There have been big debates down the years about the merits of card counting systems and comparing one to the other. This kind of reminds me of online poker and what is the best way to operate. With online poker then there is simply no one shoe fits all policy and there never can be in a million years.
Much depends on how good you are, how fast you can play, if you have rakeback, how your game stands up to multi-tabling, does watching your opponents figure greatly in your play and the list goes on and on. Usually you need to find your own level in online poker or any other form of poker to be able to make money.
Players that cannot find their own level or are constantly trying to move up and be big shots usually bust out. There is little difference with blackjack, the best card counting system is basically specific to each individual. You cannot quote some level 4 type system as being optimal if the individual cannot use it properly without losing count.
So if a certain system is “best” for you then it is “best” and it is that simple. It is the same when financial consultants recommend financial products to clients. There is no stand out best product, only what products are best for certain people.
So a blackjack player who struggles with adding up and true count conversions may find the KO Count optimal. Then again, someone who was playing long hours who was also shuffle tracking and wanted to incorporate everything as efficiently as possible may find the high/low optimal (like we did).
Then again, a player who has the mental fortitude and is doing nothing but counting and wants optimal power and results may use a level four system. So there is no such thing as the “best system” in the world…..only what is best for the individual.
See you soon
Carl “The Dean” Sampson
Why not try bwin casino with loads of exciting features and games and the best online casino that I have encountered.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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.
