The boys love them some good BJ

[ornoth]

So my buddy somervillian, who hosted a few of the Hold ’Em tournaments that I’ve attended, aspires to become a “serious” poker player. A couple days ago he pinged me and asked if I wanted to make a trip down to Foxwoods with him. (For the out-of-towners, Foxwoods is an Indian casino in Connecticut, and presumably the largest casino in the world).

I’ve only been in a casino once before. That was also at Foxwoods, but seven years ago, and I lost a couple hundred bucks on blackjack during that visit. On the other hand, I feel I have a pretty solid grasp of casino blackjack, and I had some extra Xmas cash lying around, so why not go down and give it a shot?

So yesterday we drove down, and I tagged along with my buddy as he signed up for a seat in the poker room.

At a casino, one element of success is in knowing what you don’t know. I clearly don’t know the wacky table games like craps and roulette, nor am I inclined to make the effort to learn them and gain proficiency at them.

But having taken second and third in two of the three friendly Hold ’Em tournaments I’ve been to, I think I could probably succeed at poker, but the casino game—and particularly casino players—are very different from friendly games, so I figured discretion was the better part of valor. I left somervillian to his own devices and I went to scout out the familiar blackjack tables.

Despite the fact that I lost money back in 1999, I feel I have a very solid blackjack strategy (even back then I started the day up and lost my winnings later). There are “strategy” cards you can download that tell you mathematically what you should do on any possible combination of cards, which makes things pretty easy. I don’t always play by the suggested strategy, but I limit my deviation from the strategy to certain specific card combinations where I feel that taking an additional risk is justified.

Of course, that takes care of a strategy for playing your hand. However, knowing how to win a hand is only half the equation.

You see, if you go by the printed strategy card, over the long run you’ll win about 40 percent of the time. That means that over the long term you’re guaranteed to lose money if you always bet the same amount. So in order to make money at blackjack you need not only a strategy for playing out your hands, but you also need a betting strategy.

My betting strategy is fairly straightforward. It’s based on the premise that the more hands I lose, the more likely it is that I’ll win the next hand, or that the more I win, the less likely it is that I’ll continue to win. In the short term, there’s no real correlation between one hand and the next, but over the long run, the player’s going to win 40 percent of the time, and if I wager and win enough money on my winning hands to cover the hands I lose, then I’ll wind up winning money overall. No?

So the key is if you lose on a $15 hand, you increase your bet to $25, hoping you’ll win the next hand. If you lose again, you increase your bet that much more, to $35, then to $50, $75, $100. Keep increasing until you win (just make sure you’ve got the bankroll to be able to double three or four times). Then, after you’ve won a big money hand, you back down to the minimum bet until you’ve had another losing run, when you can jump in again.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple, and predicting how much to bet and when to jump is an exercise in experience and intuition. I’m not saying the strategy is perfect or that it would work for anyone else; I’m just saying that’s how I play.

So I found myself a blackjack table with a friendly dealer and a $15 minimum bet and put all this into effect. I got raped. As the French would say, I met the man with the hammer. I was getting shit cards and couldn’t win a single hand. I think I blew through my $200 initial buy-in in less than ten minutes, and plopped another $150 onto the table. Then I lost probably all but $50 of that.

I was hemorrhaging. At the abyssal nadir of my losing streak I coined a brand new phrase to keep my spirits up. Likening my losing streak to a airplane crash, I thought: Any table you can walk away from is a good one.

But you have to trust the math. I kept putting money out there, and finally the cards turned against the dealer. By then the minimum bet had increased to $25, which helped my recuperation (recoup-eration?). I trusted the betting strategy: lose, jump, win. Lose, jump, lose, double, win more. Lose, jump, lose, redouble, lose, quintuple, win big.

It took several hours, but I knew I was at least even when I looked down and saw about $400 in chips in front of me. The stack yoyoed a bit with each hand, but the overall trend stayed positive. When my buddy called me to say he was done for the day, I didn’t know precisely where I stood, but I knew I was pretty good. I was in fact pretty surprised when I went to cash out and took $875 in chips with me to the window. Wow. I had a $500 poker chip of my very own! I was flabbergasted.

Yeah. I didn’t actually do the math until I was in the car. Superstitious or something. And that waiting was very hard, because we had dinner before we left the casino (I paid, of course). Finally sitting in the car, I did the day’s tally: not only did I make up the $350 I’d lost initially, but I came away with $525 of the house’s money. Wow!

During the long drive back, we talked about strategy and what we’d both learned about our respective games. I’m afraid I must have been a pretty poor conversationalist, because I was so shocked that I could just play blackjack for a couple hours and walk away with a fistful of Bens. Sure, it was pretty nerve-wracking at first, and there were a couple hands where I had $100 riding on a single play, but I got away with the casino’s money!

The casinos project that you have the opportunity to win big, but ultimately they are in the business of taking money away from you in exchange for a little high drama and entertainment. There’s this theoretical chance that you might win, but it’s a pretty slim chance. Sure, my $525 is nothing to the casino, but it still shocks and awes me that I got away with what— to me—is a tidy chunk o’ change.

Comments

[imperator-mei.livejournal.com]

Nice going!

We have a semi-weekly poker game going out here. If you ever make it to the left coast you'll have to join in.

How did somervillian make out?

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

How did somervillian make out?

That's really his tale to tell, since I wasn't there to observe. What I can say is that he said he wound up at a moderately high stakes no limit table and had a problematically agressive player -- the kind that will raise anything and everything no matter what. It was his first casino Hold 'Em experience, so I think it couldn't help but be what I'd call "a learning experience".