However one such popular way is to bet on even chances and only use a percentage of your stake. Say $1 if you started with $20. But instead of doubling up your stake if you lose you only increase your stakes if you win. If you went onto a winning streak straight away then you can actually amass considerable winnings. Let us say that you bet $1 and won and so now you have $2 and a total of $21. Let us also say that you actually win 8 times on the trot. Spin number two and you wager $2 and so win another $2 and thus taking your stack to $23.
Spin three and you bet the $3 profit and win again and now you have $26.

The same with spin number four and now you have $32. On spin number five then you decide that you are going to “bank” some of your money and so you risk $6 and that wins and now your stack is at $38. You decide to risk $12 of your profit on spin six and that wins and now you are up to $50. You have $30 profits after six spins and your maximum downside was only $1.

This analogy is significant because it highlights the fact that many systems fail in gambling not because they are fundamentally unsound but because of the vigorish that is imposed on it from the casino or the gambling house. Poker is the same with table fees and rake and many would be successful poker players end up either not making money, losing money or not making enough to make the entire process financially viable above and beyond doing another line of work.

This process is the same for poker players because not only do you need to find a successful style but you also need to find a successful style that beats the rake and other overheads and also to find a successful style that allows you to earn an amount from the game that you deem to be financially viable. So any casino gambling strategy by sheer definition has many obstacles for it to overcome before it can start down the road to making money.

So if around 90% of players are losing money or not making money then 90% of poker players are doing something wrong or a combination of wrong things. This means that we then need to know or try to work out what the masses are doing or what they should be doing but are not. If we know how the masses are playing poker then we can more readily design strategies to beat them. The strategies that we therefore need to construct are probably not conventional strategies as dictated to us by the mainstream poker fraternity.

It can be immensely instructive to first read and learn what the masses are reading and following because once you establish this then you basically know how they think and act. There will always be players who only take their education a certain way down the track either because they cannot be bothered to work harder or because they haven’t got the time. But there is a reason why the masses do not make money, in years gone by it was because the greatest majority of them were simply very bad poker players. This is not the case now because a much larger percentage of the masses while not being great poker players are also adequate and efficient poker players.

Blackjack is no different and in many ways is far worse because the variance in blackjack is very severe and is akin to limit hold’em in severity. Although what can be far worse in limit is that you can end up having played many escalated pots to only then find out that your opponent was better than you and that you were getting outplayed. This can never happen of course in blackjack as you can never be outplayed by the dealer. The most that the dealer can do to thwart a card counter is to maybe only cut half the shoe but that is about all.

They could maybe count along to see if the counter is upping their bets during high counts but that is about it. They cannot alter the rules of the game and so cannot stand or take cards differently to 17. But sitting back and acting as if you are merely observing someone else commit the process of risking money is a good way to proceed. This all assumes of course that you have a good winning game plan to begin with.

However another clear goal is to also ride your profits as far as you possibly can and to cut your losses short. This principle is seen in some roulette systems where you start off making an initial bet and the use a percentage of that bet to carry on towards the next bet in the hope that the run will continue. There is logic behind this because of the fact that numbers in games like roulette are not evenly distributed in the short term.

For example in 37 spins then it is extremely unlikely that all 37 numbers would appear in those 37 spins and so this means that some numbers would appear more than once. So if you can look to possibly identify which number is about to go into a sequence of arriving more than it should based on short term variance then you have a chance of coming out ahead for the session. Clearly this method of betting will not make you +EV but it can be fun to use for single sessions of play.

However I think there are certain problems in games like poker and blackjack that are not relevant to playing Chess. In Chess then there is no variance to speak of. If you are playing Chess against a vastly inferior opponent then you are going to beat them…….it is that simple! There are no bad beats or unexpected outdraws and a novice player would never beat a Grandmaster even over a series of games. If a Grandmaster played a novice over 100 games then the score would be 100-0……there are no flukes in Chess.

In poker though then a world class player may win 60% of the pots played and in backgammon then a top player may win something like 75% of the games played against a novice but in Chess then it is 100% until the skill difference narrows. So despite Chess having a much higher complexity level, there are many factors in poker that make the game far more difficult to master than Chess or Go.

The pit boss used to check them at the end of the hour when the decks were changed but to be honest then I am not too sure how well the pit boss could detect marked cards above and beyond the obvious. Professional markers are very good at what they do although it is a dying art now for sure. But if a team ever got access to a game like CSP then it may just be difficult to detect.

There were one such team down in London some years ago that used tinsel on the back of the cards but they got caught for one simple reason……they won a lot of money. It doesn’t really matter how well you conceal the cheating move because at the end of the day large winnings will be looked at closely and especially on a game like CSP. The key to getting away with something like that is to keep the winnings to a minimum and to use methods that cannot be detected afterwards. There is no point in taking $250,000 if in doing so you do not get away with it and end up with a jail term.

But the key word in all of that is “random” because under certain specific situations then the result isn’t random. The job of a croupier and the job of a roulette wheel are to make the result totally random so that no mathematical system can ever succeed and to simply allow the odds that are built into the game to do their job.

However if it is the purpose of the croupier to try and ensure a random result then this underlines how the wheel cannot accomplish these feat on its own. I have heard many different roulette experts say the same thing but differently and whether you want to call it the “dealer’s signature” or whatever…….the fact of the matter is that croupiers either advertently or inadvertently can affect the randomness of an outcome.

How do I possibly know this? Well as a croupier and gaming inspector for nearly nine years then I ought to know. The casinos do not wish it to be common knowledge and so hide the fact. But there isn’t a single casino manager that I have ever worked with that didn’t know and understand how vulnerable roulette was under certain conditions.

There is a depth to blackjack that is unknown amongst nearly everyone who plays poker. In fact even poker has advanced alarmingly so in terms of the technical side over the past few years and this has revealed a side to the game that poker players never really knew existed. This exact same process happened in blackjack some years ago but many poker players think that blackjack is just about knowing basic strategy and a simple card counting system.

If you want to make it that simple then fine but trust me when I say that blackjack and the attaining of money in blackjack is a tougher proposition than what you first think. Let us look at a clear example here of what I am talking about. In blackjack then the dealer has position on the player on every single hand that gets played. Imagine how more difficult this makes the game when a mediocre player (which is what the house is) can beat all but the very best opponents simply by acting second. I do not think that there is any definitive answer to this argument to be quite frank.

Well it is clear that they are very important in both games but the most important thing to remember here is in how the best mathematicians who have gone into both games with their maths knowledge and little else have fared badly. In blackjack then these players were bounced out of Las Vegas in the 70’s and 80’s with alarming frequency.

To be a skilled poker player or a blackjack player for that matter involves many different things. Now this isn’t a discussion about tells or anything like that as that is too broad a subject. In blackjack and poker then there are many different skills that are required to make progress or a living from the game. It is skills like evading detection, understanding casino psychology, bankroll management and attitude to risk that dictate how well you will do.

But also it is the ability to be able to adapt to a changing environment as well that ultimately defines your chances of survival in the long term. I think that the two biggest metrics far and above all others are dollars won and time played. Each on their own is largely insignificant.