Blackjack league. They really WIN in online casinos

Max is the author of Comp City, first published in 1994, with an expanded second edition published in 2002. In this groundbreaking book, Max exposed techniques even non-counting players could use to get an advantage over the casinos by exploiting weaknesses in the casinos’ comp systems. Max’s inside information came from his years of experience in the industry as a dealer, pit boss, and casino manager. Max still does consulting work for the Barona Casino in California.

The initial manuscript for Comp City included advanced comp-hustling techniques that could be used by professional card counters, but the editors at Huntington Press decided to delete this section from the book in order to appeal to the wider market of recreational players. These excluded portions were published in Blackjack Forum in June 1994, and can be found now in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

In the mid-1990s, he started hosting the Blackjack Ball, a secret annual event for professional players, where he serves as Game Master as many of the top pros compete for the Blackjack Cup and the title of World’s Best Blackjack Player.

Now, as a host of the Game Show Network’s World Series of Blackjack, Max Rubin has become one of the most visible public advocates of professional players.

Lawrence Revere was both a serious player and talented author. He died in 1977. His only book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, initially published in 1969, is still in print. If you look at the “true count” methods that was employed pre-Revere, you will see why Revere’s name was placed into the hall of fame. The earlier methods were cumbersome and mentally fatiguing to use. In the second edition of Beat the Dealer, in which Thorp first proposed the Hi-Lo Count, he mentioned a simple method of using the count, though he failed to develop it as a full system. Revere had a leap of brilliance that led him to come to the conclusion that the simplified method of obtaining a “true count” that Thorp had mentioned could be fully developed and employed with the most powerful of point count systems. Revere’s method was so simple compared to the alternatives, it has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Stanford Wong, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, Bryce Carlson, Arnold Snyder, and others. As a serious player, Revere’s knowledge of blackjack included such esoteric techniques as shuffle tracking and hole card play.

Some of you may know that there is a number of slots games in every land casino that have a higher payout percentage than the others. Such slot machines are called «loose slots». Loose slots games are used by the casino to stimulate players and make them believe that it’s easy to win here. When you see someone constantly winning, this increases your confidence and makes you want to throw in more coins into the machine. That’s how the casino makes you pay more. To give your luck a test and not spend too much money while doing it, you need to find one of such loose slots games in the casino. Such slot machines don’t have a «loose slots, win here» sign on it, so you’ll have to do a bit of research and think like casino executives would think. Get a layout of the casino, and evaluate what would be the most beneficial place to place loose slots games. So keep your eyes open and your mind working, but don’t get too suspicious in your research, because casino executives won’t welcome your findings much. There are some hints you may find helpful. First of all, you won’t find loose slots games somewhere near the table casino games. This is because table players prefer a quiet atmosphere around them, and casino executives pay much attention to their comfort. The perfect place for a tight slot machine is next to a line area, where players will play slots games just to pass the time. This leaves us with an area inside the slot machine territory, where only the slots games players are.

Online slots is a new phenomenon that has spawned hundreds of sites in the past several years, and the numbers keep growing. If you haven’t seen online casino adds and offers to play play free slots than you haven’t been online at all. Only a few years ago online slots were simple downloadable programs that had to be run in DOS mode and had graphics similar to the 80’s game consoles. However, today online slots are state-of-the-art web applications developed by teams of programmers and designers, that deliver realistic graphics and all the features you will find in a land-based slot machine. If not more.

The growth rates of online slot segment have rocketed sky-high during the past several years and the increase doesn’t seem to stop. Due to the hight commercialization of the Internet, slot games have also become a good source of revenue for online casinos. That’s why you can play play free slots, high roller slots or any other types of slot games by just clicking on a link in your browser. Some claim that online slots are much more enjoyable to play and it’s hard to disagree: you’re sitting at your home and play slots for as much as you like. Now that’s gambling with ease! Many specialists state that this segment of electronic commerce has become one of the largest among online industries. What does it have to do with a simple player like you?

Richard Epstein wrote in his Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, that blackjack became popular during World War I, and was called “black-jack” from the practice of paying a bonus to a player who held an ace of spades with a jack of spades or clubs. John Scarne, (New Complete Guide to Gambling, 1961, Simon & Schuster), puts the year when this curious rule first appeared at 1912, when twenty-one tables appeared in horse-betting parlors in Evanston, Illinois. I believe Epstein’s information is taken from Scarne, and Scarne states that he discovered the origins of blackjack in America as a result of his private discussions with old-time gamblers, not from any published texts that can be looked up today.

I am skeptical of much of what Scarne has written about blackjack, so I’ll quote from Mickey MacDougall’s MacDougall on Dice and Cards (Coward-McCann, 1944, NY), which was published prior to any of Scarne’s books: “Many professionals dress up the game by giving prizes for certain hands. A favorite stunt is to offer ten times the size of the wager to anyone holding a natural twenty-one with a black jack.

That’s when Ed Thorp dropped another bombshell. Under the auspices of their Vintage Paperback division, Random House published a revised and expanded edition of Beat the Dealer. And the most important addition was Harvey Dubner’s Hi-Lo counting system, which Thorp called the Complete Point Count, with a computer-optimized strategy devised by Julian Braun. To the casinos’ frustration, this was a system that could more easily be applied to multiple-deck games.

Thorp also included a Simple Point Count in this new edition of his book, but at the time that strategy seemed way too simple to most players to gain much of an edge, or to be taken seriously by players who wanted to beat the game. Later, the power of Thorp’s simpler method of adjusting the running count, without keeping a separate count of the exact number of cards played, would be shown.

Thorp was keeping the casinos on the run.

Still, the casino’s fears were mostly unfounded. The Complete Point Count was easier to use than the ten-count, but it was not a lot easier. It required players to keep two separate counts. In addition to the running count of the cards’ point total, the player had to keep a count of the exact number of cards remaining to be played. And in order to play his hand, he had to memorize a chart of 158 different strategy changes to be made according to the count.

The gambling world is getting tough. As the U.S. edges closer to a recession, people have less money in their pockets and casino revenues are dropping. Many states rely on taxing those revenues. It makes better politics than taxing people directly. Pennsylvania is no exception. It legalized slot machines back in 2004 and sold a casino license to Don Barden for $50m. The Detroit businessman agreed to build a casino called the Majestic Star in Pittsburgh on the North Shore. Unfortunately, he’s run out of money. There’s been no work on the site for the last two months. The construction workers are waiting for their pay. This is a real political headache. If Barden is allowed to go into bankruptcy, there’ll be pain all round. There’ll be a white elephant half-built shell that no other company can take over until the bankruptcy is cleared. Construction companies and their workers will get no more than a few cents on the dollar. So the Pennsylvanian politicians have found a new partner for Barden in the form of Chicago real estate billionaire Neil Bluhm He’s leading a new group called Pittsburgh Gaming Holdings LP. But now the legal problem is whether the Gaming Control Board can transfer the license to this new group. They’re supposed to hold free and open competitions for the license. It’’s a nightmare and the state is running short of money. If all else fails, there may have to be tax increases! No-one wants that.

So I got me a little snifter here. Jack’s been working his way through some freebies - a new supplier’s trying to break into supplying the casino. Reckons he needs to make sure all the right people get their taste of the good stuff and we’re both of us out to oblige him. Damn, but some of this stuff is good! Makes me wanna give up the poker and the slot machines, and settle down with a bottle or two to enjoy my retirement. Anyways, the young fellah just called. Caught me in a mellow mood for once. He thinks - well, we can suspend judgement on that for so long as he keeps paying me - he thinks I should explain myself. In one piece I’m saying there’s, “a proper mathematical playing strategy for video poker.” In the next, I’m saying there’s a gambler’s fallacy and you can’t predict the cards. He thinks they doesn’t fit right together. So here’s a few words to make it all crystal. Did you ever see Ocean’s 11 - don’t matter whether it was the original Rat Pack version or the new ones with George Clooney and his pals? Did you notice how they always robbed the casinos. There was never a hint of walking through the door with a system for winning at the tables or on the slot machines. Hollywood got it right for once. The only way you guarantee a big score at a casino is as a thief - and you’ve to be lucky to enjoy your “takings” and avoid the hail of bullets if you get caught by wrong people. Look around online. You’ll see a small army of people touting their systems for beating all casino games with a house advantage. Play slot machines, win big. Win at blackjack without counting. When I was growing up, my mother used to play 78s all the time. She loved the musicals of the 1920s. She’d never been on the chorus line, but she’d a hankering for it. Her parents disapproved of theatrical folk and that was an end of that. Anyways, one of my favorites was Banana Oil - kinda like snake oil but always applied to lounge-lizard lines. “When he tells you, ‘I adore you,’ that’s banana oil.” In other words, everything he said to get his mark into bed was bullshit. Well, the same goes for all these salesmen pushing betting systems for slot machines. They’re trying to scam you outa your money. Take it from me. There ain’t no system around that even dents the House edge on games where the probabilities are set in the House’s favor. Math is math. Mind you. It’s not my money - you wanna fool yourself you can shade the odds in your favor on video poker, then feel free. So, how do these systems work? You’re supposed to base your bets on the most recent outcomes. Take roulette as an example. Wait for a run of blacks, then bet on red - the longer the run, the bigger the bets on red. If you see a pattern emerging, you’re supposed to think that the probabilities of the game itself have changed. When I worked for casinos, we always nodded wisely when someone cautiously asked if they could play a system. Another little chicken ripe for the plucking. My father was counting deaths by the million over decades for the life companies. Probabilities and statistics only make sense in the long view. Short-term, you’ll find anomalies in all slot machines but, over time, the basic patterns are set in stone and in the House’s favor. You’ll see lucky streaks that look like they’re never going to end. But, so long as the House keeps its nerve, the winner will lose it all back again. It’s the same with the so-called systems. They aim to build up the small wins to offset the big losses. If you’ve the bankroll, you can often win over a session. But you’re obsessional kind, ain’t ya? You’ve invested that money in a system. You’re not going to quit while you’re ahead, are you? Which means that any small winnings you picked up on the good days will all get given back to the casinos on the bad days. It’s just the way the House edge works. Like I say, you can’t beat the math. Which leaves me with my strategy, which I’ll get back to when I’m good and ready.

Some years back people started peddling bogus blackjack systems based on the “non-random” shuffles used in casinos. They claimed that these poor shuffles tended to “clump” the high cards with high cards, and low cards with low cards, and that this effect was very detrimental to the players- unless they used a special “trend” system that took this clumping effect into account.
To evaluate these claims, in 198]1 ran computer simulations of blackjack games with non-random casino-style shuffles. The poor shuffles had no effect on the players’ results. So, I tested worse shuffles. Finally, I tested a shoe game in which the dealer did not shuffle the cards at all! He just took the cards from the discard tray and started dealing. This produced some very strange results!

This chapter outlines the High-Low system, undoubtedly the most popular professional-level point count in the world today. Harvey Dubner first introduced it in the early 1960s, and over the years, blackjack luminaries like Edward Thorp, Lawrence Revere, Julian Braun, and Stanford Wong have refined it into a powerful method that combines a high playing and betting efficiency with a good deal of user friendliness. It’s a level one that isn’t too difficult to master, yet brings to the table an edge that meets or exceeds many other card-counting methods. But as with any point count system, the foundation for successful use of the High-Low comes only after the student has mastered Basic Strategy.

The beginning sections of this chapter delve into the basics, including card values, combinations, and how to keep a running count as the care are being dealt. The latter sections focus on speed, and then the all-important process of converting the running count to a true count for both playing and betting purposes, which is covered in subsequent chapters.

As far as an approach to learning the material goes, you may find it most beneficial to first read through the entire chapter—to gain perspective—then return to each section individually to master the соn cepts presented therein. Covering the material in this way might better illustrate how each part contributes to form a comprehensive overall strategy.

In the casino world, more hands dealt means more money for the house, For that reason most dealers, especially those working from a shoe, tend to deal at a fairly rapid pace, requiring a counter to keep up with the cards or risk losing the count and thus losing any chance of knowing when an advantage over the house exists.

As far as speed is concerned, the benchmark we’ll shoot for is to be able to count down a standard fifty-two-card deck in about twenty-frve seconds. This is the time most proficient counters aim to either meet or exceed in order to simulate real-world conditions. By the way, counting down a deck in twenty-five seconds or less should be achieved not once or twice every so many tries, but consistently and with relative ease.

To further work on speed and accuracy, I would suggest securing as many decks of cards as possible. Make sure all are complete, and then just as you did with a single deck, begin counting down four, six, and even eight decks at a time. The reason for this is that you should become familiar with counts characteristic of multiple-deck games. You should start to see much higher positive and negative cumulative totals, along with a running count that often rises and falls with surprising volatility This takes a little more getting used to than the relatively smaller hills and valleys characteristic of the single-deck game. You’ll see what I mean as soon as you begin practicing.

Keep in mind, though, that accuracy is still more important than speed, and that the latter will come with enough repetition.