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In poker, if you see your opponents hand without actually trying to do so then that is not cheating. Part of the game is in concealing your own hand. In casino blackjack of course then the casino is fair game and so is the dealer if they are careless with exposing cards.

So just how do dealers expose cards in blackjack when it is being dealt from a shoe? Well there are numerous ways to do this but the main one is when dealers for whatever reason are either not holding the card correctly or not pulling the card correctly. Even many experienced dealers apply pressure to the wrong area of the card and inadvertently make it visible to an alert player at first base. If this card is a ten value card or an ace then that is a big advantage for the player.

Now of course that card needs to be the first card out of the next hand so that the player on first base gets the card. But the problem is with individual counters that if you escalate your bet dramatically to take advantage of this then it is blatant to the casino staff. You will be suspected as a card counter even if in this instance you are not counting.

If you went from £5 to £200 with the knowledge that the next card out of the shoe is an ace then the edge is around 52% for the player. This means that the expectation is +£104 on the bet. Do you want to risk your entire operation for £104? This is even supposing that you win the hand, an ace is no guarantee of victory. This tactic is better when you have a BP (big player) as you are going to be signalling them in with big bets anyway.

Quite often, aggressive male dealers have this flaw and especially if they are fresh at the start of a shift or they are annoyed for whatever reason. Different dealers deal the cards in different ways and flaws that were present at the start of shift may dissapear with time and vice versa.

In the next post I want to talk about actual spooking ploys that we used,

see you soon

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

The difference between online casino gambling and live casino gambling is akin to online poker and live poker in my opinion. By that I mean that there are many similarities but also numerous differences.

For instance in online blackjack there is no facility to card count or shuffle track. But then again in live blackjack with shuffling machines then you do not have the facility to be able to do that anyway.

But with online casinos then you do have numerous other advantages that live casinos simply do not offer. You do not get financial incentives or bonuses in live casinos for becoming a member.

You also don’t have the luxury of being able to play in your own home without having to travel in order to do it. But of course live casinos do offer the ability for interaction.

But then again maybe you don’t want interaction. Maybe you don’t want friends and family knowing that you gamble. But in my mind, the differences with live blackjack and online casino blackjack are becoming less and less.

This is rapidly becoming the case with roulette as well. Live casinos are now featuring electronic roulette more and more or using one single centralised wheel like I have seen in numerous casinos.

The fact of the matter is that the old timers like me will not like this form of roulette but the new kids will not know anything else but the Internet version.

So I can see online casino games really starting to expand as the live casinos won’t be offering much different to what the online casinos will be offering from a purely gaming sense.

In my experience, there have been no casinos in the UK who have provided new members with money when they join. This is where the online casinos really have the edge.

But most people incorrectly view gaming anyway. It is merely entertainment and nothing more and no different to watching a movie or going out. It is merely an alternative form of entertainment and should be seen as such.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

Many attribute successful blackjack players as being individuals but they never work on their own. Even if they might happen to practice on their own, they are operating with knowledge gained from some of the greatest exponents on the planet. I know from past experience that even when I was on my own as a counter, I still had an arsenal of world renowned experts swimming around in my head.

In my mind, I was never going into a casino on my own as I had other people there with me in spirit. I had read Million Dollar Blackjack by Ken Uston more times than I can care to remember. Ken ran what was perhaps the most successful blackjack operation in the history of the game and I did learn an awful lot from him from reading that one single book. Then we had Professional Blackjack by Stanford Wong, an absolute classic of a book and still as relevant today as it was when the first edition came out back in the eighties.

I had started the process off by reading Beat the Dealer by Edward Thorp  back in 1990 and that really kick started the whole process. The book was dated compared to the others but it was still a gem. This was the first great blackjack book and it must have kick started the careers of thousands of card counters.

Then we had Playing Blackjack as a Business by Lawrence Revere, like Stanford Wong this name was an alias but Revere also had a dark side as well. Rumour had it that he also worked as a card counter spotter for casinos and that he also caught the very people who he had trained up.

Many would argue that Blackjack for Blood by Bryce Carlson should also be up there. The sections on the Advanced Omega 2 counting system and evasion techniques were great information. Then I had Blackjack Attack by Donald Schlesinger. This for me could be the greatest blackjack book ever printed and was the first book to properly explain how strategy deviations were of less importance and the “sweet 16″ and “illustrious 18″ were formed in that book.

Then I had The Theory of Blackjack by Peter Griffin, a very mathematically heavy book but still very good reading. I also have to mention the articles on shuffle tracking in Blackjack Forum by Arnold Snyder as being excellent value. I could mention countless others, the Shuffle Trak program by Mesa Verde Software, Stanford Wong’s Professional Count Analyzer are also up there.

So I was never on my own, I had the best team on the planet helping me……The Blackjack All Stars……what casino can stand up to that kind of team without changing the game or the rules……none!

See you soon

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

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

For all you people out there who play blackjack, you may already know what a difficult game it is to master. My belief though is that most people simply do not know about the marvelous subtleties of the game. In fact when I read my first ever blackjack book back in around 1990 then my knowledge and understanding of the game quantum leaped. That book was Beat The Dealer by Ed Thorp which was the first great blackjack book.

The game is deeply mathematical in nature, but yet as someone who is not well grounded in mathematics myself, I know from personal experience that there comes a time when knowing the in depth mathematical stuff using qualifications in highly advanced mathematics and statistics is simply not needed and has diminishing returns. There are far more important skills to playing blackjack and beating the game inside live casinos.

Honesty is a massive element in team play and I do know of certain blackjack teams who used polygraph machines to test to see if results were being reported correctly. I tried to get around this problem by operating in such a way as to make everything as open as possible. I did not allow any team member to operate alone as I knew that this would be a problem or at least a potential problem.

At the end of the day, people need money and people have debts and bills to pay. If they don’t have enough money to get by or if they have other expensive habits then the temptation to steal is ever present. I never wanted to go down the avenue of polygraph testing although at one stage I did secretly inquire about the price of a such a device and how easy it would have been to get hold of one.

But these are things that need to be ironed out first and not during the operation. Also it is pretty difficult to ask someone to take a test when it is them who is stumping up the money as the main financial backer. So I was in a very awkward situation anyway. But polygraph testing has been used numerous times with professional gambling teams and not just in casino blackjack either……and you thought that professional blackjack was all about counting cards

see you soon

Carl

One of the biggest running counts that I ever saw happened during the second year of our operation. I was back counting a shoe game and with a table full of seven players, the first two rounds of play produced only one ten value card.

The first round of play alone left a running count of +14 and the second round increased this still further to +25 if my memory serves me correctly. This was a six deck game so with 5.5 decks remaining the true count was 4.5.

In all my years of casino gambling and counting cards both in and out of gaming, I have never seen a running count go through the roof as quickly as this. I would like to report that we made a lot of money from this situation but the rest of the team wasn’t present as I was merely scouting the game

Still, a few percent in edge isn’t something that you can take to the bank. But it does make a good story and the sum total of this advantage was that I won £45. I couldn’t really max out on the situation for two reasons.

Firstly I was only playing minimums and having a spread that was too big would have alerted the gaming staff. A second reason was that I didn’t have that much on me for a scouting mission (about £200).

There was another reason as well and getting heat at this stage would not only have been foolish but it would also have been selfish as well as we would have been coming back into this casino at some future point in time.

The game from a theoretical point of view with regards to conventional blackjack was poor, the penetration was around 60-65% and the game was six deck.

So without shuffle tracking and advantage play, it was quite poor. This was a cross reference taken from six different blackjack dealers. Not one single dealer dealt more than about 70% of the cards from the shoe at anytime.

Blackjack can really be a frustrating game at times but +25 after two rounds…..now that takes some doing.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

There are a large number of cheating moves on roulette, in fact the game itself and the entire design of the table and the dealer training procedures are ripe for cheating. I also want to say that starting next month, I will be turning my blog into a video blog as well using videos of all things gaming to spice up the blog. I am going to start with roulette because this is the game that I find the most fascinating.

I am also going to be taking trips down memory lane as well and looking at our roulette ancestors and how they beat the wheel. But there is one such move on roulette that is very difficult to spot when done well. I will see if I can get a video of this because it is very difficult to put into words. It involves placing chips onto numbers that are staggered in such a way as to make the bottom chip invisible to the dealer.

The next step is to hope that the dealer does not straighten up the chips, anyway I don’t want to spoil the surprise for if I find the video but it is a great move. But it is also a move that needs to be practiced and executed well because it has to escape detection from the eye in the sky.

In fact this is the primary objective now when designing cheating moves, they must be designed in such a way so that they are invisible to the cameras. What this also means is that the move must be designed so that if the move fails then no suspicion must fall on the player that he has tried to cheat at all. This is key and it falls within the boundaries of confidence tricksters. The cons that they pull off are real works of art and leave the mark believing in their own mind that they were merely unfortunate and not duped.

This is how the best cheats operate on roulette. The are well know to the casinos, the staff know them, like them and even enjoy conversing with them. It is the same with the management but these people use their popularity as a weapon. In many cases, they will even get preferential payouts in borderline situations simply because the staff like them, situations that they themselves have cultivated I might add.

Look out for the new video blog next month…..will be worth watching.

see you soon

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

When I wrote my book “Princes of Darkness :The World of High-stakes Blackjack” I mentioned how things went wrong constantly and the end of the struggle was around May 1999 the following year. There is a big difference between knowing the theory and running a team with five members. Each member has their own individual emotions and goals and objectives.

Also as I have mentioned earlier, there is also the trust issue as well and this was definitely something that we had to come to terms with. It wasn’t until we dropped certain team members and replaced them with others that the entire venture really started to make progress. We had been operational for eight months before the teething troubles finally subsided.

It all sort of came together all of sudden based on one session of play where we won about two grand. It wasn’t the amount that was satisfying but the professionalism of the entire operation. Everything was working perfectly and even the mobile phone technology had improved.

On this particular occasion I was there with them as a non playing observer. We were not shuffle tracking as this process was done by me being at home with the laptop utilising shuffle trak. But I needed to see a new team member in action and it worked like a charm. Not also was this guy younger than the other member but he was more eager to take part and also turned out to be far more honest.

It was quite an amazing experience to see a team in operation with two counters, a big player and their partner all working in unison after having been trained up by me. The good thing about using known big players is that the casino tolerates them. In many cases they cannot intervene for the simply reason being that this person isn’t doing anything that they haven’t done in the past. So when a big player who is perhaps losing 50k a year starts winning then it is simply tolerated because no casino would risk losing that kind of business

Now you can see why it is so powerful

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

I watched a YouTube video the other day taken from the program “The Real Hustle” in which they performed some famous old blackjack cheating moves. What made me chuckle about the video was that it was clearly a made up situation. They were inside an English casino using coloured roulette chips on a blackjack table.

Also the moves were done based on the American blackjack version where the player gets to hold the cards. This isn’t the case in England where the player simply cannot touch the cards at all once they have been dealt. Still, they do make for entertaining programs. There are still numerous cheating moves available though despite the fact that the players cannot touch the cards.

This may surprise a few readers but over the past twenty years, ten of which were actually working in that job then you become aware of many different types of cheating move. Certain moves become possible based on the configuration of the dealer and the inspector. Quite often they will have a second game to watch. In some casinos that game may even be Casino Stud Poker so the inspectors attention will always be more focused on that table over the other blackjack table.

This is rightly so because just as in the program itself, this is a game where the players do get to hold the cards so many more cheating moves become possible based on that alone. But the reason why many cheats get caught is simply because of three things. Firstly then do not understand the psychology of the casino personnel that they are going up against.

Secondly they bet too big and in a way that brings attention up to a much higher level on behalf of the staff and management. Lastly, the cheats perform the moves at the wrong times and in the wrong locations. But it is this fatal lack of understanding with regards to casino staff psychology that gets them caught….and you thought that I only knew how to deal the games and play blackjack did you

Carl “The Dean” Sampson