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!
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
