There was a documentary on Prime Video a couple of years ago that followed a card counter as he moved from casino to casino living out of his RV. I think he was up around $600K after one year. He was having to get kicked out of small casinos all over the place and keep moving to new ones every few days. At one point he tells the camera crew that he has to start driving 1/2 a day to skip over a few spots to stay ahead of the surveillance. It didn't look easy but not impossible. He got to set his own hours and be his own boss.
There is an entire niche of casino streamers (see kick.com). They basically get free chips and can more / less keep their winnings, but the real money is in all the referrals from people who watch them, which are likely the highest paid referrals on the entire internet given the value of each user. Much easier to earn a living gambling-as-entertainment than gambling-to-win
The real story of the whole of the MIT blackjack team is quite something. When you ask someone if they’re still allowed to play in this casino and they reply with “if I use my real name, then yes”.
The 80s were a wild time, kids!
A large spread between min and max bet coupled with a frequently shuffled deck makes martingale a surprisingly effective strategy. It's non-intuitive but it works.
Positive expected value, or effective as in "lose slower"?
My understanding was that Martingale is (almost?) always negative expected value.
Is card counting still possible, or have casinos implemented enough countermeasures to defeat its advantage?
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.
I think you also have to rely on your neighbor?
I played a few hands in Vegas on a lark while attending a conference. I was resoundingly scolded for taking someone else’s cards because I should have stayed rather than hit.
In blackjack the bet is usually made before any of the cards are dealt, at least in all the locales I've played. Can't judge odds a priori unless card counting.
Is it theoretically possible to beat the casino edge in either scenario?
Yes. It is. And if the casino realizes that you're doing it, you'll be banned from the casino.
So most people who do this come up with clever ways to continue to do so while being less easy to detect, like having multiple people work together. One person stays at the table, betting at a fairly constant rate, while signaling to a partner when the odds are in the players favor so the partner joins the table and places big bets.
The thing is, this all takes a good amount of work and effort, requires a sufficient bankroll to begin with so you don't just have a small run if bad luck and run out of money, and does have some risk of gambler's ruin or just getting detected by the casino and banned.
At some point, it's just a risky investment combined with a job. And you can probably do better by just starting a company or investing your money and getting a job.
> Yes. It is. And if the casino realizes that you're doing it, you'll be banned from the casino.
This is true on Fremont Street, where the pit bosses are fossils and you can probably still get a one way free ride to the desert if you piss off the wrong people. Meanwhile, in Paradise, nobody cares unless it's team play. At least not at the tables the public can get to (so max bet around 20k).
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.
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.
Loved the Riv, I was there at a very similar time as you I think. I liked the steps when you walked in, and all the places they shot Casino at. I saw a cool show in the theater which is also shown in Casino. I guess I’m more a movie guy than a casino guy, but I love Vegas. The food court was absolutely run down and awful and we lost at roulette, but I don’t bet large. Hats off to you for having a good counting game. I play blackjack like a sucker but I usually do OK.
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.
Interesting. Why would a dealer care if someone is winning? Usually big winners tip the dealer handsomely.
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.
Dealers care because the casino cares, and pays them to care.
Having never been to a casino, I've always wondered, on what grounds will a casino ask you to leave? Just that it's private property and they no longer want to serve you? It makes it pretty transparent that the house always wins, and even when they don't they can ask you to leave, ensuring they always win.
I love the implication when someone is asked to leave but, "the rest of you, you losers can stay."
The casino has no problem just telling you, "you're too good for us". Depending on the situation and the mood of everyone involved, you may be told you're welcome to play other games, or you might just get trespassed.
Note that due to a New Jersey court ruling, casinos in Atlantic City actually can't bar people for counting cards. In general the game conditions there are worse to make up for that.
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.
There's also sneaky shenanigans like sitting in the right-most chair and eyeing the bottom of the shoe on shuffle.
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.
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-...
I haven't seen a beatable game in 10 years.
Less and less single and double deck tables, dealers placing the cut card nearer the middle of the shoe, more restrictions on doubling down and they changed blackjack to pay 6 to 5 instead of 3 to 2.
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".
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.
It's quite easy. And strip casino pit bosses don't even care. I once personally witnessed one mocking a poor counter by calling out the count for him. And they're right not to. The average person will be ruined with a 10% edge[1], so why should the casinos care if some tourist is managing half a percent? The counter making $600k a year at the tables is a cool story, but as I always joke when I'm at the tables, I do my real gambling with options, cards are just recreation.
Where they come down hard is team play. So wonging and such is going to get you backed off, if not trespassed, pretty much immediately if they catch you.
If you do want to try your hand at counting, I recommend starting with a simple ace/five count[2]. It's easy enough that you can still have fun bantering without messing it up, even after a few drinks.
And the other trick for being a successful grinding counter is to toke liberally. When all the employees, including the pit bosses, like having you around, it makes you considerably less likely to get backed off.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01427
[2] https://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/ace-five-count/
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.
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.
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.