MAGIC         PORK

I played some Texas Hold’em at Bellagio. Boy have things changed since I was last in Vegas. Poker wasn’t being televised on TV back then, so it wasn’t the phenomenon it is now. Most casinos that had poker tables had just a few. When I played at Mandalay Bay back then, I remember one Texas Hold’em table and one 7 Card Stud table and I’d have to put my name on a list to get seated if it was busy. Now there’s huge poker rooms. You still have to put your name on a list, but I got seated pretty much right away both times.

That was the only “thinking” kind of game I played. I used to be into blackjack, knew the basic strategy down pat, and even learned how to count cards (but only the simplest strategy). For blackjack, unless you’re counting cards, there’s always one and only one correct move to make for every hand to maximize your chance of winning. That’s what basic strategy refers to.

So once you know the basic strategy, it’s just pure memorization. There’s no decisions to be made. Dealer is showing this, I’m showing that, this is the action I take. If you follow basic strategy, you can greatly decrease the house odds, although of course the house still has an advantage. If you’re counting cards, you can gain an advantage over the house, but it’s a lot of work. It’s really hard to get an advantage when playing with six decks, especially if they put the cut card two decks from the bottom, and now they have automatic shufflers at lots of tables which makes it absolutely impossible.

I used to enjoy trying to count cards just because I had the basic strategy so well memorized that there wasn’t any challenge in that. But it could get to feel like work. Couldn’t drink or have a good chat without losing concentration and if you slip up even a little, you could end up making things worse for you than if you weren’t counting cards at all. So anyway, this time when I went to Vegas I didn’t play blackjack except for a few hands, because I had forgotten all of that and didn’t prepare myself ahead of time.

By the way, many people have the misconception that “counting cards” means you’re doing some sort of Rain Man type thing where you are keeping track of what cards have come up. It simply means you’re assigning point values to certain cards and keeping a running count of the sum, and when the sum is within a certain range, you modify the basic strategy and bet either greater or lesser representing the greater or lesser chance of getting a card with the value of 10. More advanced strategies use more complicated point assignments or keep a separate count of Aces, things like that. I don’t really want to get into it, but if you’re interested, I recommend the book Million Dollar Blackjack by Ken Uston. It’s a little outdated now but I thought it was a fun read and it effectively teaches you a very simple strategy. A lot of people are familiar with the book Bringing Down the House about some MIT students that worked in card counting teams to win big time, but Uston invented team play and discussed his techniques well before that book came out.

OK, one more thing about blackjack. I was only going to briefly mention it but now that I’m on the subject, I might as well keep going. The dealer is usually trying to help you. They want you to win because it’s not like it’s coming out of their pocket. Happy gamblers tip more and most of them are just nice people and like seeing people win. So if they suggest you take a certain action, they’re doing it because they think it’s right. For most cases, they might be right, but in my experience rarely does a dealer truly know the basic strategy. In just the few hands I played this time in Vegas, I got wrong advice. I had an Ace & a 7 and the dealer was showing a 3. Basic strategy says to double down on that but almost every dealer I’ve ever had will look at you like you’re crazy and tell you you have 18 and you should stand. You should not. But I don’t get into it with them, I just tell them what I want to do and then put up with the “see, you shouldn’t have done that” if they win. One more quick tip: NEVER take insurance.

Moving on… Since I hadn’t prepared for blackjack, I played some completely mindless (and more house-advantageous) games. It was fun. I could just sit back and have some free drinks and have fun with my friends. OK, wasn’t too much fun when I was losing money but overall the amount of money I lost for the four days I was there was a decent price to pay for my entertainment I think. That’s how you have to think of it.

I mostly played Mini Baccarat and Casino War. Casino war I was almost embarrassed to be seen playing, it was so amazingly stupid. Remember playing war when you were a kid? It’s just like that. You get a card. Dealer gets a card. Whoever has the highest card wins. The way the house makes their money is when there’s a tie you have to double your bet to do a tiebreaker and the house doesn’t, so you’re risking twice as much. Yes, stupid, but I wasn’t in the mind for anything complicated and had fun.

The other game I played was roulette, which is also mindless, there’s just more options for you to pick. Now I don’t want to insult anyone by stating the obvious here, but the number of seemingly intelligent people that gamble on roulette that don’t understand this next concept leads me to believe that there are a bunch of you out there that could benefit from this. If black comes up 5 times in a row, it does not mean that red is more likely to come up next. I know, they have a scoreboard showing the numbers that have come up. It’s meaningless. They’re just pandering to your misconceptions.

There’s a term for that misconception. It’s called… get this… gambler’s fallacy. I’ll quote the definition from my old Social Psychology textbook, just so I can say I got some use out of it since college:

Gambler’s fallacy: Failure to recognize the independence of discrete chance events. The tendency to believe that after an unusual series of events (such as tossing several “heads” in a row) a less extreme pattern will follow.

The little ball rolling around the roulette wheel doesn’t remember where it landed last time. That’s all I’ll say about that. If there’s still any confusion, refer to the link above.

So, other than gambling, we did some quiet bible study, discussed the effect of America’s foreign policy on the third world, volunteered at a church handing out food to starving illegal immigrant crack-addicted orphans, you know… typical stuff.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 10:20 pm and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.