I thought it strange that I would find myself winning money at a casino. Believe it or not, I've won consistently $150-$200 every time I visit a casino. Blackjack is my game.
I went with the family on an outing to the States on the Labour Day weekend. We left on a Saturday, returned the following day. We travelled to Grove City in Pennsylvania (an hour drive from Erie). About 4+ hours away from Toronto. We did alittle shopping. I mostly walked around. Shopping (for me personally) is boring in these carbon copy factory outlet shopping centres. I find them boring. They all have the same shit. Nothing unique and nothing that quite says buy me (because you ain't gonna find anything like me whereever else your going!). So I walked around. From like 3 PM all the way until 8:20 PM. It's kinda sad but I was just happy getting out of the city.
The States is nice. As I was driving I started noticing all the greenery surrounding us. I never really thought too much about it. There is a lot of greenery towards New York as well. So why did I think about the green this trip? Well, I guess my thought were on the greenery on my way to New York as well. And so what I thought was these are just highways leading from one city to another. Erie, PA is the biggest city near Buffalo. On the way to Erie the Interstate highway directed you either Eastbound toward Buffalo or Westbound toward Cleveland. And this lead me to think about 'Why Cleveland?'. Or, why place a city where Cleveland sits and why did it develop into a city whereas all these other small towns between Buffalo and Cleveland did not? I wondered about that as I was travelling. More on that later.
So we stayed in Erie over night (in the car believe it or not) and I got a chance to play Blackjack at the Presque Casino and Resort. I started playing around 12:30 AM and finished about 20 minutes later. I borrowed $100 from Elaine and used $60 of my own money. I walked away with $310. I won again! Why? It's so strange. I play for 20 minutes and I walk away with money. There's gotta be something to it. So when I got back home from our trip I decided to look into it.
I found a book called "The world's greatest blackjack book" from the local BMV bookstore. I was looking to buy "Beat the Dealer" by Edward O Thorpe but I wasn't able to find the book cheap. Well, I read that book (by Humble, et. al.) and it was pretty good.
The part that I enjoyed the most was the statistics and the results of the experiments (performed by Braun and Baldwin, separately). So, according to Humble (supported by experiments performed by Braun, Baldwin, etc.), 38% of 2 cards drawn in blackjack are decision hands (a decision hand is one where you have a total value of any one between 12 to 16). All other hands make up the other 62%. That means more than 1 in 3 hands is a decision hand. A decision hand is important because it requires you to make one of the 5 possible choices (depending upon the casino) that are offered to you: doubledown, split, hit, stand or surrender. What is also interesting is that the dealer only busts 28% of the time (the dealer stands on total value cards equal to 17, 18, 19, 20 or 21). But the most significant argument that I read from the book was there proof that a play will lose if they chose the strategy of not busting or the strategy of mimicking the dealer. Both strategies have a losing percentage against the house. The no busting strategy gives up 8% and the dealer mimic gives up as much as 5.7%.
I was intrigued with these numbers. There appears to be a lot of science behind it (whenever someone is ready to give you the number then you usually feel less doubtful about their argument. And I was surprised by the calculation of subtracting percentage points and multiplying percentage values from other percentage values. There seemed to be something disingenuous about it. But I kept reading. I got the picture. The argument is is that if your not playing Basic Strategy then your paying too much for your evenings entertainment. The only way to change the between .5% to 1% advantageous the casino has in the game of Blackjack is to count cards. By betting larger amounts when the remaining undealt cards of the deck is advantageous for you you will receive a better winfall and therefore better the odds in your favour. I was impressed with numbers. I took it upon myself to learn these details.
On the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend Elaine, mom and Ray decided to head down to Niagara Falls for the day. Ray didn't have his passport so he stuck with me at Fallsview while mom and Elaine headed to Buffalo to shop. I played Blackjack again. Again I won $150. This time I sat alone at a table with an Asian lady dealing the cards. 6 deck non-automatic shoe. I was totally uncomfortable playing with her. She dealt the cards so quickly. I wasn't used to it. She was practically playing my cards! I quickly walked away. But not after winning $150 again (this time in 10-15 minutes). Ray and I got drinks and spent some time outdoors. We then went back in and I decided to play some more. This time I sat at a table with 6 other players. I chose to sit on the left side of first base. Games were much slower. Slower enough so that I could think and play. I wasn't studied up on the card counting and so I just played as I usually do. It was sad in fact. I lost all the money that I won earlier and almost lost 2/3rd of the money I brought to the casino ($300 of the money that I received from selling those Aerosmith tickets). I won back a third of it (just barely coming back from the brink). And I walked away with $200 of my original $300.
To summarize, after coming home from the Thanksgiving outing I decided to study again. I downloaded an app for my iPhone playing Blackjack regularly (last week). What I learned was the more I learned about the odds for winning and losing and what I was paying for them I realized that I wasn't so sure that I enjoyed playing anymore. What I found from the app for the iPhone was that I didn't like the risks that I needed to perform to win. Knowing about the card counting techniques I thought it would be just as easy as playing on the cheap (minimum bets) on the average deck and playing higher amounts on the hotter decks. But what I found was that the theory just didn't work with the simulation program I bought. I was pissed. I played nearly 2000 hands before I found a system that seems to work (I read it in another book that I found). The way that I was beating the simulation (not exactly all the time) was by playing a progression when I won. When I win, double your money. Win, and slowly decrease the amount waged to "lockin" some of your winnings. When I lost, and when I lost consecutively, hopefully it was for the miminum wager. However, there are some occasions when the run of cards gets away from you. You just get bad cards. Hopefully your not chasing the progression just to get even! And unfortunately that's exactly what happens. When you have lost 5-6 hands in a row your ready to place bets 10 times the original mimimum amount. That's a huge risk. And it's not outside the possibility of losing 10 in a row (I lost 10 in a row and the last 3 of those bets were for $500 -- good thing it was just an iPhone app!).
What I learned was that I didn't like putting so much at risk to be successful at Blackjack. And success in Blackjack does have it's costs. Time for instance, and a higher than acceptable propensity for risk. Both of which I don't have a healthy supply of.
