A casino card shark’s first time getting caught
narratively.com
narratively.com
So with that said:
- Casinos employ methods such as continuous shuffling machines that make counting impossible. Tables that have hand shuffling of 6-8 decks cut the deck and reshuffle with 2 decks remaining or so. So it is harder to get penetration.
- The way to be maximally profitable is to vary your bet very widely depending on how positive the deck is. This could be 30x your low bet. Behavior like this will get you detected.
- Security personnel and even dealers keep counts. It is not some savant activity. It is not hard especially since all these people do all day is look at cards. So they know when the deck is positive and if you are always betting big when that happens you will be detected.
So the people that are left counting have to avoid heat by "camouflaging" their actions. They don't vary their bet that widely and make purposeful bad decisions to make it appear they are not keeping a count. They want to appear like someone that does not know how to play basic strategy and raises and lowers their bets based on superstition (there's a lot of them). This all eats into their advantage substantially. Then in addition betting big at high limit tables is going to be more carefully scrutinized as well.
With that all added together the life for a modern card counter is grinding out for comps and very low player advantage for very long times. Casinos aren't dumb anymore. So while we watch the chronicles of the MIT team, and others, those days are long, long gone. Makes for great stories as people love Robin Hood like tales, but it just isn't happening like this anymore.
Edit: Also the tactic she mentions: Entering a game mid shoe after watching for a while, and waiting for a positive deck, is called "Wonging" After Stanford Wong a longtime gambling expert and advantage player. There is NO WAY you'd get away with "flashy big bettor Carlos" coming in after she counted detected a positive count. Tables with any meaningful limit usually do not allow mid shoe entry for this reason. It is one of the oldest tricks in the book and you wouldn't get away with that for long or at all.
If I want to know something about chess, the source code is available, endgame tables are available, everything that we say we know about chess can be confirmed.
Everyone seems to know how card counting works, with vague things like a count goes up with 5's or down with 10's, but there is no first post link to the "solution". The only thing I see referenced is some 1 deck study from the early computer days.
I'm halfway convinced the money making avenue of card counting is telling stories about card counting.
The conspiracy theory part of my brain says these stories are written by casinos to give players hope.
So, where is that github link?
https://github.com/seblau/BlackJack-Simulator is an example of this. The house advantage of blackjack is under 1% for good games (for example 0.33% at Mohegan Sun). So to beat it you just need overcome that which IS possible by counting. But you can see if you play with that sim, decreasing penetration, bet spread and amount really starts to eat into your numbers.
But with the mitigation strategies listed like low penetration, heat gained by betting big, or wild swings in bet amount, and finally no mid-shoe entry it is not possible now to do it and make good money.
https://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/card-counting/high-... Michael Shackleford is an expert on gambling analysis and is employed by gaming companies to check out their games. He has loads of detailed information and statistics on his site about every casino game.
But yes. Mathematically possible, and possible in the distant past when casinos didn't know. Pretty much impossible now due to casinos detecting it easily. Not because it isn't mathematically possible.
It's funny, but it also just reads like bad fiction to me. The dialogue doesn't seem natural, and the writing doesn't sound so much like someone describing something they actually experienced as it does like someone mimicking a storytelling style they've seen elsewhere. Add on top of it that almost every aspect of it seems ripped directly from the first half of "21" (the Kevin Spacey movie about the MIT crew) and it just comes across as an amateurish attempt to borrow someone else's story. The fact that these techniques she claims they used just don't work anymore seals it for me.
You can find the author and one of her teammates discussing their careers on a podcast from a couple of years ago here:
But I appreciate your commitment to upholding the proud HackerNews tradition of supremely confident snap judgments uncontaminated by actual knowledge.
"Carlo was betting stacks of orange chips we called “pumpkins,” up to $10,000 per hand."
"Our Big Players naturally drew attention with their wagers in the thousands."
No I didn't read every single story about this ever just the one linked. And yes it is a snap judgement from what I know that it is complete fiction. That doesn't sound like small casino action to me. Also, please let me know about the casino that allows 10k bets mid shoe entry.... I've never seen one.
If this was a story written about some struggling grad students that made small amounts of money on small action at small casinos as you claim on your throw-away account I would not have posted what I posted. But alas this thread is about the article posted and I stand by my claim that it is almost certainly untrue from what is contained in it. I don't need to know the entire history to decide that. The article contains information that is at best highly embellished.
Any customer that wins more than they spend over >50 games is probably doing something not great for business, ban them.
The empirical testing of his work was conducted over a number of years by MIT, Harvard Business School and others to show that indeed card counting and other strategies were effective at giving the bettor a statistical edge [1]. Casinos being casinos, they learned of this soon enough and effectively banned card counters in many outlets (as well as putting various measures in place to prevent or minimize those who are more subtle about it, as discussed in OP's comment). In modern times, even a small town casino will have measures in place to stop card counters, the simplest of which is just to have an automatic deck shuffler.
As for his papers on the academic research that have led to strategies like card counting, you can find most or all of them on his site[2]. Of particular note is his paper "Blackjack Systems"[3] describing a proto card counting strategy, "The Mathematics of Gambling"[4], and of course the book that started it all: "Beat the Dealer"[5].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Blackjack_Team [2] http://www.edwardothorp.com/articles/ [3] http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Black... [4] http://www.edwardothorp.com/books/the-mathematics-of-gamblin... [5] https://www.amazon.com/Beat-Dealer-Winning-Strategy-Twenty-O...
Card counting can be profitable. It's not invented by the casinos, I assure you of that. I've earned enough backoffs from them.
Wizard of Odds is a good site to peruse if you want derived tables/odds/simulations. The author of the blog (Shackleford) is a fairly good statistician and computer modeler.
The information is out there.
In modern times, most of the value of card counting comes from game selection and beating bonuses/weak side bets/match plays. It's not likely a good full-time job. But good advantage players have a wide set of skills, of which beating blackjack is simply one.
That is not vague at all and shows you how simple card counting is. Pair that with a blackjack strategy card which is based on the odds of winning certain hands and its easy to tell how a deck that has a higher proportion of 10's is better for the player.
The principle is that you bet (more) when the cards remaining in the deck are favourable to you. Even if you can identify when that happens, precisely or heuristically, it's then also important to consider what percentage of your bank you can bet to best avoid bankruptcy.
If you've considered all of this carefully enough, your method will likely no longer work when the casino modifies the rules in any way - most crudely by increasing their take to cover any variance in bet value.
Edward O Thorp explains the mathematics of card counting extremely clearly and readably.
Like a new tribe finally gains consensus to open a casino and have no idea what they're getting into or have the enforcement procedures. The same for states and municipalities, but they typically have more resources to course correct quickly.
You can take them all to the cleaners though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting
Asking to prove it is like asking to prove that tic-tac-toe is a solved game, since its trivial to understand how it works
Can you do this every night at the same casino? Absolutely not. Can you do it once, then switch to a completely different persona at a different place? Apparently you can, at least ten years ago.
Edit: also, while the big vegas casinos do all this stuff properly, a lot of the small casinos on Indian reservations are more lax with their safeguards. The issue is that table maximums tend to be in the $500 range which makes the dollars per hour somewhat minimal.
I’m no casino regular but every single one I’ve been into in my life use large 6-8 deck shoes and reshuffle as it hits about 2 decks. Counting just isn’t profitable anymore unless you are blatantly obvious about it.
>> Counting just isn’t profitable anymore unless you are blatantly obvious about it.
Game selection is a big part of it. You might be looking at large corporations. Plenty of small shops to beat.
That would kinda break yhe illusion for me but maybe other people/casino doesnt care
I think Casinos like to propagate these stories about counting to encourage people who know a little about it to come down and bet big. Odds are, they'll lose.
But surely handcuffing someone for doing something that isn't illegal is itself illegal search and detention?
Having a marked account definitely makes for some interesting plays, as you’ll have to work to deceive the pit boss that you’re not counting (Eg randomly betting large spreads when you know the count is low).
The counters lose a small but steady amount of money over time while the floaters make large amounts of money by only playing at the tables with favourable counts.
Of course that also is easily defeated... now.
There is a basic strategy to learn that is "optimal" about when to take each action, but it is easily memorized, and I wouldn't call it much of a skill element. Now, if you track cards, you can claw back a little bit of the advantage by varying the strategy dependent on what cards remain, but going very deep on this is a lot of work for not a lot of payoff.
You get a much bigger payoff by simply betting big when the deck is in a favorable shape, and continuing to follow roughly basic strategy.
Fixed betting as described is exactly the same as varying your bets, in both cases you're playing roughly basic strategy with varied bets, it's just that in fixed betting your vary your bets by having the big better change tables rather than by having an individual change bet sizes, because this is harder to detect.
For the people with a flat bet (on a card counting team) there’s no decision making at all. They simply follow basic strategy which prescribes exactly what move to make in each situation.
It is/was also possible for a player at the first seat of the table to see a sloppy dealer's hole card when checking for blackjack. This is called "first basing" while using a teammate is generally called spooking.
So they are working hard keeping that count, but they are not directly playing as if they know anything. The roaming fake rich guy is.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/01/29/382497080...
I suspect, though, that many/most people in these situations either don't want a run-in with the law, or want to keep a low profile and not make a scene for other reasons, so they'll just go along with it and quietly get out of there.
The first "real" program I ever wrote was a blackjack simulator, in MS-BASIC, around 30 years ago. My brother and I were getting ready to go with my Dad to Vegas for the first time, and we were keen on not being typical dumb ass gamblers...we wanted an edge.
We quickly learned that the only beatable game in town was card-counting at Blackjack, so I got busy first verifying that card counting wasn't some casino ploy (it wasn't), and then modifying the same simulator code to actually "teach" the systems it was simulating.
I wish I still had this code... I absolutely loved developing it, and eventually it was a very powerful blackjack system. It had configurable everything..system counts, decks, rules, players at the table, etc. I literally spent 7 years plus working on it. Eventually it was ported to Turbo Pascal for speed.
I became a whiz at counting... I eventually settled on "Wong Halves", the most complex but supposedly the most accurate count system there was. Remember, this was in the late 80s early 90s, and back then casinos were wide open to be taken.
I was only a $5 to $25 player though, so I never got any real heat. I used a 1 to 5 bet ratios (1 unit at low counts and 5 as "big bets"), which was very conservative, and looking back, I had a good deal of small-time success. Unlike my brother, I was never banned... I was far better than he at "blending in" and being personable.
Nowadays, I live in Vegas, and they have completely destroyed the chances of winning any real money at the casinos. Hell, I remember my simulations showing me that the primary money advantage was made when you had a large bet out at a high count (favorable to the player), that the fact that blackjacks came at a higher rate WAS THE ONLY REAL MONEY MAKING ADVANTAGE THERE WAS.
This is why, I feel, that the high end strip casinos NO LONGER PAY 3-2 for natural blackjacks...an outrage if ever there is one! Strip casinos now pay 6-5 for a blackjack. I have had heated arguments with pit personnel that the game should no longer be called Blackjack, so "Blackjack" pay 3-2 for naturals.
Unsurprisingly, they never saw it my way. No matter how well you count, you will NEVER win long term with natural blackjacks paying only 6-5, so save your money and your time and just goto Vegas for a good time.
The tables that were sure to fill up with low stakes, uninformed players, tended to have really bad rules. I’ve seen 6-5 blackjacks, no splitting aces, and even no doubling after splitting.
Like why not just give the casino the money?
I like playing blackjack because you can sit there for quite awhile and generally not lose too much (that’s a relative term of course) while socializing and getting free drinks. I’ll run a count after a few shoes here and there but not every shoe as I’m not trying to do this for profit so much as entertainment.
Your absolutely correct about your approach to the game now. Just sit, try to find a friendly dealer and some fun people to play with, and you will have an outstanding time.
Although I’m not quite sure what the last sentence means. She gets caught... and then what?
(edit - typo)
But still in the end, if you distill it all down, doesn't it always come out to the conclusion:
If your potential winnings are capped (fair or not, by the casino), and your losses are unlimited, what is gambling but a slower way to lose a bunch of money while getting a little entertainment out of it? At least for those of us who are not going to become professional card counters...
That's generally how I look at it when I'm in Vegas. I'll take $100 from the ATM and sit down at a poker table. Occasionally I get unlucky and play really poorly and I'm out in an hour, but usually I get at least a few hours, and on the flip side, I've spent an entire night at a table on that $100, and it's a blast. Of course this also depends on the other people at the table, and the dealers that come through. Some tables just aren't that fun to be at (you're of course playing against the other people at the table, and some people take it very seriously), while others are great.
Craps can be a huge amount of fun, especially when people are lucky, because you develop a kind of silly temporary camaraderie with random strangers at the table. Blackjack can be the same way, too (though I never learned how to properly play, so I usually don't last long).
Consider that if you go to see a movie (often $15-25 just for the ticket these days), and you're the kind of person to get concessions and whatnot, you can easily spend $50 or more for 1.5-2 hours of entertainment. I'm cool paying $100 for sometimes 6-8 hours of fun, plus free drinks. Now, for people who don't find that kind of thing fun, then sure, that's not for them. And for people who have a gambling addiction, that's great way to spend money they don't have. But if you enjoy it, and are good about setting yourself monetary limits, and consider your buy-in to be a cost of entertainment, it's fine.
She felt like because she never got caught, she "wasn't good enough"? How does that make any sense? I get self confidence issues are often irrational but, c'mon...
That's like a criminal lamenting that they weren't a very good criminal because the police could never catch them; everyone knows real criminals get caught and arrested.
If you cheat, and cheat badly, it's often the case that the casino has noticed and is choosing to let you continue.
Almost everyone who sits at a high stakes blackjack table thinks they have a system for beating the casino (perhaps by breaking the rules), but in most cases their system doesn't work or they don't execute it well enough to make a consistent profit.
If it's profitable for the casino to allow this type of cheating, they will absolutely let it continue.
I once sat at a table with someone blatantly marking every card that passed through his hand, but not in a way that gave him a hope of profit. The dealer was clearly aware of him doing it, and play continued. (I was quick to leave that table)
This is likely why she had that level of nagging doubt. "Am I not winning enough to warrant extra scrutiny? Certainly if I was that good they'd have figured out what I'm doing and busted me?"
That's a really good point. Casinos aren't a windfall business. They're there to rake the 1% advantage on blackjack. It's important to have people at the tables moving money, not to have 1 person lose their $100k nest egg in 12 hours.
Casinos make money from "whales," who may or may not end up ruined to a man, but who are certainly losing enough money to ruin an average bettor.
The guy losing $500 at BJ once in a while (and once in a blue moon winning some back) is the "economy coach class super saver" flyer. Yes, enough of those small fry help defray the fixed costs of the flight. But it's the last minute business class flyer that brings the margin.
Similarly, the real money for the casino is in some mix of 1. problem gamblers, almost by definition, and 2. money laundering.
I didn't really understand this bit from her, though. Her position in the team was not to win a lot, but to bet consistently, probably overall slowly bleed money, and signal the Big Player to come over when the count was favorable. "Not winning enough to warrant extra scrutiny" is literally her role in the team.
I find this hard to believe. I've been to a lot of casinos and I've never seen a blackjack table where the players were allowed to touch the cards.
However, it's worth noting that gambling intentionally has a very high variance - it's part of the addiction mechanism that losing players often win a little and occasionally win large amounts.
Successful card counters will also have their bank punctuated by winning and losing streaks.
It's only in the long-term that you will be able to tell if you're making money.
Henry Hill, GoodfellasThis is a brilliant place to be in.
I really feel for people in that kind of situation. Say what you like about the wisdom or foolhardiness of deciding out of high school not to go to college and take on student debt, it did put me in the situation of having very quickly to work out whether and how I was going to be worth a damn - less flippantly, it put me in the position, at the beginning of my adult life, of deciding what I was going to do with my adult life, and how to go about accomplishing it.
I can't imagine what it must be like to hit your mid-20s with tens of thousands, if not these days six figures, of undischargeable debt, and then have to start figuring out what sort of worth you're going to have in the world. It's a hell of a racket to run on teenagers, and, just as in the casino business against which this writer chose to try herself, it seems like the house always wins in the end.
It is possible to carefully observe and model a variety of randomization processes at different casinos, find a weakness in a particular game at a particular casino, and construct a profitable strategy that is nearly impossible for the casino to anticipate. Even so, they will eventually notice someone who is a consistent winner, assume you are cheating, and force you to play a stressful game of cat-and-mouse that will lower your expected profit, increase your variance, and lead to a less-than-desirable lifestyle, in my opinion. A team can improve these things at the cost of adding management and human resource headaches.
If you have the talent to succeed at this, my experience is that the same talent can be applied in much more productive endeavors that pay far better and yield a much higher quality of life.
I'd guess that the edge you can get, along with max bets and not drawing attention to yourself means you're better off with a tech or hedge fund job? I've heard that pulling six figures playing poker takes a lot of skill and a lot of grinding. The story of the professional gambler is compelling, but in practice, it seems like most people just aren't smart enough or work hard enough to make it work, or they're smart and work hard enough to do better at something more productive.
Ultimately, if you aren’t playing with a team or $50+ minimums, you won’t make a huge amount of money on a per-hour basis. I still count occasionally but now only for one or two shuffles before getting back to having fun with friends.
This is the only long term winning strategy I've seen work in practice.
(Former Poker Dealer)
Hello
A strange game.
The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
I think there is a nice psychological effect of a deck that can truly get “hot”, where the odds actually do temporarily turn towards the players favor. The life is sucked out the game if things are truly random on every deal.
But .. the game is to play with others and have a great time, no? At least poker is fun, yet everyone knows the odds.
Initially, I spent about 40 hours training on blackjack counting software. Nowadays, I'll practice for one day before the trip, and I'm sharp again. My "lifetime earnings" are very good, but I'm not trying to make money so much as not lose money.
Counting is only a small part of the game. You need to memorize basic strategy for the different types of tables, as there are subtle differences in rules. You have to know how many decks are left on the shoe. You have to divide the count by the decks remaining and calculate how much to bet based off of this information. Lastly, you have to execute all of this nearly perfectly all while in a loud environment while people are talking to you. Even a small percentage of mistakes can mean negative expected value.
it all depends how you are counting them, if you use a secondary device or person assisting, that is cheating, which is illegal, even though you are using it to count.