Vegas casinos hate America

I know quite a few compulsive gamblers, and the biggest difference between them and "regular" gamblers is that they are in it for the high and not the money.

So they may know all the tricks and edges but if they win big they'll keep betting until it's gone.

 

It's a dangerous game, no doubt. That's why it's called gambling. You can do everything you're supposed to do and still get screwed over because your death glare didn't work on the moron hitting 15 against a 5. I tried it for a spell and realized sports writing at a small town paper was far more lucrative, if that tells you anything.
I had my share of nights where I got blasted off the blackjack table and lost $50 or $60 in 10 minutes. Most of the time, though, I seemed to at least tread water for a while and there almost always seemed to be a point where I was up at least a little bit (maybe only $10 or $20, and that might have been after a few minutes where I obviously wouldn't quit, but still up).
That all goes back to discipline and patience, though. Knowing when it's not your night and leaving instead of chasing lost money. Being willing to realize you just made $25 for 10 minutes worth of work when you jump in on a hot table. Or, avoiding putting yourself in bad situations in the first place by playing at some off-peak times (when the dealers are worse and the crowds are thinner) and seeing the advantages in some things that turn people off (playing at low-limit tables to better ride out the storms).
I'm not saying it's a smart way to try to make a living. It's dangerous and stupid. But if you take the right approaches, you can do better than you have a right to. 99.9 percent of people can't do it, which is how we get places like Las Vegas.

 

I love playing the don't pass line at the craps table. It seems to piss everybody off, especially when I have the dice.

 

Wow. There is a lot wrong in that post if you actually believe it.

 

When I was at the Phoenix, I was sent to a card counting class run by a game whose business card read, no kidding "The Count." It was right after Foxwoods opened, and there were like 20 people in their class in the mid-50s and me. Two six-hour sessions, not just a ripoff, the guy was looking for pupils to put in his stable of counters. Class one was basic strategy for blackjack, which countries/casinos to seek out and avoid, etc. Class two was the serious stuff. Deception, how to deceive the house by looking like an innocent schlub, how to determine when it's time to make the score and walk away, etc. At the end, I was recruited by the guy. I told him I was not interested. He said, "you're interested, you just don't want to." I said "You're right, it's harder work than the job I have now."

 

It's all anecdotal from my own experience. I haven't studied the Blackjack Sabrmetrics to know exactly how wrong I am. But, yeah, for the most part I do believe there's a lot of truth to it.

In my mid-20s I went through about an 18-month period where I played a lot of blackjack. Had some 24-hour sessions even. There were times where I blew through $100 in a few minutes, but there were a lot more where I sat there and treaded water for an hour or two before busting out or hitting a big run (or both), never getting up or down more than $20 or $30. That's playing $5 a hand with a modest initial buy-in, usually $40. I wasn't up enough to walk away, but I wasn't getting killed either, so I'd sit there and play until something happened one way or the other.

I had patience. I could sit there and play forever and not get bored. Hell, I enjoyed it.
My problem was, I wasn't disciplined enough to take the modest win or cut my losses. I got competitive, which is a bad thing for a wannabe gambler, and I enjoyed playing a little too much. The initial $40 might last a couple of hours, but I didn't get up and leave when it was gone or when I'd turned it into $90.
Combined with the occasional bout of getting blitzed off the table -- and, again, not being disciplined enough to cut my losses and go home after only 10 minutes in the casino -- yeah, I lost a lot of money in the long term. That discipline is damn hard to come by, and it's the difference between being a degenerate gambler (99.9 percent of all regular gamblers) and a professional (.1 percent of all regular gamblers). I was in the 99.9 percent.

 

Video poker is easy. If you hit the deal button at just the right time. This was mine, about 5 years ago.

 

Plenty of gamblers treat each session separately, but that's a common bias that skews their perceptions. So, say, in one session you played X1 hands and walked away $40 up, in another you played X2 hands and walked away $30 up, and in another you played X3 hands and busted out and lost $100. You won two out of three times, but you also lost $30 in total. (Of course these results could have gone the other way.) In reality, however, no amount of discipline or timing can change the fact that you played X hands (X1+X2+X3) against the same house edge. For a "good" blackjack game played perfectly, your expected loss would be in the range of $0.005*X*wager amount. Because the blackjack edge is typically so small, per-hand variance is near its maximum, so you do have those sessions when you walk away a winner. But the more sessions you have, the less the variance works for you (and, therefore, the more the iron law of the house edge runs the show).

 

I write as someone who plays blackjack, can count cards and also worked as a dealer (admittedly a long time ago) and can see it from the other side of the table.

The level of patience and discipline required to make money in BJ is unthinkably high. A player's only true advantage is stepping away when that player is up 4 units (or 6 or whatever the end goal is each day) in a session.

Las Vegas is about the only place where it can be done but this requires moving there with about a $150,000 to $200,000 bankroll that you'd have to be willing to dip into.

The strategy:
- Five days a week (perhaps six) with the goal to win $400 a day.
- Rotate between 80 different casinos. That's 3-4 visits to each one a year. In your records go on different days and different shifts when you return to Jerry's Nugget on the north side. Play 8 am one Monday. 9 pm Thursday when you go back four months later.
- No places that pay less than 3:2 on BJ. No exceptions.
- Be willing to carry $20,000 with you at once.
- To win $400, bet $100 a hand. Play flat for the first 20 hands. Instead of counting cards, count your wins and losses and your W-L on double downs. Going 57% or better on double downs usually will bring a successful session. If you go 4-0 to start, your workday is done. Go get breakfast.
- Let's say you're 6-14 on your first 20. Down $900 (with a 1-2 on DD thrown in). Then bet into it. Bump it up to $200 a hand. I do not believe in Martingale for individual hands but I do NOT think a sound BJ player will go 6-14, 5-15, 8-12, 4-16 and 7-13 in 100 hands. You'll win 4 in a row or 6 of 7 with some 3:2 blackjacks thrown in. If you're 11-29, get to $300 or $400 a hand. Your eventual hot streak will wipe out your deficit.
- After 100 hands, you'll never get above .500 overall. Ever. But you can win 20 hand chunks. Those are where you have to focus. Some days you'll get your $400 in six hands. Other days, you'll get there in 471 excruciating hands where you were down $6,300 at one point.
- Cashing in is its own deal. If I have more than $2,000 in chips at a casino, I'll cash half of that then and the other half on a different day.

When I dealt, it was the college kids who had a $50 buy in that I would wipe out in ten minutes. If you walk in with $2,000, you should be able to walk out with $2,100.

I've written about my engineer friend from college who takes my sports action but also is trying to make a living at night in BJ. It's a grind and he's a math whiz with lots of money. About 20 of the local joints - Sam's, Club Fortune, Silver Nugget, won't take his BJ action because he wasn't careful about cashing in the chips. They spotted him counting multiple times and won't let him play.

 

Trying to actually map out the probabilities of various betting strategies (for blackjack gamblers) is, as we say in my line of work, NP-hard. Fortunately, a lot of the analysis (via simulation) has been out there for a long time. The standard deviation of a single hand of blackjack has been estimated as, roughly, 1.17. Given n, the number of hands, and p, the house edge, you can estimate (via the normal distribution)* the probability of being ahead after n hands:

n prob(ahead after n)
20 0.492
100 0.483
500 0.462
1000 0.446
10000 0.334

So even if you sat 100 players down and told them to play 10,000 hands each, we would expect to see 33 of them to finish up ahead even though we would also expect our players, in aggregate, to be down 5,000 wagering units.


*Your standard normal variate (Z) would be (n*p)/(sqrt(n)*s) ... the probability of coming out ahead would be 1 - phi(Z).

 

I can see the patience strategy working if you stuck to poker.