January 2015 - Blackjack Apprenticeship

Archive: Jan 2015

  1. Profile of a Counter: BJA Member “Bubba”

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    We recently had the pleasure of interviewing BJA member “Bubba” on his blackjack journey. Here are the questions we asked him and his responses.

    bubba1. How did you get into card counting?
    I came across the documentary one night before going to bed, at first it sounded too good to be true. The scene came on where Ben explains how simple the concept is, and then he proceeds to say you have to memorize like 2 or 3 charts, do some calculations, etc. At that point I was thinking, forget about it. A few weeks later I was on a trip in Vegas when I recalled the documentary. I was in my room bored so I decided to look up how to count cards. What do you know, right there on top of the search was the guys from the documentary. Something felt right about it so I went ahead and bought the subscription, loved the videos, signed up for a year membership, and never looked back.

    2. How long have you been counting cards?
    My first day to the casino as an AP was just about 4 months ago. At this point I didn’t know any deviations. I shouldn’t have gone out there that early but I thought I would be moving away from where I am now so I might not have the opportunity to visit some of my home casinos with this much ease. It wasn’t until the deviation drill came out on the site that I really got them down, which was around my 3rd or 4th outing. 5 months ago I didn’t even know what a double down was. I guess I’ve made my way pretty quickly. Wow, I didn’t even realize this until just now.

    3. How long did it take you to trust your skills? How do you know you’re any good?
    It took me about 3 1/2 months before I built up some confidence in my game. I made a few mistakes almost every session, I’m very fortunate that I was aware and quickly learned from them. When you strive to be perfect the mistakes burn deep and you make sure you tell yourself it’s not going to happen again. I test myself all the time with different drills, I recently got tested out by Ben which was a great feeling, Because I knew he shows no mercy in his test outs and I did way better than I expected. (more…)