bwin – the world's biggest online gaming platform

Someone asked me the other day about entering into a blackjack game in mid-shoe without knowing what the count was and how this affected your edge. Firstly what you have to remember is that if you enter a game in mid-shoe then what we are dealing with here is cards unseen.

So we don’t know if the count is plus or minus and in the absence of such information then we have to take a long term view of this and this means only one thing. The number of pluses that we cannot see will equal the number of minuses and so theoretically we can now treat the count as zero.

This is great for cover plays and especially in casinos with more than one table open. No card counter moves from table to table and bets sizable bets unless they are being signalled in by non counting team members. But let us say that you have a 20/1 bet spread of $5 to $200 and you enter mid-shoe. You could enter at say $20 and then downgrade the bets if your initial count is negative.

But also, going in at $20 allows you to double up and get to $100 very quickly and thus $200. Going from $20 to $40 to $80 to $160 looks like you are merely chasing losses or letting winnings ride. This can be achieved if the count goes immediately positive after entering.

However if the count goes negative then you can merely switch tables and enter mid-shoe again which makes you look less like a counter. So as long as you understand that entering mid-shoe makes no difference because cards unseen means that you can take the count to be zero then you will do fine entering mid-shoe.

Having worked in the casino industry on the inside as a Croupier, Inspector and trainee Pit Boss then I was in that industry for quite some considerable time. So it annoys me sometimes when certain ignorant people have some rather extreme views of the gaming and the gambling industry.

A few years ago a proposed “Super Casino” was planned for the town where I live. It actually made me laugh at the time how so many people were getting hot under the collar about this proposed event. They cited increases in problem gambling and prostitution amongst others. I saw documents from local residents which showed clear misunderstanding about what casinos actually were and their role in the community.

I also find something inherently wrong in being preached to by people many of whom have never even set foot inside a casino in their entire lives. Casinos first and foremost are places of entertainment and they do provide many thousands of jobs nationwide. This also knocks on into other areas as well and casinos plough an awful lot of money back into the economy.

But drugs and a dependency on drugs drives a large part of the prostitution industry and young people who become dependent on drugs need income in which to buy them above and beyond what they could earn in a normal day to day job.

Young boys turn to burglary and other types of theft while the girls turn to shop lifting and prostitution but the driving force behind prostitution is the drugs industry and not casinos or any proposed “Super Casino”.

Take it from me when I say that gambling books will not necessarily make you a winner. This applies whether we are talking about blackjack, poker or gambling in general. I will leave other forms of gambling out of the equation where it is not possible to create an edge like roulette for instance.

In my opinion, books are a constant in what is an ever changing environment in so much as what is written in them has the tendency to date. Also what you have to remember is that the information that is in them also has to be deciphered and understood correctly by the individual.

I have created a name for this and it is the “understanding gap”. What this means is the difference between what is being written and what is being interpreted. This isn’t always clear cut as well as often the reader can deliberately interpret data in a way which is favourable to them. Adding and subtracting data is a common theme amongst book readers and so the reader rarely reads what is intended.

In blackjack of course then this problem isn’t as severe due to the somewhat mechanical nature of the game. But even here then care has to be taken. Merely having blackjack knowledge connected to card counting does you little good if you get caught and are then prevented from playing. So what I say on this subject is that by all means read books as this is a very important part of your education.

But you have to read them objectively and almost begin the process of disputing what you read even though you could and often will be incorrectly disputing issues with the author. Then and only then will your thinking start to evolve.

Someone asked me the other day how a player starts out down the road to be a card counter and how long that training actually takes. Well firstly the training does not take as long as you think but unfortunately there are many obstacles and problems in your way. Automated shuffling machines wipe out any chance of card counting but a self imposed training program could see you being good enough in about three months.

Firstly though you must learn basic strategy and you need to know this very well. Luckily it is simply a case of learning a few tables but most of the playing decisions are obvious anyway. You would never take a card on 19 vs 4 for instance so you know much of basic anyway and so learning the rest isn’t hard. Once you know these tables then you will be able to play against the house with the house only having a 0.5% edge against you.

A good book to learn basic from is Stanford Wong’s Professional Blackjack with clearly laid out charts and tables. Once basic strategy is fully learned then you need to learn a simple counting system and I advise the high/low at first. You will need to practice your counting speed and be so quick that fast dealers do not intimidate you. During this learning process then I would advise going to a casino and playing basic strategy and practicing counting in real conditions.

Remember that you don’t want to be staring at the cards, you need to be fast enough so that you can count with just the merest glance. Also this will allow the casino staff to get to know you and they may then not take you for a counter when you start to up your bets at a later stage. But you also need to spot good games as well and not doing so will be another serious obstacle to you making money.

I am going to be starting a new section shortly which will go into my experiences with my first blackjack team. But a few people have asked me down the years how I first got into blackjack. Well it sort of happened in stages and not all at once. I guess that the first stage was based on me working as a croupier and then as an Inspector for nearly nine years.

This gave me the interest in the game from the very outset. The second step came by chance when I accidentally picked up a book inside a library and that book was “Beat The Dealer” by Ed Thorp. It also helped me to identify and then befriend a card counter who was active inside the casino where I worked and we are still good friends to this very day.

But even then my interest would have remained at nothing more than merely theoretical had it not been for me leaving gaming in July 1998 and then accidentally meeting what would be my financial backer down in Bournemouth when I was on a financial consultant induction course. So my entire operation was basically based on fluke events and pure chance.

I think that this is how many people start out to be honest and this was also how I started out playing online poker. This was something that happened simply because the blackjack operation had reached its shelf life. But starting soon, I will be telling my own story which I will call “The Dean’s Blackjack Story“.

I really do think that it is a very interesting story in so much as that it highlights just how something can be achieved out of nothing with little more than knowledge and determination. So look out for that coming soon.

It never ceases to amaze me just how many cheating teams there are out there trying to take money either from casinos or from the actual punters who frequent casinos. I recall one interview that I did some years ago with a professional pick pocket who told me that crowded places were the best places to take wallets and purses and this made casinos a prime target.

When I asked him why, he then told me that it was because bodily contact was normal in such crowded places where many people were in such close proximity. This definitely applies around roulette at night on busy games where quite often there can be as many as ten people around one roulette table.

Pickpockets know that people who frequent casinos usually have money. Even if they are not a big hitter then they will at least be having a night out and be carrying around at least £100 on average. I actually had this skill demonstrated to me once and my wallet was lifted from my back pocket without me even feeling it. Apparently slim people make easier targets because of the cavity between the fabric of the cloth and the persons actual body.

This means that a slim person is less likely to detect any movement. It was only after I had my wallet taken and then handed back to me that I then realised just how good these people are. But then again these are practiced skills that are akin to the skills honed by magicians and card mechanics but the only difference is that their sleight of hand comes with cards and not wallets, purses and cash.

Its a scary business so watch out.

I recall one of the very first card counters who I ever spotted was back when I was a dealer in my local casino back in the very early 1990’s. The only blackjack knowledge that I had at that time was when I had read Beat The Dealer by Edward Thorp.

But that book was more than enough for me to be able to spot any conventional card counter and certainly one who wasn’t making any effort to disguise his play. We actually went on to become very good friends and still are to this day.

One of the things that gets counters spotted is the intense concentration that they exhibit when they go about their job. This is a dead give away as is looking at the discards. When a counter looks at the discards then what they are trying to do is to calculate the true count. In another post on the same subject, I mentioned how not converting the running count into a true count was one of the biggest mistakes with regards novice card counters.

To better estimate the true ratio of high cards and aces to low cards then you need to divide the running count by the number of decks remaining to be dealt. This is why a counter often looks at the discards. However it is a mistake to look like a counter as if anyone in the casino has this knowledge then your playing life is going to be cut severely short.

I have said this many times and I will keep on saying it, card counting is not only a very serious business but it is also very difficult to pull off. Certain people with certain personality types are definitely not suited to playing full-time blackjack or even part time blackjack for that matter.

The thing is that it does create somewhat of a nervous situation when you are ramping your bets. When you do this for the first time, you always get the feeling that everyone in the entire building knows what it is that you are doing.

This first time nervousness and paranoia should go away but with many people it doesn’t. The fact of the matter is that anyone who goes and does the bare minimum as a blackjack player will get caught. Or at the very least will have severe counter measures taken against them.

This usually involves the dealer dealing short shoes which decreases the number of hands dealt per shoe but it also decreases the number of profitable situations for the counter as well. The best and most profitable situations tend to arise at the end of the shoe so when the shoe is cut very shallow then the really profitable situations rarely arise and the game tends to be nothing more than a process for recycling money.

This is what many novice card counters do not understand, they learn the running count but do not do true count conversions. If the first ten cards out of a four deck shoe are low cards then the running count is +10. But this figure of +10 does not represent the same ratio of high cards to low cards as it would if the count was +10 with only one deck remaining.

If we use the high-low count to show what I mean, there are 208 cards in a four deck shoe. These are broken down into 80 low cards, 80 high cards and 48 middling cards that have a count of zero. So ignoring the middling cards we can see that there are now 80 high cards and aces and 70 low cards remaining for a ratio of one high card or ace to every low card at a rate of 1.14.

But with only one deck remaining if we took a standard distribution of 20 low cards, 20 high cards and 12 middling cards, taking away ten low cards gives us a ratio of high cards and aces to low cards which is 2.00 and not the 1.14 like before.

See what I mean now

I remember clearly the first time that I ever made a non conventional blackjack move. I was scouting a casino in the north of England and was playing table minimums. I did not have too much money on me as counting and playing was not on my agenda. I did not want to ruin my chances with the team before we even started.

So what happened during the course of the evening was a little amazing if not stupid. The dealer was a nice girl and the inspector was also a nice guy and we had been making polite conversation for about thirty minutes or so.

There were a couple of other players on the table apart from me and she pulled an ace to her own hand when she already had seventeen. The rules state that the card must then be the next card out of the shoe and on this instance, the card happened to be an ace.

Without any conscious thought, I reached into my pocket and took most of the money that I had and placed a maximum bet on the first box of £200. The hush and silence became deafening as the inspector and dealer exchanged glances with each other as if to say “can he do that”.

Well of course I can and I wasn’t breaking any rules, just taking advantage of a dealer mistake. It was a bad thing to do but this is money when all said and done and the edge for the player when you know that your first card is an ace is over 50%. I won the hand although not with a natural and the mood on the table changed.

But I knew that this wouldn’t get reported because what dealer or inspector would want their superiors to know that they were not doing their jobs properly?

That really was a defining day and I made that same move numerous times although not always with an ace as it was often with a ten value card.

See you soon

Carl
Play at one of the best casinos online

There is a special type of buzz when you enter a casino with the intention of taking money from them. Casinos at the end of the day are businesses and any business is concentrating on making money and not on losing it.

But at the end of the day they are providing entertainment. They don’t mind people winning money as long as winning money is all that they are doing. There is of course a world of difference between winning money and earning money. When you are earning money then you have a positive long term expectation.

You are no longer winning money by getting lucky like a normal punter but slowly extracting money from the casino. It is possible that some card counters could be allowed to ply their trade if the casino was gaining in some other way.

For instance I once knew of a gaming manager who allowed a winning small-stakes counter to ply his trade simply because he didn’t want to risk upsetting the big hitting roulette players that he came in with who were his friends.

It is when you know that the casino don’t know what you are doing that creates the biggest buzz. This is something that a lifetime of online poker cannot replicate. This constant cat and mouse game is in itself quite a thrill.

Alas of course, it is very difficult to make blackjack a career. This is why I was playing online poker just a few years later. Just like with online poker where you are struggling to find profitable games, it is often better to play semi-professionally or as a serious amateur than to try and go full-time.

I certainly do recommend though that you try and play blackjack in a live setting because it will be well worth it.

See you soon

Carl
Or alternatively why not come and play blackjack on bwin online casino