When I was playing blackjack in an Indian casino, I got distracted for a moment and didn’t get my bet down in time. The dealer wouln’t let me play another hand until he had gotten through that set of decks and reshuffeled. This is yet another rule casinos use to thwart counters but it really pissed me off.
Forget counting for a minute…
If you play a very technically sound strategy like know when to double and when the cards are falling your way, can you make money without counting? Knowing when to play, when the dealer might be a little “too” good (any experiences with cheating dealers anyone?), or when Luck is just smiling on you?
Maybe it won’t last forever, but it strikes me that you could do well by just knowing sound strategies to playing blackjack…or will the odds always catch up?
Short answer, no.
Long answer–what you describe is playing “basic strategy”. It consists of knowing the proper play for any hand and dealer’s hand–for instance, knowing that you hit a 16 against a dealer’s 10. The basic strategy changes a bit based on the rules and the number of decks. When you vary that strategy (and your bet) based on what cards you’ve seen go by, that is “counting”.
Playing correct basic strategy in most games will put you at a slight disadvantage (usually less than 1%, IIRC–I’m away from my books).
It is possible for the rules to be such that basic strategy will put the game in your favor, but you won’t find many tables like that, for obvious reasons. (Last I knew, there was one at Slots-A-Fun in Vegas. Even so, the advantage is miniscule, and you’d have to be playing the right BS for those conditions to get it. I’d be willing to bet that that table still makes money.)
Dr. J
Actual cheating, as oppposed to card counting, will most likely get you arrested, not just thrown out.
Arjuna34
Quoth Powers106:
Lady Luck never smiles, period. Sure, you might win a thousand hands in a row, but you’d still have exactly the same chance of winning the next hand as any other schmo. Many people do not realize this, which is one of the main reasons that casinos can stay in business.
Plus the fact that casinos love all these guys selling their video tape, and books with a ‘guaranteed’ method. As other people have pointed out a really skilled card counter can get a slight advantage over the house, but anybody with the skill to do that probably figured it out long before they needed to buy a tape. Most of these average schmoes just get a false sence of confidence, and are more likely to go and bet a large amount of money, thinking they have the edge. Anything that brings people to the casino is a very good thing as far as casinos are concerned.
To answer the OP, casinos can offer blackjack because very, very few people play it at an advantage. In fact, if you sit for a while and pay attention to the other players, you’ll notice that most of them don’t have a good grasp of basic strategy.
I remember reading that the average house take on BJ was around 2%.
Dr. J
I’m surprised nobody’s really gone into the two reasons casinos actually offer blackjack.
1. It attracts customers. The only reason I ever to go a casino, ever, is to play blackjack. I don’t like slot machines. I’m sure lots of people feel the same way.
Casinos want to bring in the absolute maximum possible number of potential suckers. If they can get you in for table games - and blackjack is the most popular table game - they’re likelier to get you to drop money on bad odds games, like Keno or the slots.
2. The gambler’s Achilles heel. If Blackjack gave the player a 1% advantage, the house would still win money. Why?
Your typical casino blackjack player is not a high stakes player; he’ll usually sit down at a table where the minimum bet is such that his total purse will give him anywhere from ten to thirty hands. If you have $200 to blow - a pretty typical number - you’ll sit at a $10 minimum table.
Those of you who play a lot of blackjack know your pile of chips fluctuates a lot over the course of several hours of play. It’s possible for our $200 player to be up or down $200 after a couple of hours, easy.
When he’s down $200, he’s outta money.
When he’s up $200, you know what happens? He plays until he loses it.
The tendency for players to play until they lose their money is incredibly strong; most people don’t walk away. They play, they go up and down, but when they hit zero and max out the credit card, they can’t play anymore. The house has more money than you do. They can absorb losses, and you’ll keep playing - but when YOU get to a certain point you have to walk out and leave your money behind.
This is why casinos are legitimately fearful of big stakes players; they lose that advantage.
I don’t really think the casinos give a shit about card counters, to be honest. You can win $5000 a night just by sheer luck. I’ve won bundles; nobody ever challenged me walking out.
What do you think counting is? It’s knowing when the cards are falling your way. Without it, there’s no way to know. Ignore “hot streaks.” I know you’re thinking about them, but there’s no such thing. Cards fall the way they fall and they don’t remember being kind to you last hand any more than they’ll try to be kind to you on this one. I suggest reading books by David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth on the mathematical odds of gambling.
Now, as to the question as a whole, if you do no counting whatsoever, but play perfect strategy, you can break even IN THE LONG RUN. This is another thing many people don’t understand about gambling and statistics in general. Anyone can be lucky. Anyone can be unlucky. The best BJ player in the world can go for months on end with one losing session after another. A person who doesn’t understand that Aces count for 1 and 11 can walk out $100 richer.
In the long run, money flows from the bad players to the good players. There’s just no other way. - Mike Caro.
Rickjay: You’re wrong about the ‘Gambler’s Achilles Heel’. The house expects to take in exactly their house vig, multiplied by the number of dollars wagered on the tables.
They get NO advantage from the fact that your bankroll is smaller than theirs. YOU may bust out of the game, but another player will take your place. As far as the casino is concerned, those ten rolls in craps could come from ten different guys who each busted their bankroll, or one rich guy.
Just another counter-intuitive aspect of gambling math.
Someone up there said that casinos use four to six decks in a shoe. While that’s true at most big places here in Vegas, especially where all the guppies hang out (on the Strip), there are places in the Downtown area (Fremont Street) and on the Boulder Strip (Sam’s Town, etc) where single deck, $5 games are still quite normal. If you know what you’re doing, the best place for that is Binion’s Horseshoe, downtown.
The best place to sit is third base, the final place to be dealt to on the table. That gives you the best place to see the most cards before it’s your turn. There’s a double edged sword as to the number of folks are on the table with you. The more there are, the more cards you see, but the less hands are dealt before a shuffle.
On average, the shuffle comes up around half a deck. A table has six slots for us poor folks to offer up our hard earned scratch. If there are four or five people in the game, the general rule is two hands come out. More than that, only one hand per shuffle.
As for getting booted from a game…
Counting cards in your head is not illegal. Counting cards with the use of any aid is. If you have a computer on your leg to help you out, you’re gonna get tossed and probably arrested. HOWEVER… the secret really is to be able to “get lucky.” I have a friend who takes his own beer bottle in filled with water. Acts like a drunk tourist all night, goes heavy once or twice for a hundred or so, wins it, toddles off like a drunk. One day I personally watched him take about four grand from three casinos downtown. After a while, they caught on to him. All the pit bosses in town (off the strip… too hard to count six decks) recognize him and ask him not to play. That’s all they can do in that case. They will let you play any other game. They reserve the right not to allow you to play if you’re too drunk, whathaveya. But if you’re not playing illegally, you won’t get into too bad trouble.
You really wanna see folks go crazy, walk around a Strip hotel with a note pad, stop at every overhead camera, and make an x on your pad. After about three or four cameras, you’ll make a new friend who’s neck is the size of your thigh!
It never ceases to amaze me how many people go into casino games with little or no knowledge of the strategy to win those games. Many casino games are not completely luck games, and improved skill lowers the house advantage considerably. Yet time and time again I’ve seen players tossing hundred dollar chips after pipe dreams.
Part of it might be a desire to experience good luck. I actually had someone tell me they trusted their intuition more than mathematics. Casinos make a killing on blackjack.
I can’t understand why casinos don’t offer more games where skill gives the gamblers a better chance to win. Recently the casinos in Atlantic City removed all the 20-8-7-5 joker poker video machines. Only a few years ago they removed the 20-8-7-6 machines. (20 being payout for 4 of a kind, 8 for a full house, 7 for a flush, and 5 or 6 for a straight). While the latter machines offered a 102% payback for expert play, the former machines still gave the house an edge. So why pull them? Most gamblers pay no attention to payout charts, but if they see someone win they’ll jump on another machine and start throwing in their dollars. I won’t play any of the new poorer payout machines. Hence they lost me and the many friends I used to drag along. Sigh.