I must confess that before I started working with bwin, I was unaware as to how big and just how varied their markets really were. Coming to the site is worth it just for the extensive football betting and bwin live betting and streaming service by itself. If all that doesn’t grab your attention then you can get yourself across to their poker room which is one of the best on the net and with some great bonuses to boot.
You can also get access to some great poker material as well on the poker blog section with some great features and news. I think for me personally one of the outstanding features that any gambling site can have is variety and daily content. But there are millions of people who are turning to the online casino experience these days.
In fact I was only having this exact same conversation with a professional colleague of mine the other day. We discussed how land based casinos were starting to veer down the electronic gaming avenue. This is certainly the case in the UK. We have electronic blackjack, electronic roulette and all the rest of the electronic games that are sprouting up like mushrooms.
They are entering dangerous ground in my opinion because what they are starting to offer in a gaming sense is starting to merge with what online casinos offer. So in future, where will the incentive be for punters to leave their own home to gamble on blackjack or roulette etc when everything can all be got from their very own computer? There are always those who fear cyber crime of course by these days sites like bwin employ some of the best experts in the world to thwart these people.
In my mind the threat is no more real than getting mugged outside a casino (which almost happened to me once). I can also say that numerous people have had their cars broken in to whilst being inside a land based casino and I have even heard of big winners being followed home and then robbed at home. Land based casinos are also a haven for thieves and pick pockets so if you think by avoiding online casinos that you are safer then you had better think again.
I really do think that you are safer both physically and financially playing online casino gambling and this is from someone who has done both on numerous occasions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There has been a long ongoing debate about the merits of particular card counting systems down the years. The easiest ones to use are the level one systems along with some unbalanced systems like Fuchs and Vancura’s KO counting system for example.
In fact the KO system is one that I would recommend to any novice counter as a starter system. I have never used it personally for the simple reason being that balanced counts are better for shuffle tracking. My own personal favourite was the most well known of them all and that was the high/low. This simple system managed to grab most of the betting opportunities that were presented but its simplicity allowed you to do other things.
Like interact with casino staff like a real punter and not have to act like some emotionless android from the planet x. It also allowed you to shuffle track as well and to also watch for suspected heat. In short then it game you one very importantand valuable thing as a blackjack player……time.
This was just what many blackjack players simply didn’t get when they read my book Princes of Darkness : The World of Highstakes Blackjack, sophisticated counting systems are very tiring when done for hour after hour, simple systems are far better and this gets back to the concept of time once again only this time, you are creating longer playing time.
In fact I dare say that there were few people who properly understood my position as in many instances I was approaching things from a direction purely based on what I knew about the internal structure of casinos and how they operated. So my answer to this question is that I wouldn’t touch sophisticated level three and level four systems with a barge pole for the simple reason that you would spend so much mental energy keeping the count that you would miss the crucial other aspects of advantage play blackjack that contribute towards getting you a meaningful edge and not something that was very marginal.
Personally I have never much fancied playing blackjack for an edge somewhere inbetween 0.5% and 1.0% and all of the assorted variance that comes with it.
Anyway….take care and see you soon.
Carl “The Dean” Sampson – author of Princes of Darkness : The World of Highstakes Blackjack
So you want to tackle the online blackjack games do you, its funny but I get asked alot if playing online blackjack is a waste of time simply because you cannot card count. I dont think that they are a waste of time at all for numerous reasons. Firstly they have the same strategic purpose as online poker has. If a player wanted to play in a live casino cash game or tournament and had never played poker before in their entire life then playing online first may be a viable alternative if only to learn the rules and procedures.
It is no different with Blackjack and playing a few hundred hands online after learning basic strategy can give you some much needed experience before you try it out in a live casino for real.
Also it may be possible for you to take advantage of online sign up bonuses and reload bonuses as well so it may even be possible for you to make a little dough playing online blackjack. There are also all kinds of other bonuses that are not available when you play live so it may serve your interests to check this out.
But I would advise anyone to get their BJ education first and part of my Casino blog will be to educate people in the art of BJ over the coming months. In fact I am going to start to have a structure with my blog where I talk about theory one day, then news, then my past history and then I may even divulge some really juicy stuff so keep an eye open for that.
I started out card counting while I was a croupier and that allowed me to become extremely fast and versatile when I counted. The technique with counting is to use cancellation methods to scan an entire table rapidly. So for example if the dealer dealt five hands to five players and the cards were 9,8….A,5…….10,10……3,2……K4 then if I was using the simple high/low then I could scan this and get a total running count of zero very rapidly. The first box with the 9 and the 8 are both counted as zero cards. The next box with the ace and the five are -1 and +1 so that box cancels out to zero.
The two tens on box three are -2 but they get cancelled out by the two low cards on box four which are +2. Then the final box has one high card and one low card whch cancel each other out so the total is ZERO!!!! Thats how to scan rounds of cards very quickly……now go and work on it with an actual deck.
