which is why players who play them learn complex multi-level counts, side counts of sevens and aces, and memorize many strategy variations. In shoe games, most of your profit goes from bet variation, and strategy changes alone are not enough to overcome the house edge. That’s why I keep pointing out that shoes are actually easier to count than single deck games.
As for taking the word of someone who claims to have beaten the house, you don’t have to just take my word for it. If you need more empirical evidence, you can start by explaining why the casinos spend millions of dollars on anti-counter countermeasures. Or why the casinos in Atlantic City were willing to fight tooth-and-nail in court to protect their right to bar counters (they lost (to Ken Uston, btw), and you can’t be barred in Atlantic City - which is why the games there suck). And I’m not the only one who’s made a living playing blackjack. I know literally dozens of people who have done it or are doing it. The ranks of professional blackjack players is thinning, however, for two reasons - one is the rise of poker, which has attracted away a lot of blackjack players. And the other is that the casinos have gotten very good at spotting counters, and making a living at it for big stakes is increasingly hard to do.
As for a player “Walking in with $100 and walking out with $113”, what you are neglecting to consider is that the players play MANY trials. If you have a 1% edge per hand over the house, and you play 100 hands, you expect to make 100% of your average wager. If you are betting $100 per hand, and you get 50 hands per hour, that’s $50 per hour profit. I don’t know about you, but most people would think that was worth playing for.
The downside is risk. Blackjack has a lot of variance. Much more so than poker. So while your expectation may be to make $50 per hour, the variance around that may be $1000 per hour. The variance is so large that in a given hour it is impossible to see the trend through the noise. That’s why bad players keep playing, after all.
Given a variance that large, after 400 hours of play, a player would expect to be up $20,000. But his standard deviation will also be $20,000. So being even one standard deviation out on the low side, which is quite common, can have a good card counter losing money after 400 hours of play, which represents probably close to half a year of play for a counter because they get so few hours at the table before they have to leave if playing high limits.
This is the real reason why there aren’t that many card counters. Because to make serious money, you have to have a HUGE bankroll. Especially if you have to pay your living expenses out of it. As the numbers above show, if you want to make $50/hr as a card counter, and you want a 5% risk of ruin, you had better start with a bankroll of maybe $40,000, plus enough to pay the bills each month if you aren’t winning. The thing is, most people who have those kinds of financial resources already have good jobs and wouldn’t dream of giving up their careers so they can sit in a casino all day.
So the average card counter probably plays with a bankroll that’s too small. This is the real killer of professional gamblers everywhere. They start with a too-small bankroll, they pay their bills out of it, and what’s worse, when they go on winning streaks they treat it like a windfall and spend even more. If you’ve read Epstein, you understand the Kelly Criterion, which states that if you continually bet more than twice the percentage of your bankroll compared to your advantage, at some point your bankroll will crash to zero no matter how big your edge is over the house. This, combined with those ‘counters’ who think they are winning when they have giant holes in their play, and casino countermeasures, is what really limits the number of serious card counters around.
This is also why the real threat to the casino are the teams. And there are some BIG teams arount. The MIT team was mentioned. There was also a team from Jet Propulsion Labs (they offered me a chance to play with them one year, but I couldn’t make it). There are other, even bigger teams. There was a team so large at one point that it had its own full-time accountant and hired people to fly around the world scouting for good games. When they’d find one that was especially profitable, the team would fly in, bet insane amounts of money, and win big. The key to a team’s success is that they can pool their bankrolls and each player can play as if the bankroll was theirs alone in terms of risk (as long as they all play on separate tables). This, coupled with the fact that teams have their own methods of camouflage such as the ‘big player’ technique which is very hard to spot, and the casinos sweat them big time.
Also, counters in the internet age tend to pool together a bit. I used to subscribe to an expensive notification service run by a mathematician and expert blackjack player named Stanford Wong (a pseudonym, of course). He had stringers scouting casinos looking for good rules, promotions, or mathematical errors, and notify the list when one cropped up. For example, one year a casino in Vegas introduced a new game called “Free Ride Blackjack”. The innovation was that if you got a blackjack, you got a little chit that allowed you to surrender a hand in the future and get your bet back. Well, it turns out that this game had a 2% advantage for the player. Stanford spotted it, worked out the optimal play, and sent a notification out, and when that casino opened the next day there were about 50 professional card counters waiting outside. That game didn’t even last 24 hours - towards the end, the casino was having to employ their security guards as chip runners to buy back chips from the players because the cage had run out.
By the way, “Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic” was the first serious gambling book I ever bought. Great book. If you want something a little lighter and fun to read, I recommend “Theory of Blackjack” by Peter Griffin. He does fun stuff like work out the mathematical expectation of those little coupon books the casinos hand out, and optimal play for using them to make a profit of a few cents. Fun stuff, but also very educational in showing how to look for advantages.