Blackjack Articles
Can you really win playing casino blackjack?
by Andrew W Scott
December 2004
It's approaching 3am on a Sunday morning and you're
sitting at box 3 of a high stakes BlackJack table.
On your right, a large breasted tizzy blonde is slurring
her way through her fourth Cosmopolitan and on your
left a cigar chomping vacant eyed gambler keeps muttering
incomprehensibly under his breath at the dealer. You
rake in your winnings from your latest $2,000 bet
to add to the ever-growing mounds of black $100 chips
in front of you. In fact, so far this year you've
played 812 hours of BlackJack and your net winnings
are $178,000 for the year to date! You once used to
have a "real job" but that's now a long lost memory.
Fact or fantasy?
Well, it's a nice story but also definitely achievable.
I've seen many of my students work their way up to
becoming a high stakes professional from much more
mundane walks of life. When I tell people that this
could be done, reactions range from blank stares to
total disbelief. "Can you really beat the casino?"
is an often-asked question. When I proceed to explain
that yes, you can, and I've been doing it for the
last 18 years, some people simply refuse to believe
me.
Yes, dear reader, it can be done!
And for all you naysayers out there, here's an analysis
of some of the major points that come up when I have
such a discussion about whether the game can be beaten:
1. Who first discovered that the game could
be beaten?
The person generally credited with being the father
of skilled BlackJack play was Professor Ed Thorp who
wrote a book called Beat The Dealer, first published
in 1962. While Professor Thorp probably wasn't the
very first person to work out how to beat the game,
his credit deservedly comes from being the first person
to popularise the fact that the game can be beaten,
although there were four engineers working for the
US government in the Nevada desert who worked out
basic strategy in 1956. There is also anecdotal evidence
of low-key long-term winning players in Las Vegas
as far back as the 1950s and even 1940s.
2. Why would the casino offer a game that
can be beaten? Well the truth is when the casinos
first developed the game, they had no idea that it
could be beaten. When Beat the Dealer was first published
in 1962, they panicked. Most of the Vegas casinos
changed their rules dramatically so that the game
couldn't be beaten. They restricted doubling to two
card totals of 11 only, and didn't allow the players
to split pairs of Aces. Unfortunately for the casinos,
this had the result of the general public deserting
the game. BlackJack tables throughout Vegas were deserted.
The casinos quickly realised that the best idea was
to revert to the traditional rules, but to police
the game. Whenever somebody came along who knew how
to beat the game, they would deal with that person
on a case-by-case basis.
3. How did you learn?
I taught myself. It took about six months of hard
work on the computer, and I had no idea that I was
merely repeating work that had been done by others
two decades before me. I naively thought my knowledge
was unique. That was why I had no idea about disguising
my ability when I first starting playing professionally!
4. If it's so easy, why doesn't everyone do
it?
Well the thing is that it's not that easy. Professional
BlackJack is by no means a get-rich-quick scheme.
You can make a lot of money doing all sorts of things,
but not everyone does them! Why? Well, just as with
any worthwhile profitable activity, there are obstacles
to entry. Those obstacles need to be tackled before
entering the field. For example, being a doctor is
pretty profitable, but it involves six years of University
education!
Becoming a professional BlackJack player involves
mastering some skills, and this usually takes around
three months of fairly dedicated practice on the kitchen
table at home.
Also, as with most businesses, professional BlackJack
takes some start-up capital. Once a player graduates
from the kitchen table to the casino, he needs at
least a few grand just to improve his skills, and
to play a proper professional spread you're looking
at around $10k. To play at high stakes tables, you
need at least $100k behind you if you want to operate
at a conservatively low level of risk.
While these do sound to some like very large amounts
of money, most high stakes skilled players were once
low stakes players who ground their bankroll inexorably
up over the years. Having said all that, if you do
have the skills and the capital behind you, pro BJ
is very lucrative. This is why I sometimes mischievously
refer to professional BlackJack as a "get-rich-slow"
scheme!
5. Casinos bar skilled players.
If the game couldn't be beaten, why on earth would
casinos waste so much time and energy identifying
skilled players and then frustrating or even ending
their play? You see casinos putting up with all sorts
of bad behaviour from ordinary gamblers because at
the end of the day the casinos view these players
as little walking bags of gold for them. But as soon
as the casino forms the view that a player has enough
skill to have an edge on the game, the casino will
do whatever it can to frustrate or halt their play.
Depending on the jurisdiction of the casino and the
powers it has, this can vary from altering penetration
percentages (a fairly mild reaction) to outright banning
the person from the premises (the most severe reaction).
6. But you can't win if the casino kicks you
out!
Yes, casinos can frustrate and restrict your game.
I've often heard statements such as "yeah, card counting
works but the casino kicks the card counters out so
you can't win". The truth is that less than 5% of
card counters are ever discovered by casinos. The
only card counters that you hear about in the popular
media are the ones that get kicked out like me! The
ones that are merrily plying their trade are very
publicity-shy, for obvious reasons.
Skilled players that fall foul of the casino can
generally be classified into two categories: the ones
that just can't keep their mouth shut and maintain
a low profile, and the ones that are discovered purely
due to the sheer volume of their winnings. If a skilled
player is trained well when he learns his craft, the
first problem shouldn't be an issue. If the second
problem causes a player to be identified as skilled
by the casino, well, it's a nice problem to have!
And there are plenty of casinos around the world,
aren't there?!
7. The body of literature
There is an enormous body of literature from many
eminent writers discussing, exploring, analysing and
proving how to beat the game. My own professional
library consists of 247 books, videos and items of
computer software. This body of literature started
with Beat The Dealer in 1962 and continues to this
day. The body of literature includes numerous computer
simulations simulating literally trillions of hands
of BlackJack and proving that the game can be beaten
with the correct strategies. Those authors and programmers,
many of whom were highly educated mathematicians and
IT specialists, can't all be wrong!
8. Historical winnings
While it has been proved in theory that the game
can be beaten, the actual real-world experience has
borne this out. Over the years, some of my students
have agreed to submit their session results to me
on a regular basis. At the time of writing, these
sessions have developed into an extensive "real-world"
database of approximately 60,000 hours of professional
BlackJack play at all different levels from 1996 to
2004.
Some players have had expected wins as low as $8
an hour, and other as high as $500 an hour, but the
average hourly expected win has been around $200.
Incredibly the actual net winnings have come out to
be almost exactly the $12,000,000 expected win amount.
At the end of the day, this should not be seen as
so incredible, because what I have described above
is basically the same as saying "hey, I tossed a coin
a million times, and guess what I got almost exactly
500,000 heads and 500,000 tails". It's merely an example
of a long run actual result tending toward the long
run statistically expected result, which of course
eventually it must do.
For many reading this, all of the above will be common
knowledge - but for others it will be a revelation.
I'm still amazed at the scepticism out there in the
community about whether the game can be beaten, especially
now that it is 42 years since that first ever book
was published. And yes there are skilled players around
the world to whom the scene described at the start
of this column is a very regular one!
Over the coming months I'll be writing a number
of columns for Smartgambler.
To whet your appetite, here are the titles of a few
of my upcoming columns, in no particular order:
How much do other Players on the Table Effect
your BJ game?
How Useful is Common Sense in a Casino?
How BlackJack Conditions are like Cricket Conditions
Good Runs and Bad Runs
The All-Important Edge
Curse of the Dreaded Civilian!
If you have any specific BlackJack or casino questions,
please email them to management_at_ozmium_dot_com_dot_au
I don't promise to answer them all, but I'll certainly
use some of them for inspiration for upcoming columns.
Until next time…if it's worth doing, it's worth mastering!
Andrew W Scott
Andrew W Scott is founder and CEO of blackJack-mAsters.com
Professional BlackJack School, a school established
in 1993 to further the education of players of casino
BlackJack in Australia. You can visit the school at
www.blackjack-masters.com
© Andrew W Scott December 2004
Proceed
to next article
Home|FAQs|Disclaimer|Contact
Us
©2000 - present OZmium Pty Ltd. All
rights reserved
