Of course, kicking you out is the only thing they can do. They can't take your earnings, prosecute you, detain you, or use force unless you resist. Usually the player will be kindly asked to cash-in and leave.
Security can track your play patterns, your gains and losses. Card counting result in very characteristic patterns, and if your gains are too consistent to be explained by chance alone, they are going to watch closely. If you are just lucky, they will offer you free drinks, if you are an advantage player, you will be asked to leave, if you are a cheater, you are going to have problems.
Edit: I think there are some places where casinos can't just kick people out for no reasons. But anyways, there are ways of making card counting impractical. The use of continuous shuffling machines is one of them.
Counting cards isn't considered cheating because you're manipulating numbers in your head and in NJ, where the case happened, you can't be asked to leave a casino just for counting cards. Edge sorting is considered cheating as it's basically a form of marking cards. (This is an oversimplification of the rulings in the US
I find this surprising. Aren't there any rules about having to serve everyone equally? Like non-discriminatory rules? A Casino could unilaterally bar entry to all people from a certain ethnicity and they wouldn't have to justify themselves? Is this true for all businesses?
It's really fishy that Casinos can say you can come play here unless you win.
Ethnicity is a protected class, so no, you can't just ban people based on that. "Being really good at gambling" is not a protected class.
Blackjack is an incredibly boring game, remove the ability to count and beat the odds and no one would play it.
They don't reshuffle every time because your last statement is very wrong. The money card counters can take before being caught is a rounding error in the face of the masses of people who are happy to play with no edge.
But yeah, it's really easy for casinos to keep a track of your betting pattern and kick you out if you're playing the game too well. That's why the really successful card counters play as groups with personas. They'll station a bunch of low key guys around the casino and have them maintain a steady stream of cheap wagers while they count. When a table gets hot they'll signal a flamboyant high stakes looking guy to sit down and play a few rounds.
The Casinos will eventually catch those guys too, simply by correlating who is sitting at what tables when the high stakes guy comes to play, but it takes a lot more work and they make out with a bunch more cash. Worse, because what they're doing isn't illegal the casio can't even deny them the winnings, only kick them out and plaster their faces all over the blacklists the casinos use.
However, casinos now know of and how to foil this strategy. The countermove is to prohibit entering a table while a shoe is in progress. Either the new player must wait until the deck reaches its established end point at the cut card, or the deck gets reshuffled immmediately upon the new player entering. Either way, an incoming player can't take advantage of any count.
They sucked most of the fun out of video games to turn them into gambling machines for kids. Now imagine if they sucked the remainder of the fun out, and the only thing left was the gambling. Now you can only have fun if you think playing a game where you are statistically guaranteed to lose everything in the long run is fun.
They may have more glamour in the gambling-centric cities, but the few casinos I have been in have all been sad, dingy, smoky places filled mainly with old women staring at their slot machine with dead eyes and cups full of their pension funds.
Even if you temporarily win at gambling, you're still part of a machine that sucks life out of people and leaves them drained husks.
If you don't have an expert system mathematically guaranteed to give you an advantage over the house, you're better off gambling on the stock markets, because at least if you lose there, it might have at least paid for someone else to have a decent non-bullshit job for a little while, and there's also a possibility that everybody wins, even those who didn't play.
In Quebec all the lottery games and the casinos are owned by the government, thus every gain there goes to the public sector. Everyone win (except the one with gambling addiction, which are sadly the vast majority of the customers).
There's an interesting article on how security detect card counting[0]. My take is that it's not a science, instead the security/ pit boss' who spend significant time watching players would develop a 'feeling'.
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-casinos-know-that-you_b_6...?
They don't to justify anything. Casino bans are not subject to judicial review.
[1]http://m.startribune.com/gambling-problem-states-let-you-ban...
Huge fines, potentially followed by loss of license.
You do not want to go there. With the elevated scrutiny on gambling operators (triggered in part by the US opening up, in part by the increased competition, and in part by the receding margins) all the regulators are itching to make examples out of suitable villains.
Disclosure: I work for a [UK] gambling company and deal with compliance matters on an almost daily basis.
An interesting question to be honest. I'd somehow expect any prosecution to be far too complex for the parties to enjoy court.
Sure, you excluded yourself but then went to the casino after all. Did you do that because addiction caused you to misjudge the risks? Did you go there with the intention of defrauding the casino when you lost money? (Gambling establishments that fail to prevent self-excluded customers will have to refund their losses. And if they do that only after regulators get involved, there will be fines on top.)
Proving the nature of intent for that kind of violation could be very messy indeed.
Casinos will use continuous shufflers which kill counting 100% or will cut off multiple decks at the end of the shoe so one cannot get a very positive count and more certainty that the deck is in their favor. In addition, as stated earlier, the type of counting these people did in the early days which was most lucrative is easily spotted. So now modern counters have to apply "camouflage" which includes placing higher bets when the deck is not in their favor to make it appear they are betting randomly, and also reducing their bet spreads. All of these eat into the theoretical return, and make it much less lucrative if not entirely not worth it. So modern advantage players look for casinos that don't watch as carefully or dealers that are not cutting off enough cards.
Even with counting (at the individual level) you are really only giving yourself a very slight edge and this assumes that all other advantages are being taken (playing a perfect game, playing favorable rules... unfavorable rules are everywhere these days... managing your bets to take advantage of the count without getting caught, having a properly sized bank roll, etc.). Sadly, after all of that you can still get your butt handed to you on a bad night. On the aggregate you can beat the house with counting and all of the above but only just.
It’s pretty simple. Surveillance and the pit bosses also know how to count cards. All mathematically correct counting systems will tell you to raise or lower your bet at almost exactly the same, because a counting system is simply a way of quantifying your positive or negative edge at a given time. So if you modify your bet in correlation with the count even 4 or 5 times, the odds that you did that on a hunch become very small. Do it 10 times in a row, and the odds are nearly 100% that you are counting.
It isn’t counting that casinos hate, per se. They hate anyone that can consistently beat their games - “advantage players”. Counting just happens to be the most easily detectable form of advantage play, so the people that still do it are cannon fodder for surveillance. Most professional advantage players today don’t count cards. They use a variety of other techniques, such as hole carding and taking advantage of promotions created by mathematically challenged casino marketing departments, that are both more profitable and far harder to detect than counting.
I know - it would change the games entirely. So? The games are arbitrary. They would be new games, and it would defeat many modes of cheating.
This is different to a slot machine, where clearly it's just a game of chance.
In reality casino card games are 99.9% chance, but I think the infinite deck idea would remove the skill feeling and hence the attraction for many players.
If there's an infinite deck, there's now no way of knowing if I'm tied for the best hand or not. How the hell can you read a player if you have no way to possibly peg him to a hand? The game would be unplayable with an infinite deck
Adding five of a kind also seems like a pretty easy adjustment.
The most obvious difference is the possibility of cards matching both suit and rank. So if you have HA HK and the flop is HA HJ S2 you have both top pair and also a very strong flush draw (although HA HA would be better), a combo which is impossible on that board with a single deck.
The issue is that this is a completely different game. It might be a fine game. People might like it (maybe even more than Texas Hold 'em). But this isn't the same game anymore. They're both played with the same 52 data points, but the frequency of those 52 data points makes these games and the skills needed to be good at them very different.
My previous comment of the game being "unplayable" might have been hyperbolic. The point I was trying to make is that it's not the same game when you change one of the rules so dramatically.
Small nitpick: I'd argue that Blackjack is closer to 80% skill, and 20% chance, just based on the fact that if you don't play every Blackjack hand with the same statistically "correct" strategy [1], you will end up bleeding money well in excess of the house advantage.
I'd venture a guess that casinos make 80%+ of their profits from players that aren't playing with perfect Blackjack strategy (for example, not double down on an 11, or not splitting aces, or not remembering whether to hit or stand a 16, etc). When players aren't playing with perfect Blackjack strategy, the house edge isn't all that relevant.
The amount of money a player loses can be attributed to the "mistakes" an average player will make (that can be avoided by memorizing perfect blackjack strategy), rather than being attributed as much to chance. Someone playing perfect blackjack strategy will on average break pretty close to even, since the house edge for Blackjack is incredibly small.
> It feels like if you played enough you'd get better
From the perspective of a player learning perfect blackjack strategy, the truth is you do get better with practice :)
[1] Playing a perfect game of Blackjack requires memorizing charts like this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/816DFf5i0EL...
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-casinos-know-that-you_b_6...?
http://physics.ucsc.edu/people/eudaemons/eudaemons.html
Or see the 1985 book, The Eudaemonic Pie
If you bet 10$ every hand, then suddenly 100$ when you think the count is good, and are winning, then back to 10$, you're done.
Good card counter will level their perceived variance by dumping money back, just like a poker player will sometimes call with a wider hand range than they consider their play style to be profitable in.
One of the ways casinos combat card counters is to lock their betting. So, they'll see someone with variant betting, between 1 and 100, and tell them they can keep playing, but only if they bet 20$ per hand.
That's an easier thing to kill card counting than outright banning players, as they still may be losing players at slots or some other table game.