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Let us say that you want to achieve a bet spread of £2 to £100 without getting noticed. You want to play as little as possible without getting noticed when the count goes negative. In blackjack then you know when the dealer has the advantage and when you have it. Ideally you would like to play the absolute minimum when the dealer has the advantage and then expand to the maximum whenever you have it. In reality of course then the situation is far different as you will quickly get detected doing this.

So you start your bet at the start of the shoe at £5 and not £2 as I said previously. Here the running count is zero and the house edge means that you are under a -0.5% disadvantage at this stage. But if the running count starts going negative then you can leave the table. But you need to have cover when you do this so I would advise going and standing behind a roulette table as if you are waiting to bet on roulette.

This has then reduced your blackjack bets not to the table minimum of £2 but to absolute zero. It also allows you to look more like a gambler who is flitting between two tables. Of course you throw the odd cover bet onto roulette even money chances every once in a while but that is just for cover. You are only losing 1.35% per spin on even chance bets so 4 bets of £50 every hour is only costing you £2.70 per hour.

Your blackjack hourly rate will offset this and increase the length of your career. Then when the count stays at around neutral you can increase your bets by doubling it up and you can even tell the dealer to “double you up”. You can do this after a winning hand so that it makes you look as if you are letting winnings ride or after a losing hand so that you are chasing losses.

Also your £50 bets on roulette exceed your bets on blackjack at this stage so when you increase your bets on blackjack to match them or even exceed them then no one will think anything of it but be sure to let the blackjack dealers know that your £50 bet on roulette has either won or lost…..got to be sneaky

see you soon

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

How do you get the money onto a blackjack table without looking like a card counter? This is the problem that you face as a pro blackjack player. Let us say that you have a $2 table minimum and a $200 table maximum. But due to bankroll limitations, your maximum bet is $100. This is still a bet spread of 50/1 if you deviate between betting $2 and betting $100.

This is called bet spread and will get you caught in any casino for the simple reason being that this is what they look for. So you need to reduce your spread, if you think that this is reducing your profit then you are wrong. Let us say that your could theoretically make £10,000 in a six month period but after that six month period, you were basically prevented from playing   wherever you went as your details were now on some database of undesirables.

Let us also say that had you reduced your spread during that same period, your theoretical earn rate would only have been a mere £4000. During that six month period, it is easy to think that you are maximising your earnings but that is merely an illusion.

It is like a tortoise and the hare type situation where the player who is earning less has the ability to carry on doing so at a rate of £8k a year. Let us say that his playing career lasts for 10 years at the same rate, he has then made £80k compared to the other players £10k and all because he chose a more realistic bet spread.

You need to sacrifice profit, if you try for the maximum possible then you will fail for the simple reason being that you will expose your operation. If you could start betting £5 instead of £2 then that would be a start, straight away you have reduced the spread to 20/1 from 50/1 when you max out with your £100 bet. You could then use a typical gambling doubling up system and make it known to everyone that this is what you are doing. You prepare for the jumps by increasing your bets in neutral counts.

This has the added effect of confusing any member of staff who can card count as you will be increasing your bet when the count isn’t positive but it also allows you to get to your maximum bet faster should the count continue to escalate.

You have to work smarter

see you soon

Carl

I may not be having any casino trips on a Friday/Saturday for a while after a very close family member was diagnosed with a serious illness on Tuesday. So I guess that this means that I will have to think about something else to write about the following day

I remembered though yesterday that I was only part way through talking about basic strategy. I had already discussed the decisions for standing and now we will look at the splitting decisions. Once again this is a generic basic strategy so should not be seen as remotely definitive.

To be able to split then you must have a pair and we will start with the highest pair which is aces. Here you are correct to always split them unless the dealer is showing an ace. With tens you never split them but in many casinos you simply do not have the option to do so anyway. With nines then you split them if the dealer has a nine or below except if they have a seven showing. Anything above a nine by the dealer and you stand.

You split 8-8 if the dealer has a nine showing or lower, sevens if the dealer has a seven or lower, sixes if they have a six or lower, do not split fives or fours. Finally, split 3-3 and 2-2 if the dealer has a seven or less. In future posts I will look at soft totals that include an ace.

But while we are on the subject of basic strategy then I will mention doubling as well. You double on 11 if the dealer has a nine or less, you double on ten in the same way, you double on nine if the dealer has a 3,4,5 or 6.

So this is basically it then with regards to basic strategy, all I have missed are the soft totals which I will cover in a later post. But once again it is important that you realise that these are generic and rules variations and geographical location will mean that there will be differences in what I have just said.

But if you want to be a good blackjack player, get down to basics first

see you soon

Carl

It has taken a while but I have finally watched the mover “21” with Kevin Spacey. I think as with all movies that surround technical fields like sports and games, there are going to be numerous things that are not accurate. Today’s video shows the preview for the movie and has been selected by me because it sort of fits in with what I have been saying about blackjack.

At the end of the day, anything that has been written, spoken or filmed about the game of blackjack rightfully takes its place in the blackjack world whether people agree with it or not. It is inevitable that Hollywood will do their stuff and change what the MIT team did just for dramatic effect.

So we have a situation where reality and fantasy merge. Even when I wrote my book “Princes of Darkness: The World of High-stakes blackjack”, it was difficult to get across the reality of it and I was the one who was writing the book. In fact I have to confess that I slightly inflated and dressed up certain things in a minor way and I think that is kind of inevitable during the process.

I remember a few years ago watching Rounders with Matt Damon and even though that is probably the best film on poker ever made due to its accuracy, I found it very clichéd and done in a way that still didn’t depict true reality. Watching the movie “21” will not reveal how to run a successful blackjack team although it will reveal useful tips if you zoom in on them.

But things like using two big players on the same table isn’t needed for instance as this just brings too much heat down and tipping is not something that a professional blackjack player does on any great scale simply because the edge is so small. By all means watch the movie if you have never watched it before but do remember that you are watching Hollywood at work here.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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Yesterday was hard work for me, in fact I was so shattered by the end of the day that I cancelled our usual Friday night casino trip. I was fast asleep by 10pm and snoring like a trooper in my armchair (according to my partner). It was a bad day all round, lost my Internet connection and spent several hours of making phone calls and listening to annoying music first with BT and then with my ISP provider.

I couldn’t even be certain that it wasn’t my router that was the problem and went out and purchased a new router out of desperation. I had work to do and business meetings to attend and still had no connection last night and had to use a colleagues business computer to send several important emails. Anyway, got up this morning and all is fine as it was a fault with my broadband which was fixed at their end late last night.

Anyway I promised to teach you basic strategy this weekend. Well the bad news is that I cannot teach you perfect basic strategy because there is no such thing. Much depends on where you are playing and what the rules are. Because I don’t know where you are playing then I will be forced to give you a generic basic strategy that will do about 99% of the job.

In fact on second thoughts I may have to fragment this over several posts as it may be longer to put down than I first imagined. So I will start off with hard totals first.

18……..always stand
17……..always stand
16……..stand if dealer has 2-6 otherwise hit
15……..same as above
14……..same as above
13……..same as above
12……..only stand if dealer has 4,5 or 6 and hit against all other totals

Obviously if your total is 11 or less then you take a card because you can only improve your position by hitting. Don’t try doing stupid things like standing on 7 because you “think” that two picture cards are due and the dealer has a 5 showing. This is ludicrous and will cost you money in the long term irrespective of how successful you may be on any one individual hand…..ditto with hands that are 17 or higher.

So the next stage is to learn this data first and then I will provide you with the rest of it in the coming posts.

see you soon

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

These days you simply cannot make any progress as a blackjack player without first learning basic strategy. This is not as difficult as it sounds and merely involves learning a few charts. You will need to learn all of your basic strategy decisions before you play blackjack, this will form the bedrock of all of your future play.

Most of the decisions are common sense. Like standing on 13 or higher if the dealer has what is called a “stiff” which means a starting card of 2 to 6. These are the worst starting cards for the dealer to have because they carry the highest chance of busting from these starting card values.

All hands 17 or above are stands for example although I will put a firmer description of basic strategy in tomorrow’s post so look out for that.

Blackjack is also one of the online casino games where this knowledge will stand you in very good stead. So this applies whether or not you play live or whether you play online. How important is it to learn basic strategy? Well you are increasing the edge that the house or casino has against you if you don’t know basic so you must learn this stuff.

If you want to consider making money from blackjack then you need to learn basic strategy. This unfortunately takes a little work but you must knuckle down to work at some stage if you want to improve your blackjack game.

When you get a casino bonus like a sign up bonus for example then you are already technically ahead of the game. This then puts you into a flexible situation where you are starting from in front and can even afford to lose some money.

Basic strategy forms the foundation of online blackjack as well as live play and this is why it is imperative that you know this stuff. So do please keep a look out for tomorrow’s blog and also for the new videos starting next month on here and on my sports blog.

see you soon

Carl

There has been a long ongoing debate about the merits of particular card counting systems down the years. The easiest ones to use are the level one systems along with some unbalanced systems like Fuchs and Vancura’s KO counting system for example.

In fact the KO system is one that I would recommend to any novice counter as a starter system. I have never used it personally for the simple reason being that balanced counts are better for shuffle tracking. My own personal favourite was the most well known of them all and that was the high/low. This simple system managed to grab most of the betting opportunities that were presented but its simplicity allowed you to do other things.

Like interact with casino staff like a real punter and not have to act like some emotionless android from the planet x. It also allowed you to shuffle track as well and to also watch for suspected heat. In short then it game you one very importantand valuable thing as a blackjack player……time.

This was just what many blackjack players simply didn’t get when they read my book Princes of Darkness : The World of Highstakes Blackjack, sophisticated counting systems are very tiring when done for hour after hour, simple systems are far better and this gets back to the concept of time once again only this time, you are creating longer playing time.

In fact I dare say that there were few people who properly understood my position as in many instances I was approaching things from a direction purely based on what I knew about the internal structure of casinos and how they operated. So my answer to this question is that I wouldn’t touch sophisticated level three and level four systems with a barge pole for the simple reason that you would spend so much mental energy keeping the count that you would miss the crucial other aspects of advantage play blackjack that contribute towards getting you a meaningful edge and not something that was very marginal.

Personally I have never much fancied playing blackjack for an edge somewhere inbetween 0.5% and 1.0% and all of the assorted variance that comes with it.

Anyway….take care and see you soon.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson – author of Princes of Darkness : The World of Highstakes Blackjack

Play blackjack online at bwin.com!

Blackjack isnt like poker, you dont go on your instincts to get the best result…..not once…..not ever. The only time that instincts ever come into play with advanced Blackjack is in the area of avoiding detection. At times I could feel when I was being watched, whenever I got that feeling then I always stopped playing immediately.

The problem with card counting and using advantage play methods in the UK is that although there are about 130 casinos (figure may have changed recently), the number of companies was very small. Grosvenor Clubs, Stanleys, Stakis (now Gala) and London Clubs probably accounted for about 75%-80% of the casinos in the entire country at that time.

So if you were spotted in one casino then your details could have been passed to as many as 20-30 casinos in a very short space of time. Also casinos share information as well and especially casinos in the same city as they tend to cover each others backs with that sort of thing.

But with basic strategy then there is literally no room for instinct, if you are not using proper basic then your decisions are wrong plain and simple. There would be no point in me replicating basic strategy here because there are so many different types of basic that one could literally fill an entire book with them.

Basic shifts with what differences there are with regards the rules variations. It still isnt terribly common even in 2009 to see accurate basic. In fact seeing accuarate  basic was one of the surest ways of spotting a counter as someone who had taken the time to learn basic usually went the whole nine yards and leant a counting system as well.

Also most counting systems basically do the same thing. Most balanced counting systems find high card segments at roughly the same time so even if you were say versed in the high / low and no other counting system, you could still spot someone using a different system quite easily like the Wong or Uston or Revere systems for instance.

But once you learn the mathematics then instinct and hunches are a thing of the past…..or at least they should be.

see you soon

Carl

I studied some of the best blackjack books in the world years ago. In fact this was fantastic because at that time, we were looking at pre-internet so it wasnt easy to get your hands on the books that I had in the UK. This gave me a tremendous advantage over the casinos because while they knew about card counting, their level of knowledge was so basic that it was laughable.

They knew basic strategy at best and the high / low system at best and that counters went from betting table minimums to table maximums very quickly. Any player who did this was as basic an amateur as you could ever wish to meet. I had all of the knowledge of Stanford Wong, Ed Thorp, Lawrence Revere, Bryce Carlson, Peter Griffin, Donald Schlesinger, Ken Uston and Arnold Snyder behind me.

I had all thier knowledge and tons of my own. I had access to shuffle tracking software that barely anyone even knew existed at that time. I had profesisonal BJ count analyzers that could calculate your edge given what type of counting system you used and what strategy you adopted to give you your earn rate per 100 hands.

This was immensely powerful stuff at that time and this was equivalent to poker players using software today. But some of the best blackjack books in the world in 1998 are still the best blackjack books in the world now. For anyone who wants to study this game then I recommend the following books,

PROFESSIONAL BLACKJACK  : Stanford Wong

MILLION DOLLAR BLACKJACK:  Ken Uston

BLACKBELT IN BLACKJACK:   Bryce Carlson

BLACKJACK ATTACK:   Donald Schlesinger

THE THEORY OF BLACKJACK:  Peter Griffin

Also anything by Arnold Snyder and especially his works on shuffle tracking, using this to compliment the shuffle trak programs is worth its weight in gold. It was amazing back in the 1990’s becasue I felt immensely powerful, I had almost top secret knowledge that even the owners of the companies didnt even have. For me though, the real profit lay in training people up.

Using proper anti-detection methods was the real art to the game……I still crave playing even now……its just in the blood. I am off to another casino this weekend….maybe I will have a little dabble

see you soon

Carl

Many people have asked me how long does it take to become a pro blackjack player. Well that answer is difficult to give simply because speaking through experience, if it were not because of my financial backers then I wouldnt have played the game at all in all probability.

Risking money isnt easy for many people and it certainly wasnt easy for me and this was why I probably wouldnt have done anything had it not been for a serious cash injection.  But this underlines that in order to be able to make money out of any form of gambling then you are going to have to accept risk and that isnt easy for many people.

Then even when you accept the risk, you then have to accept the variance which is severe. A bankroll of 150 big bets is really only adequate. Then what you have to remember is that in order to make money in BJ then you have to risk a certain amount. So having a max bet of $20 isnt going to get you a huge hourly rate.

This was why we used Shuffle Trak which was a great piece of software that tracked shuffles into the next shoe. This gave us far more frequent high card segments than merely counting. But even then, unless your maximum bet is at a decent level then your hourly rate isnt going to be big and if you are betting big then you are under more scrutiny.

This is the BJ players dilemma and it is a difficult one to overcome. We used a laptop computer that I operated on the outside and one of our team called me to give me the shuffle, within seconds I could give them back the exact info for where these cards were going into the next shoe.

But if you remember that even 150 big bets doesnt guarantee not going bust then having an half decent big bet of $50 means that you will need at least a $7500 bankroll and probably $10,000-$12,500 may be needed. Gambling for a living is like joing the foreign legion……you have to be tough enough.

See you soon and take care

Carl