4 ms·

If you can count perfectly, you can beat the odds. An obvious solution would be for casino to reshuffle cards at ever game but I suspect they don't do it becaus

by Iv 7y ago

If you can count perfectly, you can beat the odds. An obvious solution would be for casino to reshuffle cards at ever game but I suspect they don't do it because they bank on a lot of people who underestimate how hard it is to count cards or overestimate their mental skills. Blackjack is an incredibly boring game, remove the ability to count and beat the odds and no one would play it.

theelous3 7y ago
You don't really need to count absolutely perfectly. The more you count the better, of course, but it's a probabilistic system with a thin edge to begin with. They don't reshuffle every time because your last statement is very wrong. The money card counters can take before being caught is a rounding error in the face of the masses of people who are happy to play with no edge.
- mohaine 7y ago
  I haven't personally done the math but one of the articles I read (Scientific American?) mentioned that 1 error an hour makes you basically at the break even level. Higher error rates brought the house advantage _higher_ than non-counting methods. Is this incorrect?
  - jandrese 7y ago
    It probably depends on the technique. Some counts are pretty easy to manage, like simply keeping a tally of the number of 10+ cards vs. total cards. It does take practice, but it's way easier than trying to keep a tally of every card you've seen in your head. But yeah, it's really easy for casinos to keep a track of your betting pattern and kick you out if you're playing the game too well. That's why the really successful card counters play as groups with personas. They'll station a bunch of low key guys around the casino and have them maintain a steady stream of cheap wagers while they count. When a table gets hot they'll signal a flamboyant high stakes looking guy to sit down and play a few rounds. The Casinos will eventually catch those guys too, simply by correlating who is sitting at what tables when the high stakes guy comes to play, but it takes a lot more work and they make out with a bunch more cash. Worse, because what they're doing isn't illegal the casio can't even deny them the winnings, only kick them out and plaster their faces all over the blacklists the casinos use.
    - T-hawk 7y ago
      Your middle paragraph was true, but is now outdated as of the last 15 years or so. This is indeed how the MIT Blackjack Team worked, as documented in books like Bringing Down The House. However, casinos now know of and how to foil this strategy. The countermove is to prohibit entering a table while a shoe is in progress. Either the new player must wait until the deck reaches its established end point at the cut card, or the deck gets reshuffled immmediately upon the new player entering. Either way, an incoming player can't take advantage of any count.
      - a_t48 7y ago
        I didn't notice this last time I was in Vegas...then again, the blackjack tables I was at were pretty low stakes. :)
AmericanChopper 7y ago
Well there are casinos that use shuffling machines to shuffle every blackjack hand. People still play it though, just like they play slot machines and the dozens of other boring things to do in Casinos.
- logfromblammo 7y ago
  If you want to know how boring casinos are, but don't live near one, go to any game arcade where the games give out tickets that can be traded in for prizes. Compare with home video game consoles. They sucked most of the fun out of video games to turn them into gambling machines for kids. Now imagine if they sucked the remainder of the fun out, and the only thing left was the gambling. Now you can only have fun if you think playing a game where you are statistically guaranteed to lose everything in the long run is fun. They may have more glamour in the gambling-centric cities, but the few casinos I have been in have all been sad, dingy, smoky places filled mainly with old women staring at their slot machine with dead eyes and cups full of their pension funds. Even if you temporarily win at gambling, you're still part of a machine that sucks life out of people and leaves them drained husks. If you don't have an expert system mathematically guaranteed to give you an advantage over the house, you're better off gambling on the stock markets, because at least if you lose there, it might have at least paid for someone else to have a decent non-bullshit job for a little while, and there's also a possibility that everybody wins, even those who didn't play.
  - dwild 7y ago
    > you're better off gambling on the stock markets, because at least if you lose there, it might have at least paid for someone else to have a decent non-bullshit job for a little while, and there's also a possibility that everybody wins, even those who didn't play. In Quebec all the lottery games and the casinos are owned by the government, thus every gain there goes to the public sector. Everyone win (except the one with gambling addiction, which are sadly the vast majority of the customers).
- Iv 7y ago
  Yeah, actually I forgot how boring you can make the experience once you have people addicted to it. I should know, there are tons of pachinkos where I live. The dullest experience of all...

by Iv 7y ago

theelous3 7y ago

You don't really need to count absolutely perfectly. The more you count the better, of course, but it's a probabilistic system with a thin edge to begin with. They don't reshuffle every time because your last statement is very wrong. The money card counters can take before being caught is a rounding error in the face of the masses of people who are happy to play with no edge.

mohaine 7y ago
I haven't personally done the math but one of the articles I read (Scientific American?) mentioned that 1 error an hour makes you basically at the break even level. Higher error rates brought the house advantage _higher_ than non-counting methods. Is this incorrect?
- jandrese 7y ago
  It probably depends on the technique. Some counts are pretty easy to manage, like simply keeping a tally of the number of 10+ cards vs. total cards. It does take practice, but it's way easier than trying to keep a tally of every card you've seen in your head. But yeah, it's really easy for casinos to keep a track of your betting pattern and kick you out if you're playing the game too well. That's why the really successful card counters play as groups with personas. They'll station a bunch of low key guys around the casino and have them maintain a steady stream of cheap wagers while they count. When a table gets hot they'll signal a flamboyant high stakes looking guy to sit down and play a few rounds. The Casinos will eventually catch those guys too, simply by correlating who is sitting at what tables when the high stakes guy comes to play, but it takes a lot more work and they make out with a bunch more cash. Worse, because what they're doing isn't illegal the casio can't even deny them the winnings, only kick them out and plaster their faces all over the blacklists the casinos use.
  - T-hawk 7y ago
    Your middle paragraph was true, but is now outdated as of the last 15 years or so. This is indeed how the MIT Blackjack Team worked, as documented in books like Bringing Down The House. However, casinos now know of and how to foil this strategy. The countermove is to prohibit entering a table while a shoe is in progress. Either the new player must wait until the deck reaches its established end point at the cut card, or the deck gets reshuffled immmediately upon the new player entering. Either way, an incoming player can't take advantage of any count.
    - a_t48 7y ago
      I didn't notice this last time I was in Vegas...then again, the blackjack tables I was at were pretty low stakes. :)

AmericanChopper 7y ago

Well there are casinos that use shuffling machines to shuffle every blackjack hand. People still play it though, just like they play slot machines and the dozens of other boring things to do in Casinos.

logfromblammo 7y ago
If you want to know how boring casinos are, but don't live near one, go to any game arcade where the games give out tickets that can be traded in for prizes. Compare with home video game consoles. They sucked most of the fun out of video games to turn them into gambling machines for kids. Now imagine if they sucked the remainder of the fun out, and the only thing left was the gambling. Now you can only have fun if you think playing a game where you are statistically guaranteed to lose everything in the long run is fun. They may have more glamour in the gambling-centric cities, but the few casinos I have been in have all been sad, dingy, smoky places filled mainly with old women staring at their slot machine with dead eyes and cups full of their pension funds. Even if you temporarily win at gambling, you're still part of a machine that sucks life out of people and leaves them drained husks. If you don't have an expert system mathematically guaranteed to give you an advantage over the house, you're better off gambling on the stock markets, because at least if you lose there, it might have at least paid for someone else to have a decent non-bullshit job for a little while, and there's also a possibility that everybody wins, even those who didn't play.
- dwild 7y ago
  > you're better off gambling on the stock markets, because at least if you lose there, it might have at least paid for someone else to have a decent non-bullshit job for a little while, and there's also a possibility that everybody wins, even those who didn't play. In Quebec all the lottery games and the casinos are owned by the government, thus every gain there goes to the public sector. Everyone win (except the one with gambling addiction, which are sadly the vast majority of the customers).
Iv 7y ago
Yeah, actually I forgot how boring you can make the experience once you have people addicted to it. I should know, there are tons of pachinkos where I live. The dullest experience of all...