A comment made by houyi in a recent post caught my interest. He said: “I think we can all agree casinos waste their time on at least 90% of would-be counters, for a variety of reasons.” I’m starting a new thread since I don’t want to hijack his thread in another direction.

This thought appears to be the mainstream view in the AP community, and I couldn’t disagree more based on my experience and what I see other APs saying. I’ve always wondered why so many APs believe this.

First my experience: I’ve played fairly extensively in various parts of the country (but not much in Vegas) for over 20 years and only seen one person backed off and barred...and that was me. From the casino perspective, it was a good move since I have a winning game. From my perspective, it obviously wasn’t a good move since I like taking money from a casino. The two casinos that backed me off got it right, the many that did not back me off got it wrong...that is from the perspective of the casino trying to return as much money as possible to their shareholders (which is why a business exists).

I’ve also seen many young APs come through my local casinos and not get backed off. As with most APs, I can usually spot another AP within 10 to 15 mins. I’ve got to where I can most the time spot them as they are cashing in their money for chips. When I see their ramp with the first positive count, my original assumptions are confirmed. Just the other day I played with a young AP who was ramping from $10 to $500 on DD and got away with it for 2 hours before he left with a couple thousand. I know this pit crew and they aren’t the sharpest knives in the draw. If I was a pit critter, I’d have backed him off within 15 mins. Again, I’ve never seen another AP backed off and I’ve seen quite a few APs play with some pretty aggressive spreads. If anything, I think casinos are making mistakes by not backing off APs sooner to protect their business and shareholders.

This brings me to my second point. I read comments on this site and many others on how much all the APs are making in casinos, but then they claim casinos are making mistakes when they get backed off. This makes no sense to me. If they’re playing a winning game, the casinos didn’t make a mistake by backing them off. In most states, casinos have a right to back off APs. Therefore, it’s in their interest to back off or bar APs since their business model isn’t to give money to their customers. Joe748 claims to have made $400,000 in his first year playing blackjack and many on this site believe him. If this is true, the casinos clearly weren’t doing their job. Any compentent casino should have seen he was an AP and backed him off long before he took 10s of thousands from a casino. The church team claimed to make close to 4 million (and I believe this story) from casinos but then you’ll hear them complain that casinos made mistakes by backing them off. What???

I guess my point is I think casinos make far more mistakes by not backing off real APs with winning games sooner, than the reverse (backing off would-be counters who are really losers).

Something else to think about. The very fear of being backed off keeps most of our spreads low and within casinos tolerance. If we weren’t afraid of being backed off, we’d be much more aggressive.

Maybe this problem is more of a Vegas problem, where the casinos back off marginal players. I don’t know since I don’t have much experience in Vegas. But in my area, I can assure you casinos are not backing off marginal players....in fact, I don’t see them backing off anybody, even very good players.