Posts Tagged ‘blackjack systems’
Blackjack is the casinos' best moneymaker precisely because people believe the game can be beaten. Casinos are forever bemoaning their losses to card counters, and constantly changing their rules and dealing procedures to make their games tougher for these feared blackjack experts. Casino floormen, with increasing frequency, unceremoniously bar suspected counters from their tables. Promoting this paranoia is one of the most successful advertising campaigns ever developed. Not one person in a thousand has what it takes to make any significant amount of money playing blackjack, but hundreds of thousands of people have given it a try.
Card counting is not difficult for the dedicated practitioner, but few people are dedicated enough, and, as most players discover the hard way, there is more to being a successful card counter than the ability to count cards.
In cynical moments, I see the American public being taken for a ride by the strange bedfellows of the casino industry and the blackjack systems sellers. A tremendous effort is being made to convince people that card counters can get rich quick at the casino blackjack tables.
I don't mean to imply that all blackjack system sellers are trying to bilk the public—I am a system seller. I'm the author of nine books on casino blackjack, and have written operating manuals for two home computer blackjack programs, and articles on card counting for numerous magazines, and I've acted as informal consultant for a number of high-stakes international counting teams. I know the game can be beaten. I have played professionally for many years myself, and I know many full- and part-time card counters who regularly take the tables for piles of money. I know a few players who have made fortunes playing blackjack.
But the successful pros are few and far between. Their dedication to the game is beyond that of the average counter—they live and breathe blackjack. They devour every written word on the subject; they drill and practice until they count cards in their sleep. They know professional blackjack as a dog-eat-dog business.
Some blackjack system authors have been honest about their negative experiences at the blackjack tables. Most publishers, however, aren't so forthright, and the media in general isn't any better. It's not newsworthy to say, "Gambler loses money." Advertisements for blackjack systems promise everything from instant wealth to private airplanes and priced-to-move personal islands.
The average player has no way of knowing that the author of his system objects to the publisher's advertising claims, and sometimes to large portions of the ghostwritten text. In fact, publishers, promoters, and imitators have abused the most respected names in the field of blackjack.
Compound all of this misinformation about card counting with the dozens of books on the market that teach totally inaccurate count strategies, "money management" systems, strategies so weak as to be a complete waste of time or too difficult for anyone to master, and you can begin to fathom why card counting is the best thing that ever happened to the casino industry in this country.
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Little is known of the original blackjack counting systems. In Beat the Dealer, Ed Thorp discusses a number of the first systems developers who had colorful names like "Greasy John" and "Stem Smitty." They had privately worked out crude but effective blackjack strategies that they used to win their livelihoods from the Las Vegas blackjack tables.
Until the early sixties and the publication of Dr. Thorp's book, most casinos felt that blackjack systems were like all other gambling systems, a lot of bunk. Prior to Thorp, the only "card counting" system that was recognized by the casinos as valid was "casing the aces," in which a player would markedly increase his bet (say from $5 to $500) in the second half of the deck if no aces had been dealt in the first half. Crude as this counting technique was, it was effective and the casinos knew it. Unfortunately, it was extremely easy for the casinos to detect. Because it was such a weak method, and because the players who used it rarely followed anything resembling proven basic strategy, a huge betting spread was necessary for the system to gain an advantage over the house.
Then, in 1956, a group of mathematicians led by Roger Baldwin tediously applied the methods of statistical analysis to the game of blackjack and developed a basic strategy which they published in a technical journal for mathematicians. This strategy, if followed rigorously, would narrow the house edge, making blackjack close to a break-even proposition for the player over the long run. Though a colloquial version of this paper was later published in book form, few gamblers took notice. Gamblers wanted winning systems, not "break even" systems.
One person who took particular note of this technical paper was Dr. Edward O. Thorp, a mathematician. He saw that Baldwin's strategy had been devised on old-fashioned mechanical adding machines, but he had access to what, in the early sixties, was a sophisticated computer. He wrote a more precise program than had been used by the Baldwin group, and subsequently developed a more accurate strategy.
Blackjack is a difficult game to analyze mathematically because the depletion of the deck constantly alters the makeup of the remaining cards, constantly altering the probabilities of winning or losing. It occurred to Dr. Thorp that using a computer he could analyze just how the makeup of the deck affected the possible outcomes of the various hands. His method was unique. He wrote a program to analyze the best strategy and what a player can expect in the long run, assuming various cards had been removed from the deck. He noted that the player's chance of winning was dramatically increased when fives left the deck. In fact, to remove any of the "low" cards—2, 3,4, 5, 6, or 7—worked in the player's favor in varying degrees. On the other hand, if tens or aces were removed, the player's chances were badly hurt.
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