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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

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

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

It was around October 1998 when we first started having problems with losing the signal on our mobile cell phones. Cell phone technology was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is now. I certainly did not like the thought of the team acting on their own. The two “counters” that “Steve” had brought with him just knew basic counting and no more and both of their careers had hardly been filled with success.

I certainly couldn’t trust them to visually track the deck as they simply didn’t have the experience despite being counters for a good few years. I hated not being there in person although I did go along to scout a few casinos every now and again. We had a particularly brutal session in October that hit our confidence badly.

We had lost over £7000 and received heat doing it, always a terrible combination. It is bad enough losing money but when you lose money and get heat then there are problems. This had to be sorted and quickly as getting heat is the first step in getting barred.

They were obviously not doing the things that I had taught them to do and when. We obviously needed another big player as “Steve’s” cover was severely compromised. Any casino should be happy to have taken your 7k and especially when the team had never been ahead at any stage of the session.

When I asked the team what sort of “heat” it had been, it was a combination of “subtle sly looks” and “cutting deeper shoes”. Casinos do this basically when a player is winning money even if they don’t suspect that a player is counting. They would never have suspected shuffle tracking because there is just no way that they would have had that kind of knowledge. So this meant that the team were looking like conventional counters, this was precisely what I had warned “Steve” (our financial backer) about before we even started.

These two associates of his were set in their ways as far as I could tell but they were all we had at the time and this could only be done by a team. If I hadn’t let these guys come along then the entire thing would have been a non starter. It was definitely time to get back to basics and this meant more training sessions which would not have gone down too well……more on that later.

regards

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

It isn’t just roulette where cheating takes place inside a casino, it is on all games. Blackjack is certainly no different and there are many cheating moves available even though in the UK, the players cannot physically touch the cards. In many situations, the lethargy and the indifference of gaming staff make many moves possible.

The way that the dealer deals the game opens up many moves. One such move is to spot the next card out of the shoe on the next round of play. Quite often this is accidentally revealed by certain dealers who apply too much pressure to the centre of the card.

Fast dealers tend to do this or male dealers who are far too rough with the cards. It is difficult to see certain types of cards because of the white surfaces but picture cards can be visible sometimes. But taking advantage of this move is not cheating in any way shape or form. It is no different to a poker player who accidentally reveals his hand to a fellow player.

The player who has glimpsed those cards certainly has no duty to inform the player that they are revealing their cards. It is exactly the same with blackjack. Also, this is something that the inspector cannot spot from their position so they cannot inform the dealer to correct it anyway.

Plus,at the end of the day….inspectors are nothing more than promoted dealers so they suffer from the same indifference and lethargy that the dealers do. Plus they are elevated and looking down on the table either from an elevated chair or from a standing position so they simply cannot see this. In fact the punters cannot see this either except one of them…..the player who is active on first base or first box.

Most dealers do not expose cards in this way but if you find one that does then you can create very profitable opportunities here. When you factor in that the knowledge that when your first card will be a ten value card then the edge to the player of around 13%

Now that’s why these moves can be so damn good,

see you soon

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

These days, tracking software prevails in online poker with software items like Poker Crusher and Hold ‘em Genius amongst others basically giving you all the information you need to play better poker against your opponents.

But few people are aware that tracking software has been around in blackjack for a long time and far longer than it ever has in poker. I was using software to improve my blackjack game back in the early to mid nineties. I first used Stanford Wongs blackjack count analyzer. This piece of software was brilliant and you just inputted your count information, bet sizes and what counts you would be coming in on and the software calculated your earn rate and standard deviation.

But that didnt have anywhere near the effect that using Shuffle Trak had. While it was possible to visually track shuffles, we could never use this process for the simple reason being that I would find it difficult to train two people in all my methods and visual acuity honed by years of practice of actually dealing and watching blackjack and analyzing shuffles. It is impossible to pass this across in a short time frame.

I taught them the basics of tracking but I had the experience to know when to deviate and by how much based on little and almost invisible changes in a dealers shuffle pattern. I simply became good at this back when I didnt have any money at stake and that is the best time to practice. Playing with someone elses money and THEN practicing is hardly going  to go down too well with any backer.

So I hatched a plan of using Shuffle Trak on my computer at home and trained them in how to learn basic casino shuffles which is a far easier task. They then either went outside or to the lavatory and called me to tell me the shuffle. I then inputted the data into Shuffle Trak and within a couple of minutes we knew where the cards would be distributed to in the next shoe.

I ended up having over 50 shuffle variations in the memory but one of the problems that we faced was that cell phone technology was not as good then and losing signal was a problem although in some casinos we had the option to use their own telephones

see you soon

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