STREETWISE BLACKJACK

Streetwise Blackjack

Your Cheatin' Heart, Part I

By Peter Ruchman

I hope you enjoyed the three-part series on the history of card counting. Many of you are familiar with the names of Thorp, Revere, Braun, Wong, and Snyder. From now on, the names of Bernstein, Marcum, Kimmel, and Horowitz might be more familiar as well. Lately, I have been involved in several projects on a national scale with HBO and the Discovery Channel, with these organizations sending film crews into Gambler's Book Shop for different purposes. The Discovery Channel was in last week to shoot some footage for a special they are running on great cons and cheating. The reason they chose lil' ole me is that they wanted authoritative information related to blackjack counters and casinos from personal experience. They were also looking for background material along with an informed opinion. I did my best to give them all of the above with a bit of humor and insight. Look for the show to run in August.

That the casinos consider blackjack counting to be cheating is not startling news. This thought process has been going on for decades. For many higher-ups in casino authority, there was a time of denial, a period when these men were thoroughly convinced that card counting was a sham or ruse to confuse them. Then, those who understood the math, thought that they could regain the upper edge with a number of controls. One of these was to offer shorter penetration employing a greater number of decks. After all, the math also says that the greater number of decks used, the greater the House advantage. And, as any card counter will relate: penetration means everything. But first I want to take a look at how blackjack has changed since these men and women revolutionized the casino world with counting, and how it relates to cheating.

The biggest change in the blackjack world came from three distinct areas. The first was that casino ownership shifted from private ownership to corporations. The men who built Las Vegas casinos came from the gambling world. They were gamblers and bookies first. For the most part, they would take a bet, fade the action, because that was how it was done. They knew the math, and understood that they had the long-term edge. Save for Jackie Gaughan, these men are all gone, replaced by bottom-line bean counters who are incapable of mumbling the word, "gamble." They refuse to risk. It isn't their world.

One illustration is an anecdote related to me by a man who has very capably run one of the bigger sports books in Las Vegas for years. He started out a long time ago as a blackjack dealer. He was sitting through another of those endless corporate Monday meetings where the empty suits rake the weekend's figures. After the meeting had finished, a newer suit approached the casino vet and informed our man that he was eminently qualified to pass judgments on gambling because he had played poker in college.

The corporate mentality is mingled with a gross misunderstanding of the casino world. They don't understand the games, they don't understand the customers, and there is a gross need to justify their middle management positions creating a sea of paranoia. No one wants to take the hit for a loss at a table or on shift. So it's far better to clamp down hard and fast and chase a customer than risk being written up. This thinking applies across the board.

A flamboyant but supremely gifted blackjack counter named Ken Uston revolutionized the casino world when he sued Atlantic City in the 1980s and won. The author of The Big Player, Million Dollar Blackjack, Two Books on Blackjack, Ken Uston on Blackjack, and The Uston Newsletters, Uston took the Atlantic City casinos to court over their barring him from card counting. This goes to the heart of the matter of the cheating issue. The question comes down to one of perspective: Is card counting cheating? If it is, why is it cheating if a card counter is merely using his/her brain to win? If it isn't cheating, why should the casinos be able to throw you out or bar you? Uston had been barred and challenged it in court pursuing the case with lawyer Ken Hense all the way to the Supreme Court and won. Thus New Jersey casinos were not allowed to bar counters any longer. Instead they adopted a series of rules changes that made playing in the state a miserable experience. Uston won the battle but the blackjack players ultimately lost the war. The casinos should actually thank Uston for all of the publicity he generated. The heightened awareness on the part of the public made more people flock to the tables, and the response of the Las Vegas casinos was to re-examine their games and make them increasingly more difficult as well as their New Jersey brethren.

The third reason blackjack life has changed is that the players have become smarter. In the "good old days," of the 1950s and 60s, the casinos "held" or kept as their profit, about 18 percent of the money wagered on the blackjack tables. Most folks had no idea how to play the game at that time, and based their playing decisions on luck, hunches, their state of inebriation, etc.

In the last forty years, there have been hundreds of books and thousands upon thousands of articles written about blackjack and "how to play better." These books and articles have made a difference. Then there are the instructional videos and fine software programs. The quality of play at the tables has gotten better. I know this might be difficult to believe when your hand has just been crushed because some moron on third base split his 5s on a dealer's 4, with a true count of plus 6, and took the dealer's two facesŠbut you should have seen things in the good old days. There was a lot more of that than there is currently.

The advent of the Internet has also pushed up the learning curve. There are websites exclusively devoted to discussions of blackjack information with the latest casino updates and chat rooms for people to exchange ideas. All of this information has contributed to a much greater and in-depth understanding of how the game of blackjack is played along with up-to-the-minute reports on the best‹and worst-- casino conditions. The players and the casinos have taken notice.

The abundance of information has coincided with the fact that casinos are legal in 30 states. There are hundreds of them spread throughout the country. Forty years ago, if you wanted to play blackjack, legally, you had to come to Las Vegas. As the games have spread throughout the states, more people are playing closer to home, thus becoming better players. The one or two trips to Las Vegas each year are now amplified or replaced by numerous trips to the local joints.

The casino hold for blackjack games has dropped to about a 12 percent average or less in some areas. This lowered percentage of profit is cause for great concern amongst the ivory tower purists in many casino administrations. Of course what many of them fail to understand is that there is a greater volume of people playing today than there was 40-50 years ago. Wouldn't you rather have 10-25 times the profit of 12 percent than 90 percent less the amount of people coughing up 18 percent? You do the mathŠ

In next week's column I'm going to continue to follow the development of card counting as cheating and see if I can figure out where we are today.