Click Image To Visit Site
My name is Bill, I was a school teacher and was once like you. I bought into the theory that the game could be beaten by counting cards. And believe me, I ate, drank and slept blackjack for over five years. You name it, I mastered it: Hi-Lo, Hi-Opt I & II, K-O, Zen Count, Canfield Expert, and others. I spent hours on card counting forums and online discussion groups, and I found that people only bragged about winnings, but never mentioned their losses.
I was so frustrated as I couldn’t understand how all of the popular literature and so many websites were dedicated to the subject of card counting, but no one I knew could win consistently using these strategies.
Sure, I had some big winning days when I celebrated and took all of my friends out for a night on the town, but my losers always ate away at my profits and eventually put me back under water. I was even banned from more than one casino after being simply told that they didn’t like my “style of play” and was no longer welcome. The pain was so deep inside that often times I felt like I was the unluckiest guy in the whole wide world.
What the industry won’t tell you is Vegas’s dirty little secret that casino operators love and even propagate the myth that the average Joe can win consistently by counting cards.
Hollywood movies like “21” and “The Hangover” and novels like Bringing Down the House serve to revitalize interest in blackjack and card counting. The media entice the m es to flock to the casinos, seeking to emulate their silver screen heroes. Most of us experience some early success (usually pure luck), but later give it all back and end up withdrawing more cash from the ATM machine to chase our losses.
Do you think casinos are upset when the Travel Channel shows an endless cycle of stories about card-counting blackjack teams who took on Vegas and won? Not at all. In fact, they love that kind of free publicity. For every professional blackjack team grinding out tiny advantages, there are thousands of s either trying to count cards and doing it poorly; losing, while trying to prove to the world how smart they are.
Well, let’s start with the math. The authors of these systems expect the player, not only to memorize a value given to each card (index number), but to keep a running count and convert that number to a true count of the sum of the cards being dealt, to be able to estimate and divide the index number by the remaining cards or decks in the shoe, and to know when and how to play a deviation from basic strategy. In addition, they require one to play only at a certain position at the table and to camouflage one’s betting spread so as to avoid unwanted attention from the pit bosses. As an added drawback, if the player loses track of just one card on the table, the entire system may collapse and he may risk losing his entire bankroll by staying in the game.
Add adrenaline, alcohol and the noise of bells, laughter and shouting and you have a recipe for concentration breakdown and disastrous losses.
You get the idea. One has to be a rocket scientist or math wiz to be able to use these blackjack strategies effectively and maintain mental sanity.
All those mental gymnastics under intense pressure for a mere 2% advantage over the house at most! Ask yourself, is it worth it?
And then there’s all that waiting around. Besides the math, you may spend hours waiting for a deck to turn rich (that may or may not happen) because the casinos are taking countermeasures to stop you. Not only are they limiting the penetration of the deck by controlling the reshuffle point with a cut card, they are now further restricting betting spreads, multiple hands, mid-game entries, and employing continuous shuffle machines and software in online games to thwart card counters. The pit bosses and the people watching the surveillance cameras are there to monitor your betting patterns. And why are you doing all of this? To obtain a maximum advantage of 2%, not to mention that…
Besides, do you really want to play undercover like agent 007 just to be able to play a decent game of blackjack?
I’ve seen other simpler blackjack systems that use basic strategy instead of counting. Why aren’t these strategies any better?
Most of these basic strategy progressive systems differ only in their money management technique, that is, how you vary your bets. They all rely on the same basic strategy chart and this… Read more…