[HN Gopher] How Blackjack Works (2007)
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How Blackjack Works (2007)
Author : Tomte
Score : 36 points
Date : 2024-11-27 07:01 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.blackjackincolor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.blackjackincolor.com)
| imglorp wrote:
| Is card counting still possible, or have casinos implemented
| enough countermeasures to defeat its advantage?
| SynasterBeiter wrote:
| Sort of. Look up StevenBridges on YouTube, he documents his
| career as a card counter. It's certainly possible and you can
| get some profit, but the casino will sooner or later ban you
| from blackjack, so you also need a steady supply of them.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I just watched one of his videos this morning. Yeah you tend
| to hit like into the thousands and they tend to see you as a
| problem, especially on single deck tables. It's not hard for
| them to spot someone using well known strategies. You can
| still turn out a modest profit and I think one thing to keep
| in mind is in places like vegas you might want to find the
| casinos that aren't owned by the two big companies that own
| most of them because they share information on punters...
|
| His whole book is like 'why you probably shouldnt learn how
| to count cards' and its because its a massive pain in the ass
| and you can probably make more money doing something like
| poker instead. It's fun from what I hear though every person
| I know who has the mental math skills to do this has gone to
| vegas only to get limited at around 1000$ or so. Sometimes
| they even catch you within like 3-5 hands haha
|
| Fun fact, Ed Thorpe developed blackjack basic strategy and
| card counting through computer simulation and is pretty much
| the guy responsible for casinos having to change all their
| rules at one point with the game. One thing I thought was
| funny was how steven bridges was trying the fake beard thing,
| it seemed like the most obvious tell that he was doing some
| funny business to me, it looked like shit haha
|
| https://graham-kendall.com/blog/claude-shannon-edward-
| thorp-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp
| chungy wrote:
| Card counting is largely defeated by adding more and more decks
| to the shuffle. Once you get to a 6-deck shoe, it becomes very
| difficult to use card counting to successfully "beat the odds".
| kippinitreal wrote:
| I believe it's not strictly more decks, but also how often
| they shuffle. If they add 7 decks but don't shuffle until
| near the bottom, it's actually advantageous as the count can
| get very skewed (e.g. 50 cards left and 30 facecards
| remaining). However, with 7 decks and reshuffling halfway
| through the count doesn't reach as much relevance to the next
| card.
| tekla wrote:
| Casinos are not dumb, they have countermeasures as well as
| people watching the game counting the cards themselves to see
| if players are OBVIOUSLY counting from their playing pattern.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Possible enough so to encourage new people to think they can
| try, not possible enough to become a millionaire.
|
| Possible enough that to be elite your life turns into a sort of
| arbitrage trying to scam casinos in exchange for a mediocre
| salary.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It's not a scam to use math to your advantage. Casinos do it
| all the time.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Counting is always possible, nobody can tell if you're just
| counting in your head. What's detectable and counterable is the
| way to get advantage from it: you must make your bet much
| bigger when the count is favorable. That behavior pattern alone
| is enough for a casino to choose to toss you - they don't even
| have to prove that you were counting.
|
| Counting works in general because the player's advantage is
| concentrated into a small number of possible hands. Almost all
| of your profit comes from blackjack hands paying 3:2, with a
| bit more from some particular cases like splitting aces and
| doubling on 11. For everything else, you lose more hands than
| you win (the asymmetry is that if player and dealer both bust,
| dealer still takes your money), and you're just trying to tread
| water to get to the good stuff. The good stuff all requires
| aces and tens, and counting is to identify the cases when there
| are more of those available.
|
| Besides counting, the other way to play blackjack profitably is
| shuffle tracking. It's possible to watch as aces go into the
| discard pile and visually track them through the shuffle. When
| you know an ace is coming up soon (even within a range of the
| next 20 cards), bet big since even a 5% extra chance of an ace
| makes the expected value of that hand profitable in your favor.
| Casinos also know to foil this and will eject you in the same
| way, for a pattern of suddenly making big bets even if they
| don't necessarily know or prove you're doing it.
| onekorg wrote:
| Advantage play in Black Jack boils down to:
|
| 1. Placing minimum bets when odds are in the casino's favor. 2.
| Placing large bets when odds are in the player's favor.
|
| This makes the betting patterns of solo counters very different
| and easily identifiable from average joes.
|
| Some players do try to add some variance and make intentional
| non-optimal plays to avoid detection. But every non-optimal
| play costs money and doing it too frequently eats up any
| potential profits.
|
| Adding more decks doesn't fully prevent advantage play. More
| decks aren't harder to count. Adding more decks lowers the
| variance of the odds distribution through a shoe.
|
| In a one-deck shoe the odds vary in a "spiky" way. It's more
| likely to be highly favored for the casino or highly favored
| for the player.
|
| An eight-deck shoe the odds vary in a far smoother way. Most of
| the time they'll be slightly in favor of the casino or slightly
| in favor of the player.
|
| A one-deck shoe is better for an advantage player because they
| can sit out when the odds are unfavorable and make very
| profitable bets when the odds are highly in their favor. But
| you can still make money by playing a lot of hands correctly in
| a eight-deck shoe.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| Not an expert but my understanding is that it's only feasible
| on a small enough scale to eke out tiny profits over the long
| run, too much success will get you rapidly 86'd.
|
| If anyone reading this is intrigued by games of chance with an
| available skill edge and is considering learning advantage
| Blackjack, I'd highly recommend learning Poker instead. You're
| not playing against the house, you're playing against other
| players, and the house is not incentivized to clamp down on the
| edges available (though of course they take a cut of everyone's
| winnings). And it's an endlessly deep strategic game instead of
| a mechanistic counting game that advantage Blackjack is, which
| is to say, it's actually fun.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| Here's my story about counting blackjack successfully. It takes
| place in 2014, at the now-demolished Riviera. At the time, the
| Riviera was pretty run-down, definitely one of the cheapest
| places on the Strip. I was in Vegas for the first and only
| time.
|
| They had single-deck blackjack that had a unique side bet.
| Basically you could make additional bets that you would get
| dealt a natural blackjack, with a couple variations like
| getting an extra payout for suited blackjack.
|
| This side bet was even more amenable to counting than standard
| BJ. The morning after I saw it, I did a quick simulation and
| discovered that the odds turned player-friendly if you went a
| single hand without seeing an ace.
|
| I went down and played it. There was a crowd on Saturday night,
| and the deck was shuffled basically every hand. No good. Sunday
| morning I had the table to myself. I bet aggressively, starting
| with $5 min bets and going to $50 if I went two hands without
| an ace.
|
| The dealer knew almost immediately that I was counting. He made
| a few snide remarks, but didn't kick me out. No idea why not.
| Maybe because the side bets are usually suckers' bets, so that
| gave me some camouflage.
|
| I had a great run of luck, doing way better than expected. In
| an hour or so I was up $1500. Along the way I hit a suited BJ
| for $250. The dealer called over the pit boss, who told him to
| pay me, and then side eyed me for the rest of the session. I
| left only because I had to get to my flight.
|
| The cashier's cage gave me a hassle about cashing in brown $500
| chips. I guess they rarely got any big winners there.
|
| Overall great experience for me. I'm not at all surprised they
| closed the casino soon after.
| pwython wrote:
| Interesting. Why would a dealer care if someone is winning?
| Usually big winners tip the dealer handsomely.
| bagels wrote:
| Dealers care because the casino cares, and pays them to
| care.
| splonk wrote:
| Card counters (and advantage players in general) are much
| less likely to tip well compared to the average gambler.
| The sort of people who think they're making money on a game
| also tend to recognize that tips cut into profits.
| ilamont wrote:
| I employed a basic counting system I learned from a book and
| tried it out on my first and only visit to Vegas about 20
| years ago. This was at the Stardust.
|
| It was a miserable afternoon. I don't think the dealer cared,
| but the other players to my left were _pissed_ when I asked
| for hits on seemingly nonsensical hands. "Hey, you stole my
| card again" was a typical complaint. I ended up slightly
| ahead but never played again.
| vikingerik wrote:
| If the relevant part was that you didn't see an ace... fun
| semantic question: is it counting if the only number you
| track is 0?
|
| As for why a casino might let a counter stay: many try but
| not all are good at it so they're still losing money. A
| counter might not be accurate, or misplay other decisions
| like splits and doubles, or not bet bigger enough when it's
| favorable, or tilt after some bad luck and bet bigger when
| it's not favorable enough.
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