All these talks about oklahoma and their antes lately. Drive up to Missouri (good idea) or Kansas and play ante free.
Well no freakin durr. I was referring to the good casinos being too far away, not looking for an excuse to play at a bad one.Originally Posted by Dieter
Far away casinos = EV - Bigger Gas cost. Therefore, no good since frequency of play will be so low that there is no reason to even bother.
Closer casinos = EV - Ante, even worse.
There are other casinos in OK that pay the ante for the player (i.e. customer does not pay ante). These are the ones to shoot for in Oklahoma if one lives closer to these casinos. Traveling 5-7 hours to play at a casino in Missouri or Kansas is just useless if you are not going to get a worthwhile rate of hands per hour, not to mention long travel time. What's your time worth?
From Oklahoma City (the most southern gambling friendly metro in OK) its about a 5.5 hour drive to KCMO or about a 7.5 hour to STLMO, where you'll get to enjoy blackjack without the ante, and be in a state with legislation protecting card counters rights to count.
Sounds more economically feasible if you ask me.
I'll be in the STL this week
So make an adventure out of it? Or go to a non-tribe-regulated casino, if you have them? I'm just saying, when I went to Vegas in April, I ended up paying for the entire trip for me +1, food, drinks, rooms, flights, and made $2200 on top, and that was before I legitimately put effort towards card counting. After that, my trips to St. Louis and North/South Dakota have all paid for themselves and then some.
If you're actually interested in getting out of Oklahoma and into the Missouri/Illinois area, I can give you some info on a "fair" game against one of the fastest dealers you'll ever see in your life, where the bottom card in the shoe is exposed pre-cut and post cut. Totally beatable game, and the hours that you'd need to play with this dealer has two floormen who literally do not care about redchipping counters, on top of the fact that the specific game is in Missouri where card counting is protected by legislation. Totally worth the trip, I make it often.
If you have a $100/week budget, you can go and play "locally" weekly, biweekly, or monthly with bad rules, on a very tight bankroll. Great for recreation.
If you have a $100/week budget, you can go and play once every 3 months on a $1200 bankroll.
"But it's 5 hours away, instead of 1 hour!" - yeah, and you're going 1/12th as often, so you're spending less on gas overall.
If waiting for Thursday afternoon when they're doing an ante-free promo works for you, enjoy.
May the cards fall in your favor.
I'm just looking at this from an economic perspective, if you're forced to play ante games, in the long run it'll be cheaper to head out of state. I mean think about this for a moment, if you play for 4 hours at 70 HPH with a 50 cent ante, you're giving away $140 that session to the house, which should be right around the same amount of money it would cost in gas to get to KC or STL to play, though I'm sure the rules might be more favorable on the ante game.Okay Exoter. You're starting to win me over to the idea. Don't get me wrong. I definitely WANT to get out of Oklahoma. I barely consider those places casinos. I have always wanted to check out the casinos in Missouri. I would just hate to spend all that time traveling to break even or lose.
I guess I would have to look at it more from a "recreational" counting basis. At this time, I could certainly not make it the bulk of my playing, but I am certainly willing to be on the receiving end of sharing information if you have some!
Thank you in advance!
I guess now I'm confused, if you play at places that don't have the ante, only, why are we talking about the ante? Or are you just curious about places without it because you yourself couldn't find info?
When you contribute a little more to the forum and have a few more posts under your belt, I will gladly send you an email (I'll eventually ask for it) and give you a tip or two about some of the Missouri Casinos, as I've been frequenting just about all of them this month scouting while crushing a few out of state Casinos on some hit and run backcounting trips.When I first said "if only it were economically feasible," I was referring to the fact that a player with a small bankroll like myself and many others would not find it practical to drive 5-7 hours to play somewhere as gas would eat up EV. I don't know how things would turn out for a green chipper as I have not inputted that info, but paying for gas would sure be a drag on long-term income. I was NOT making a comparison between paying an ante vs. not playing one.
So to be clear, I believe that no AP player should play a game with an ante for any reason. So yes, you are absolutely correct that making the drive to pay no ante would be preferable to playing locally and paying an ante. But for those that ONLY live near casinos that HAVE an ante and have a small bankroll, neither playing locally nor driving so many hours to another state would be worthwhile on a consistent basis. The ante would eat too much money locally, and the gas would eat up too much money when constantly traveling across the border and back.
Ask yourself this, if you were living in a state with NO blackjack (those with an ante may as well not even exist), would you drive 5-7 hours to play a beatable game? I guess some would, but you wouldn't make much realistically in the long run unless you had a good sized bankroll.
So in summary, my view is:
1. Pay the ante = unplayable AP game (not economically feasible)
2. Drive far to not pay the ante with small bankroll = unplayable AP game (not economically feasible)
3. Play locally with no ante (like I do) = beatable blackjack game (economically feasible)
I would be curious to know details about those casinos that you play in Missouri. I can not go often enough so I would not have high hopes for EV, but on a recreational AP player basis (visiting new casinos and seeing new places), I would like to know!
That aside, I totally get (now) what you were talking about, and I apologize for the confusion. I was under the impression that you were playing an ante game and was trying to steer you off of that for something a little more reasonable.
Now, as far as redchip play, like I had mentioned before, I've paid for every trip this year that I've made and brought in about $3,600 in profit for my "seriously out of town" trips, covering food, gas, airfare, every expense under the sun. It isn't unreasonable to assume that you'll actually make money if you go, just like it isn't unreasonable to assume that any given session will be a winner.
Keep in mind, I'm still very new to this by comparison to guys like KJ and T3 and the like, but now that I"ve got 53 logged sessions (missed quite a few) since I began back in May-ish, the numbers are starting to take shape a little, and what becomes feasible is backed by the numbers, and if you aren't already logging each and every sessions you make, I would advise to you that you do, like T3 had advised me to do many months ago.
As an example, I keep a pretty tight 1-8 spread but also incorporate a "super max" bet now that I didn't about midway through my logged sessions. So far the important numbers breakdown like this.
44/53(~83%) sessions resulted in a win. 1/53 (~2%) sessions resulted in a net neutral $0, 8/53(~15%) sessions resulted in a loss. Keeping in mind that I make a deduction to my personal books of $20 to offset gas and cigarette costs, a net neutral trip like the 1/53 there, would actually be a table win of about $20, but my resources cost money and I like to keep my books skewed towards resource usage as well as my own personal time. Now, according to my books, my average loss breaks down to $674 in the red. And my average win of $384. My average session results in about $217 over my 53 trips, with an average Foot In-Foot Out hourage of 8.7 hours or roughly $25/hr in profits. As you can tell the win rate looks pretty good, but the $/hr doesn't look nearly as good, and trust me it was better but I wrecked myself hard on a 3 day session for almost $5k.
Point being, despite my extremely small sample size, I have a much better idea of what my time is worth playing the way that I do against "meh" rules (H17, DAS, RSA4, DOA). So now I have a means to calculate my "average" play when I want to plan a trip to go to this state or that state, or when business pulls me to one state or the other and travel becomes magically free. Point being, I'd have a more realistic expectation.
If I were to drop what I'm doing right now and travel to Oklahoma City, it would cost me about $80 round trip in gas. Account for a two day stint and add in hotel fees, food, cigarettes, and misc, I'm looking at around a $300 round trip. That means I'll have to play on average about 12 hours to turn a net neutral trip. And with the numbers I had above at 8.7 per session, I'd actually be looking at $435-300 for my trip, or a profit of about $435. Low $/hr rates in profit of course, but if we're looking at the "whole" for total profit and having a good time getting out of your city, the trip proves profitable on paper even with my exorbitantly high trip cost of 80 dollars which I know I"d end up at a little closer to $140 being frugal and staying at a dive lol.
Point being, red chipping can be done on the "travel level" of AP play. You just have to have a consistently good game and be ready to put the money out there when its called for. Only in the last month or so have I truly become comfortable putting big money on the table and I expect when I audit myself again in two months, I'll have shown a marked improvement in $/hr profits.
I'm not going to give the full explanation here right now but short version, if your trip expenses exceed half of your EV, you will go broke if you take that type of trip consistently. You really want to keep expenses below 25% of EV if possible.
Yeah I'd imagine it would be a fair bit closer, but before heading up from OK, I'd check the game rules down there and compare them to see if there's something more favorable.
STL and KC are just logical choices to play as card counters have made them their home now for a few years, and red chippers just get ignored until they start reaching $100 hands.
Well, Ideally you'd want to keep them below 1%, but sometimes when you add in the luxury of being able to get out of your hometown on a mini vacation and relax as well as get a few hands in, its okay to go behind any predetermined threshold of % of EV which is nothing more than arbitrary at best.
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