Archive for February, 2008
The Soundtrack of the new movie “21” based on the MIT card counting team will be released by Columbia records.
The headlining track is a cover of The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” performed by the Belgian alt-rock band Soulwax. Here is a list of the other tracks as well:
1. You Can’t Always Get What You Want – The Rolling Stones (Soulwax Remix)
2. Time To Pretend – MGMT
3. Big Ideas – LCD Soundsystem
4. Giant – D. Sardy featuring Liela Moss
5. Always – Amon Tobin
6. Young Folks – Peter Bjorn and John
7. Mad Pursuit – Junkie XL featuring Electrocute
8. Sister Self Doubt – Get Shakes
9. I Am Unknown – The Aliens
10. Shut Up And Drive – Rihanna
11. Alright – Knivez Out
12. Tropical Moonlight – Domino
13. Hold My Hand – UNKLE
14. L.S.F. (Lost Souls Forever) – Mark Ronson featuring Kasabian
15. Tender Buttons – Broadcast
Gambling movies can be pretty damn good. Think “Casino” and “Rounders.” They can also can fall flat. Anyone ever hear of “Hit Me” or what was that movie about high stakes poker with Drew Barrymore and the guy from Munich?
Anyone care to wager on how this new movie on card counting starring Kevin Spacey and Kate Bosworth is going to be?
This is an interesting article about Ken Hunt, a college professor at Fort Lewis College, who got tired of people making stupid actions playing Blackjack. He understands the math, and he knows that you can get the House advantage as close as .05% when playing correctly. Now he wants to enlighten everyone in his community.
Some of his advice: Never play with your gut. Look for Stand 17 tables. Never let the dealer count your hand for you.
Hunt has mastered the first step in successfully beating the house, which is playing Perfect Basic Strategy. The next step is counting cards and the final step is deviating your play and your bet when the count warrants.
Read the full article here.
I just got done watching an old episode of numb3rs from season 2 called, “Double Down.” You can download it on i-tunes if you haven’t seen it.
The episode features a card counting team that ends up getting shot down one by one (literally) and the police department investigates. If you know anything about this show it always involves some sort of high level math problems that end up solving the case. In this case, the math featured on the show is the math behind card counting.
The show does a pretty good job of showing what card counting really is and what team play looks like. The thing the show does that is ridiculous is it portrays card counting as really dangerous.
They show also investigates whether card counting is legal. The show accurately portrays how casinos will often lump card counters into the cheater category, where mathematicians understand that it is just using a mathematical system to beat a game fair and square.
Spoiler alert: it turns out that the team of card counters were not just card counting but also laundering money. Apparently, they also knew how to shuffle track the automatic shuffler through an algorithm leaked from the consultant who help make the Automatic Shuffling Machines (which is cheating…or stealing atleast). If they knew how to do this I have no idea why they were still counting cards. Anyways, you piss off some money launderers and steal secret algorithms then I guess that might get you shot. But counting cards is not as dangerous as the show portrays. In fact, I feel less safe getting a physical then counting cards.
Fellow Iphone users:
Follow these easy directions to turn your iphone into a blackjack
super computer:
1. Create an iphoto album called “bj” or “charts” or whatever
2. Drag the Basic Strategy chart into the album. If you don’t have it already download it here. You can drag the deviation chart in there too if you have a premium membership.
3. Plug in your iphone and under “info” command your iphone to sync
all of the pictures in the “bj” pics folder from iphoto
4. The charts will be under photos
5. For higher resolution images I recommend emailing the whole pdf file to
yourself. The two problems with this is that sometimes it takes a
while to download and these are also inaccessible if you do not have
edge network access.
There will be a lot of interest in card counting after the movie “21″ comes out on March 28th. How will this affect you if you if you count cards professionally. Here are a couple thoughts:
Positives:
1. As far as casinos should be concerned, the popularity of card counting is the best thing that ever happened for the game of blackjack. Since people know blackjack can be beaten there are more people who are drawn to play it with an unfounded confidence that they can beat it too, while there are very few people who actually learn what it really takes to beat the game. So the casinos get more people playing at their tables and more people handing them money.
2. Some casinos have really good rules and single deck or double deck games to seduce those type of players. If there is a jump in interest in beating blackjack more casinos may create better rules to compete for these kind of players. Real card counters will benefit from these better rules t00.
3. If there are more people playing blackjack at the tables who think they can beat the game this will add cover for those who are actually doing it. More cover means you will last longer. (I think the best cover any card counter could ask for is for the general blackjack player to spread there bet without a systematic counting system but on whether or not they just saw a string of high or low cards.)
Negatives:
1. Occasionally I have had dealers and pits spot me as a card counter because of my betting patterns, but generally (outside of Vegas) most people don’t know what to look for. After every pit boss, dealer, and security monitor in the country watches the movie will have card counting on the brain and they will understand better what to look for. This might mean less playing time.
If you haven’t seen it yet here is the trailer for the movie coming out next month called “21″
You hear every single type of superstition at the blackjack table. Lots of people like to think they understand the “flow of the cards”. I’ve sat next to a guy who was trying to teach me how to think the value of the dealer’s undercard into existence, stating quantum theories and abstract philosophies as proof that such powers do exist. Fellow gamblers don’t want you jumping in and out of shoes or changing the number of hands your playing because you will somehow screw up the cards. “Third base” often feels the pressure to stand on hands he or she should hit so to not steal the dealer’s bust card. Some people get mad at the dealer thinking he or she is somehow responsible for the cards that come out.
In order to be a successful blackjack player you have to realize that this is all nonsense. The cards are shuffled and everything is completely random. The cards have no mind of their own. I can’t think cards into existence, and just because you’ve noticed some sort of pattern or “flow of the cards” does not mean that the same pattern or flow will continue on the next hand. It is all random.
There is an near infinite sequence of cards that can come out of a six deck shoe and the only thing that you can be sure of is that mathematically the more you play blackjack the more you are going to loose because the casino has the edge. The only weapon a blackjack player has at his or her disposal is to use a system of counting to know which cards have come out of the shoe, and thus, which cards have a higher probabiliy of coming out next. If the shoe is saturated with high cards the advantage shifts to the player. So if you play basic strategy blackjack when there is a disproportionate amount of high cards left then you will win in the end.
Don’t try and pretend like you have a read on the cards, or a system, or an eye for patterns. These are just excuses to justify gambling. Learn a simple counting system like Hi-Lo and know when you have the advantage.
I personally have learned “The Halves Count” at one point. My team has recently considered switching to a count called the “Hi-Lo Lite”. Basically there’s two types of counts that differ from what we are using: ones that are more complicated and generate more EV and ones that are simpler and generate less. This may sound obvious to some of you, but it is what always lies at the root of this issue: the ones that are more complicated are generally much more complicated. The problem is that we have generally found that the increase in EV is so small that it is not worth the difficulty or complication. One thing that needs to be considered is that as the complexity goes up so do the mistakes. Especially in the actual counting systems, where often times people are pushed to the max in certain situations that require extreme multi-tasking. We have also considered counts that are simpler as far as deviations but the cost in EV was not worth it.
If certain players are looking to increase EV, the absolute easiest thing is to add deviations. In the immediate sense they are not worth that much. To learn more about EV and about Deviations go to our video course.
