Oh, and I've been practicing with Hi-Lo for awhile, and have a decent chunk of the Ill.18 down, have read Wong's Professional Blackjack, am reading BJA3.
My last question is to ask if this would be a proper thread: "How did you guys first get involved in Advantage Play, and what was your first Casino experience like?"
: D
[email protected]
> Hmmm, where is that list again!?
>
> That's what I keep telling myself; I just
> want to play as large as Hollywood. (You
> think I'm kidding?)
>
Sun you always make me crack up. I'm still laughing as im typing this.
I don't use KO, because I think it's best. I use it because ALL the other ones confuse me.
Ace side counts, true count conversions etc. I never feel confortable when I use any of them.
KO relaxes me, it's custom made for the lower IQ's in this room. And trust me i'm one of those.
When I start side counting aces and do some of the other things associated with other systems, I make mistakes.
Now that being said, the mistakes are much more expensive then the tiny differences in EV.
When my good friend cardkountr makes his argument against me with his HI LO vrs my KO. He wins that one EVERYTIME.
So as usual, without raising a question, you raise a good question. Which is the best.
I feel in the 6 deck shoe game with standard AC conditions KO is the answer.
I recently read a good article written by Arnold regarding this question.
So here is the consensus.
If you are a smart guy like most of the people in here. Go Hi Lo.
If your a meat and potatoes guy like me. Use KO.
Sun, keep those posts coming. I love reading them. You add an extra pulse to the room.
Hollywood
> "How did you guys
> first get involved in Advantage Play, and
> what was your first Casino experience
> like?"
I had heard BJ was mathmatically beatable, was talking to a friend and he said he had the perfect book. The next day he brought me a bright shiny copy of Canfeld's BJ Your Way to Riches (this was some time ago.)
My first experience was at a $1.00 table at the Mirage. Played for three hours in the early early AM and turned $10 into $20. I thought I was the bomb!
My last experience was .. last night. I lost the first 10 out of 12 hands; got two BJ's in 60 minutes; and it went downhill from there.
Oh well ...
> My last question is to ask if this would be
> a proper thread: "How did you guys
> first get involved in Advantage Play, and
> what was your first Casino experience
> like?"
My first casino experience was rather brief. I walked into a casino in downtown Reno (not sure which one -- possibly the Horseshoe) and was just looking and walking around when a security guard threw me out. I was about 19 at the time.
As for how I got started in advantage play, the details are in my bio, to which I have conveniently provided a link below.
You can really lose 10 of 12 hands? According to casino policy, you were lucky.
I love it when dealers say, "you didn't lose" when you push. Or look at you when you lose 10 of 12 and say, "what do you expect?" Or another good one, especially after you've had both big losses and no blackjacks, to getting a blackjack with a small bet, and they say, "there you go, I gave you a blackjack."
At about that time, smiling nicely, but saying nothing, yet thinking, you are lucky, because right about now I should reach over and slap you silly, but being cordial and nice, I quietly say nothing and wait for the next hands...
LoL, yes, it's so nice to be calm, and to have the power that the math is behind me, even though I want toSCREAM
But that would be unprofessional. :-) and I'm sure no one has ever allowed themselves those kind of thoughts. Or worse, ever actually did the Howard Dean at a table! :-)
Ah..the joys of blackjack.
cheers
bfb
Sometimes I hate myself.
I should have gotten up from that table and walked around a little. Don, forgive me, but I swear, sometimes I think your old bud Patterson was right!! That table sucked -and there was opportunity to wong -or at least to find a 'winning' table.
But, I was trying some new stuff, and, well, that was then and this now.
OK.
This dealer though -he was an affable friendly guy.
There were three of us at the table, all getting beat up it seemed. The kid sitting next to me once lamented something to the effect .. "I've never seen one dealer hit 20/21 this much in my life!"
The dealer smiled big and said, "Yes you have, every time you come in here."
Just saw that same 20/21 crap in LV all weekend at a certain store. Won every other store I played. It really sucks when you tuck a 20 and have to HOPE you don't have to reload the betting circle.
You all can laugh at me all you want, and I'm not going to revisit my earlier discussions about money management, but I will not play at that store again after losing another session stake there in the future. They have one more chance, and then I'm moving to other pastures. EVERY player at a BJ table was saying what bfb pointed out: "I've never seen anything like this." My girl saw TWO separate dealers pull three straight naturals in a single weekend of play. One DD, one in a shoe. I'll let you math geniuses figure out the probabilities of seeing that ONCE in a weekend, let alone twice! {Ok, I'll try: 1 in 21 hands roughly is a blackjack, so three in a row is 1 in 21 x 21 x 21 = 1 in 9,261. At 100 hands an hour, you should see that once every 92 1/2 hours of play. 2 times in a single day seems a bit far fetched.} Further, I watched a dealer pull multicard 21's 4 times in a row in the same store. Don't even ask me how many hands of 20 or 21 in a row I watched get turned over against me. It was probably double digits out of a possible 15 from a DD.
$100 into $1000 the first time I ever applied card-counting. My guardian angel was an alcoholic vietnam vet whom I had become friends with the previous day. I was just in there, some mid-western Casino along my travel path, hoping to practice counting, not to play even a single hand.
This large gentleman with a beer in his hand had just lost a small bet, and the aatractive pit-bossette said, "You should have listened to me on that one." And he replied, loudly, much too loudly, drunkenly loudly, "Yeah but you didn't tell me the count."
There was a pause while she stared at him and he bashfully looked down at the table. I let out an audible "Ha!" -- and that was how he and I became friends.
Two remarkable things passed, and I still don't know which is more exceptional. One is that by the end of a three day stretch I had turned $100 into $1000 (this was my very first excursion, and I was seeing the world through hyper-mega-kilo-rosey glasses). The second is that they did not ask this gentleman to leave. We played alongside at the same tables. I -unabashedly- cued my high bets based on his.
He was not a wholely pleasant man, eccentric to be sure, but he really took me under his wing for 4 days, and I owe him a lot.
"How the hell did you get away with saying that? Why are you still here? They haven't asked you to leave?" comprised our first conversation.
"These guys don't give a ****," he told me.
As far as I could tell, he was right as rain. He played green to black, too.
The whole scene seems covered in gold dust in my memory, now. I know I was extraordinarily lucky -- I also know that for the following four months, as I tap-danced around more tables without playing, that I had a very naive concept of the game. I was utterly unprepared for the losing streak that took my $1k. I was unhinged when it happened, too. I had read all the brief paragraphs saying that one must be emotionally prepared for the losing streaks, but, well, I did not handle it.
These my first two major swings have always felt so interesting to me and that's why i wanted to share them.
But it obviously brings up a question, an event, that I have not heard mentioned anywhere before.
"These guys don't give a ****," and I feel that I've seen additional examples of this mentality at other casinos. I even have another story that evidences this, but I don't want to babble, and the story might also make me look bad.
I'll leave this here though, having mentioned what, at the moment, I don't think is an extraordinarily rare example of pit-boss apathy.
Yes, Good Cards to everyone.
[email protected]
> The whole scene seems covered in gold dust
> in my memory, now. I know I was
> extraordinarily lucky -- I also know that
> for the following four months, as I
> tap-danced around more tables without
> playing, that I had a very naive concept of
> the game. I was utterly unprepared for the
> losing streak that took my $1k. I was
> unhinged when it happened, too.
Man, I know that feeling.
My mental picture of this game has swung like variance out of control.
When I got that first book, and turned that $10 into $20 (obvious luck, playing BS only, but I didn't know better, and it only took three hours!) I thought I was on target to get rich quick. I mean, shoot, what if I'd been betting greens or blacks -yo hoo!!
Then, after grinding a while and really learning the game (somewhat) I realized what a grind it really is.
Now later, with much less emotion involved, I see that if the game holds together in just the 'sorry' state it is in now - there is plenty of opportunity for a really decent return on the effort if you are willing to keep learning and turning those rocks over.
Thanks for the story.
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