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You have to understand me and my background to understand my answer. I'm a retired actuary. I've had a fascination with numbers since I was about 4, I read "Scarne's Complete Guide To Gambling" when I was about 11. And for most of my working career I was either working for a major consulting firm or in management, up to C-suite positions.
Answering an earlier question, I am far more likely to get in trouble with my bosses if I do address a counter situation, than if I don't. Initiative is strongly discouraged. But I count for the challenge, and I flag counters for the challenge. And it is deeply ingrained in me to be professional, and as such when I'm employed by someone, I will give them my 100% best effort.
I guess a lot of it comes down to why people gamble. My degree is in economics, and we assume that people act rationally at least within the scope of their own priorities. Since gambling is unquestionably a negative-expected value financially activity for the vast majority of gamblers, they must find some other reason for wanting to gamble, and those are as varied as there are personality types.
One thing I do observe is the tendency for players to be risk-averse in the play of the hand. They are much more likely to want to avoid busting, than to avoid losing when the dealer makes a 17. They know you're supposed to "always split 8's" but they want to avoid splitting 8's against an A or 10, and also to avoid splitting 9's against an 8 or 9, when these are all colossal errors.
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On a related note... Last night was my last night at my job. I'm moving to Vegas; I don't know if I'll work there or not. For some reason, the conversation was more intense about whether one player's actions affect another. The answer of course is yes they do, but in a completely unpredictable way. I'd show a bust card (2-6) and all the players would have 12 or higher, and they'd say "Well, somebody has to hit." Or players holding 12 against a dealer 3 and saying "I know I should hit, but I don't want to take the dealer's bust card." I had almost all regulars at my table (not surprising for my last night) and my response was that if you asked 20 statistics Ph.D's whether one player influences another, the over-under would be 19 1/2, and that's only in case one of them was having a bad day or didn't understand the question.
I used to play quite a lot of backgammon online, and people would continually claim the dice were somehow crooked. I would issue the following challenge: "You make a clear statement of HOW the dice are crooked. We'll hire a statistics Ph.D. to evaluate your claim. We'll each put up $100,000, pay the analyst out of the $200,000 total pool, and the winner takes the balance." Naturally I never had a taker. The same thing applies here. No one will ever explain why the next card to come out would be bad for the dealer, but the one after that would be good, and therefore the player shouldn't hit and thereby "save the table."
We can all at least understand quack conspiracy theories, like that voting machines were hacked by Hugo Chavez, despite his having died in 2013. It's nutty but at least internally coherent. I do have a player who comes to the table with a strategy card, who will sometimes stand on 16 vs. 10 and say "I think I'll let you bust." But that's a tiny error. (No, I don't think he's counting; if he were he would make more deviations than he does.) But there's nothing coherent about player theories about how one person's actions affect another.
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Updating my post, because there were some intervening replies. I am not moving to Vegas to become an AP. I had always planned to retire to Vegas, but I had some family issues come up that made it appropriate for me to move back in with my parents when they were getting old. They're both gone now, or perhaps I should say, together for eternity.
I'm offended by the idea that I'm a "cheap bastard" and a "moron working the pits." A convenience store charges $2 for a soda that costs them 15 cents to pump; how many of you if working in a convenience store would be "cheap bastards" and not let people who buy a hot dog and a donut take the soda for free? Or, why aren't more of you going to dealer school and getting a job dealing so that you can sell out the casino to fellow AP's? Admittedly I'm in a somewhat unusual position. I have bad legs so I have to dealing sitting down, we only have two sit-down tables, one is baccarat which I never learned and the other is a blackjack table with a shoe. Our only other shoe table is in the high-limit pit and that's a stand-up table. So I deal 100% of the time at a blackjack shoe table. I don't feel any obligation to sell out my employer.
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