Gafoo’s Blog

So if you have talked to me at all in the last month you would know that I have been studying blackjack. I had planned on learning for the sole purpose of not throwing away money at the slot machines. First of all let me get this one statement out of the way because any good gambler should know it and there is no sense in deluding yourself…

The House Has The Advantage

That being said, I accidentally stumbled across a book that goes against the grain in terms of training blackjack players. It proved to be very profitable and I suspect that if I had the bankroll to be able to bet higher I could sustain a living playing with his methods. Allow me to explain…
Traditional Blackjack player are taught to play to the long term. You put together a bankroll, you play with basic strategy, you learn counting, you bet with the count, you win. The caveat is that the advantage you gain over the house in this manner is very slim and depending on the size of your bets and bankroll, your money would be made much easier flipping burgers. Of course that last statement is debatable but it stand to reason that surviving swings in your wins and loses (where you could end up VERY far down) is more stressful that filling someones order at burger king.
Getting back to my story, the method of Blackjack that I learned to play is a combo of different things by the author but definitely the most important thing in this method is table selection. The author theorizes that the swings in the game are predictable and you can capitilize on these situations. To the casino, one of the important things about the game is maximizing the amount of bets per hour. This is why the proliferation of the automatic shufflers is so huge. If a dealer doesn’t have to stop the game to shuffle, he can spend more time playing hands and the casino can spend more time taking in money. That, I think, is the achilles heel for my style of play since I look for hand-shuffled games which are definitely fading. However, they’re are still a few out there and they are very advantageous.
As I stated before, the casino wants to play as many hands per hour in order to maximize their profits. As a result, the hand shuffle games go through cycles of predictability since most dealers are not shuffling the cards very well. This leads to clump of cards (high or low) that can make games advantageous to the dealer or to the players. This is where watching the table and knowing when to enter or exit a game makes all the difference. Watch the play, for at least 3 rounds. If you are a card counter, count the cards and determine the profile of the shoe. The important thing to look for is the amount of dealer busts versus player wins. Both of these should be 2/3 hands to qualify for entry. You see, in a properly shuffled shoe, the dealer breaks 28% of the time, roughly 1/4. If the dealer is breaking 2/3 there is a high probability that you are playing into a clump of high cards (especially if you are playing at a full table and this is happening). This is where I made my move.
The methods that I employed in my playing are too long to discuss here but I will say there are a few things that I did to ensure that I walked away ahead or, in the case of a loss, feeling good about the game. They are common sense but they go a long way in an enviroment that is designed to make you want to give away your money.
1. Money Management.
Otherwise known as knowing when to leave the table. With the expection of 2 devastating sessions where I dropped $50 dollars in a matter of minutes (one of which was only 1minute), I always left the table with chips, even in a losing situation. If I bought in for 50 dollars and it was a losing table, I left with $25. I tried to make sure that in a losing situation that I wouldn’t throw all my money away. Even though it was a loss, I still left the table with money and that feels a lot better than leaving a table with lint in your pockets. Just for edification, the tables in which I lost that $100 were both auto-shuffled games.
2. Playing Smart
This is what everyone knows but so few follow (or in the case of my friends, we take full advantage of). Don’t drink and gamble. They are offering you alcohol to impair you judgement. Of course this is a given but the other thing you gotta remember is to respect yourself as you are playing. Don’t let lack of sleep impair your judgement. Don’t let hunger affect you. Play smart and stick to your plan and it will work out for you.
3 Play to the short term
The goal for all of my gambling sessions was always very simple. Leave with double my money. Nothing more. If I put down 50, I tried to leave with $100. Keep in mind, that doesn’t mean play until I get $100 because in a losing situation, $50 might not be enough to survive a swing from player biased to dealer biased. This simply means that I was constantly re-evaulating the table and how much money I was willing to lose. example: I bought in for $50. If I immediately started losing I would leave with $25. If I started winning and was ahead by $20 I would leave if I lost $10. Meaning I would leave with $60. If I was ahead by $40 I would leave if I lost $15 meaning I would leave with $75. If I ever got to $100, I would pick it all up and leave, no questions asked. This is playing to the short term. You make a little money and you don’t have the headache of counting cards and watching your winnings dissappear when you hit a slump of “bad luck.” It sounds simple but this requires a tremendous amount of discipline. Especially if you leave table after table with just a $10 profit but it does ensure that you when you hit a winning streak, you leave with your winnings instead of dumping them right back into the table.
This last one is personal but open to your interpretation…
3. Fuck comps and tipping
Don’t play for comps. Comps are not cash. True they can be as good as cash and you would be a fool to turn them away in a winning situation but if you stay at a table just because you want a free dinner then you are a fucking tard. The money you lose trying to get that free whatever will be worth more than whatever they give up. As far as tipping the dealer, fuck them. Yeah, they are giving you your winning advantage but that is just eating into your profits. Theres the issue of the house mistreating them, or them trying make ends meet or whatever but I play to increase my bankroll and tipping is just standing in the way of that.

So that’s my Blackjack dissection. I am sure I pissed off a lot of people and made many greivous errors in my style of play based on the assumptions that cycles occur in the game but I leave with this:
Including the expenses of hotel room, food, travel budget, and light shopping, I left Vegas with more money than I came with. Some would say I was just lucky but this evidence, (and more since then) speaks volumes to me.

Thanks for reading and the drunken stories are coming real soon, I promise.