The NY rats (rationalists) are hosting a gambling strategy night, led by our very own Professional gambler Val [redacted] who's come back from Puerto Rico to show us the ropes of how beat the house at blackjack.
We'll then be having a somewhat impromptu Halloween party, with karaoke. In the city? come along!
Time: 7:00 PM tonight [10/31] Location: [redacted after event]
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Notes -
I could not attend because of location, but card counting is pretty cool. Perfect memory of Basic Strategy charts (i.e. when to hit/stand/double down/split) isn't enough to get an edge on the house. Card counting systems like Hi-Lo are typically for choosing your bet size so that you only bet larger sums of money for when the deck becomes stacked in your favor, which usually happens when a lot more low cards get randomly dealt out. Casinos try to avoid this by adding more decks to the card pool, and it does make it harder to find opportunities where you can reliably beat the house edge. A good card counter is looking for a blackjack game that is more easily exploitable so that's he's not waiting around all the time and making it increasingly obvious what he is doing. Failure mode is of course getting kicked out by the Casino, or maybe that's a win?
I've heard there is another level above basic card counting where you are using distribution of cards still in the deck to inform your Basic Strategy plays, so that you can increase your profits even more, but I don't know how I'd even begin to remember that.
So many places use auto shufflers now and/or reshuffle only 1/3 or 1/2 way into the way into an 8 deck shoe that it is basically a thing of the past. Or don't pay 1.5 on a blackjack anymore etc...Blackjack has become enshitified.
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