I haven't written much here or anywhere about my brief interest in the game of Blackjack. A few friends have asked that I change that.
I picked the word "interest" because that's what it was. It wasn't an obsession and it certainly wasn't anything that consumed a lot of my life or had a great monetary impact on it. It was just something I thought would be fun to try and master…and once I did to some extent, I got bored with it and gave it up. In the last ten years, despite more than a dozen trips to Las Vegas, I don't think I've played a hand of 21 except on my home computer or iPhone for fun…and that doesn't even feel like Blackjack to me. For reasons I'm not sure I can fully explain, playing it on a computer ain't exactly like playing it in a casino but without the money risk. Even if the computer game has the exact same odds, there's something different about it. The reality of winning or losing makes it different.
Blackjack and I first got acquainted around 1981. It was at Harrah's in Reno and I was there because I'd written the act of a fellow performing in the showroom. He paid me a thousand dollars for my work and because I'm such a generous guy, I gave about half of it to the nice folks at Harrah's before I went home. Well, they seemed to need it more than I did. But it wasn't so bad. I may have almost gotten even with them via two trips to the buffet.
Some of my loss was due to the kind of bad luck that can strike any player at any time. No matter how well you play, if the dealer deals herself an Ace and a Ten and doesn't give you the same, you lose no matter what you do. But a lot of my loss was a matter of simply not knowing the game I was playing.
I then spent some time reading up on the topic and realized what a chowderhead I'd been to play without knowing all about things like splits and surrender…and the minor rule variations you find from casino to casino. For example, whether the dealer hits on Soft 17, as they do in some venues, can matter a lot in how you play certain hands. It's vital to learn Basic Strategy and to understand why you should trust it above things like hunches and the dangerous, occasional realization that you're just plain on a winning streak. Nothing will end one of those like the giddy notion that you're in some magical zone where the cards are predestined to go your way no matter what you do. I once saw a gambler lose a hundred thousand dollars in such a mindset…and because he couldn't believe that his "streak" was really over, he immediately bet another hundred grand and lost it, too.
So grasp that concept. There's no magic. There's no luck. There's just the way the cards come off the deck and the way you choose to play them. And sometimes, how you play them doesn't even matter.
Several of the books I consulted also clued me in to what this "card counting" thing was all about and I began to learn about that. For the sake of information, know that I used the Stanford Wong High-Low method but I do not recommend it or any method in particular. That was just the one I learned. There are (supposedly) more accurate systems out there but at least when I last surveyed the field, they all seemed to take a lot longer to master. There was a limit to how much of my life I was willing to spend on any of this and it seemed to me that once I'd fully absorbed one system, it would be very difficult to unlearn it and learn another. I might have tried if I'd even considered the life/career decision of one writer I know who gave up that profession to become a full-time player of Blackjack. There was a notion that never occurred to me. I do not know how he can do that; how he can sit on those stools in those smokey casinos for eight and ten hour stretches. I used to like it for about an hour or until I was up a thousand bucks, whichever came first. Usually, the hour would come first. In any case, I would never want to do it if the amount of money won or lost would impact my life in any way. That would take it out of category of being a game.
To play well, you need a certain amount of courage. There are times when it makes financial sense to put out a really, really large wager and if you're timid about doing that, you limit your ability to win. I'm not sure I could have done that if a loss would have meant not being able to meet my personal financial obligations…but I never put myself in that position. A lot of the time when I was in Vegas, it was to play and work: Spend a few hours a day at the 21 tables, spend the rest of the time in my hotel room, laboring at my laptop to cobble up comic book and TV scripts. When I lost at Blackjack, it would just motivate me to scurry back up to the computer to earn back what I'd dropped at the tables…but at no point did I risk dollars I could not afford to lose.
So I studied card counting at home, practicing with a little hand-held Blackjack game. Here's a quick explanation you won't need to read if you're familiar with the tactic…
Imagine you're playing two-deck Blackjack and that the "penetration" — how far down the deck they deal before shuffling — will allow for four hands before that shuffle. Then imagine that in the first two hands, six of the eight aces in the double-deck are played. You don't know what will be dealt in Hand #3 but you do know something significant. If you've been paying attention, you know that the odds of you getting a Blackjack (an ace and a ten) are way below normal.
That's good to know and that's the principle of card counting. By tracking which cards are played, you gain an awareness of which cards remain in the deck. When the composition of the remaining pack favors the player, you up your bets. When it favors the house, you lower your bet…or perhaps even move to another table or quit. And if you do play, you may play your hand a different way because you know, for example, that the deck has a higher-than-usual or lower-than-usual percentage of low or high cards. If you're interested in learning more about it, there are only about 72,000 books than can teach you. I recommend none in particular. At best, I'd suggest reading several and trusting that which appears in most of them. You'll find a lot of hype accompanying most so-called experts with grandiose claims of how much they've won and how the casinos live in terror of them walking in the door because they have the magical power to bust the bank. Believe none of that. They're selling what they know about the game because that seems like a more lucrative, dependable way to make money than applying those skills at some Blackjack table somewhere.
I was still learning to card count when I got an invite to Vegas for business reasons and decided it was time to try and apply what I'd learned. I'll tell you what happened in a day or so as I serialize this topic over many posts. At some point, I'll tell you how a chance remark from a very funny man named Pete Barbutti led to me giving it up.