Take Me to the River

Mar. 21st, 2016 01:13 pm

When the condo sold back on Leap Day, I figured a good way to celebrate would be to make my first trip to Pittsburgh’s riverside casino, creatively named “Rivers”.

What I hadn’t figured was how painfully difficult it would be to obtain a fistful of Bens for my initial cash buy-in. BayBank BankBoston FleetBoston Bank of America has no branch anywhere within a day’s drive of Pittsburgh, and I didn’t have an account at any local banks. I finally opened a local account with a token amount, but they won’t cash checks for more than your account balance, and they won’t let an accountholder cash a check drawn on another bank for 16 days! Another local bank advertises that they’ll happily cash anyone’s third party checks (for a fee), but when I went there, they summarily declined my check with absolutely no reason given. In the end, I had to do an EFT transfer from one of my other accounts to my new local account, wait four days for it to clear, and only then could I finally pull cash out of the new account. Pain in the ass!

But you don’t want to hear about my banking woes, you want to hear about my subsequent visit to the casino, so how was that?

The trip itself was noteworthy because unlike Foxwoods, Rivers is in town, saving myself from renting a car and several hours of drive time as compared to Foxwoods. But more importantly, if you factor transportation costs into my Foxwoods expeditions, things like car rental and gas and tolls have eaten away no less than 65 percent of my gambling winnings! In Pittsburgh, the lack of transportation expenses will allow me to actually pocket my proceeds for once, rather than handing them directly over to Hertz et al.

After a pleasant walk from downtown across the Allegheny, I stepped into Rivers for the first time and scoped the place out. It’s a pretty decently-sized facility, although as usual most of the space is allocated to offensively loud and gaudy slot machines. Slots always attract the most victims, despite being by far the worst bet in the house. In terms of table games, there is a separate non-smoking sections near the cage, although I didn’t see any $25 blackjack tables in that area. On a Thursday morning it wasn’t very crowded or smoky.

Casino chips

In terms of blackjack rules, they’re very similar to Foxwoods, which are amongst the most favorable rules you’ll find anywhere on the planet. In Pennsylvania, the state mandates the specific set of rules, which includes double after split, dealer stand on soft 17, and late surrender, all of which are meaningfully favorable to the player. The table I chose was surprisingly using a 6-deck shoe with no mid-shoe entry. That was a little inconvenient, but the short shoes made the wait shorter.

Their dealers were generally pretty good. The players seemed pretty competent, as well, although there were rarely more than two other players at my table at once. And considerably fewer Asian gamblers than one would see at Foxwoods.

As for my run of play… It was a long, intense, difficult battle. Unlike my farewell trip to Foxwoods where it took only 20 minutes to reach my win limit, I had to work this table for a solid two hours. After being up initially, the deck turned against us for an extended losing streak across multiple dealers. Several times when I got close to busting I managed to collect on anxious CLB bets, including one well-timed blackjack on an atypical $300 bet (the state also requires BJ to pay 3:2).

After an incredibly nerve-wracking battle, eventually the cards turned back in our favor, and I found myself ahead of the game, surprisingly $75 above my predetermined win limit. I colored up and pocketed that amount, but played on to parlay my spare $75 into a couple hundred before it was finally taken away from me. However, in that time I won a side bet for a $50 toke for the dealers, which made everybody happy.

So although it was in doubt for quite a while, I was satisfied that my first trip ended with the casino’s money in my pocket. The hard-fought two-hour battle provided quite a different feeling than my 20-minute farewell victory at Foxwoods, but one could say that I received more entertainment value for my money.

Or rather, their money! ;^)

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What Happens in Oxford Stays in Oxford

Jan. 13th, 2013 12:05 pm

Somehow two years had passed since my last trip to a casino. To make up for that, I made two blackjack pilgrimages in the past couple months. Here’s some notes.

My first stop was Foxwoods, my preferred joint. In that session, I lost a lot early, but managed to turn it around. In the most memorable hand, I split two fours against a four, then doubled down when I drew a seven on one of the splits. Fortunately, since I now had three times an already substantial initial bet riding on that hand, the dealer busted. It’s always nice when big money hands go according to the mathematical probabilities.

After about 90 minutes I looked down and saw that I’d surpassed my “win” criteria, so I stepped away and drove home. That’s really the most difficult and most important skill in blackjack: having the self-discipline to leave when you’re winning.

A month later, during a trip to Maine, I decided to check out a new casino that has opened in Oxford. It seemed like a nice little joint, until I looked at their rules: no surrender and dealer hits soft 17. Nonetheless, having made the trip, I sat down and played through.

It didn’t take much time for me to plummet to my “lose” criteria. Some of that was bad cards, and some of it was also the unfavorable rules, which bit me a half dozen times.

Will I go back to Oxford? Not unless they change their rules. Foxwoods permits late surrender and stands on soft 17, and I prefer to encourage stores with favorable rules. It’s too bad, though, because Oxford seemed like a nice little place.

So you win one, you lose one, and that’s about par. The betting strategy I’ve developed theoretically allows me to win two thirds of the time, and that has proven out in real-life, where I’ve been up after six of my last ten sessions.

That might sound great, but because I set my loss threshold at twice as much as my win threshold, it winds up being a wash.

In other words, if I win $100 66 percent of the time, and lose $200 33 percent of the time, my long-term result should be a big fat goose egg. Or, if you’re mathematically inclined, let X = my win threshhold:

(.66 * X) - (.33 * 2X) = $0

Nonetheless, that’s an above average result when you’re playing against the house, and it felt great to be back at the table again.

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Was that BJ really that good?

Feb. 13th, 2006 11:17 am

I thought it important that I followup on last month’s article, wherein—after a successful trip down to Foxwoods—I described my betting strategy for blackjack.

I did a little followup research, and discovered that the basic idea behind my betting strategy is pretty close to something that’s been around for a long time, and is commonly known as the Martingale betting system.

The kicker is that it is almost universally derided by the pros who have looked at it. That kind of intrigued me, so I read up on it quite a bit.

I’ve already described the basic strategy: every time you lose, you double your bet until you win, guaranteeing that you can’t lose.

There are two problems with that. First, you need a big bankroll to be able to absorb the doubling you have to do if you lose six, eight, ten hands in a row. Second, on most games, there’s a fixed house limit that is designed to specifically prohibit you from following the doubling progression indefinitely.

So what it boils down to is this: you’re betting the casino that you’re not going to lose six, eight, ten hands in a row during that session. It’s a very profitable bet, and one you’re likely to win most of the time, as shown in the chart at right.

However, the problem is that when you lose that bet, you lose your entire bankroll. Hence the worrying lump at the left hand side of that same chart.

So there are a couple keys to making Martingale work. First, you need to play a game with near 50-50 odds, like the red/black roulette bet or the pass line in craps. Second, you need to play it for a comparatively short time, because over the long run, you’re guaranteed to eventually lose those eight hands in a row and completely bust, and that will likely lose you more money than you won on all the other hands combined.

That’s why professional gamblers hate Martingale: over the course of the large number of hands they play, they’re guaranteed to bust. However, for us recreational gamblers, it can be profitable in the short term. But if you’re going to Martingale, you always have to be prepared to lose your entire bankroll at the drop of a hat, because the more you play, the more likely it is to happen.

Of course, being cocksure, I’ll continue to play Martingale for blackjack, even though it’s heavily contraindicated. I’ll bring what I can afford to lose, be happy when I win, and grumble when I lose. We’ll see how it turns out. It’s not like I go to a casino often enough to tip the odds in their favor. But win or lose, it’ll be an interesting thing to observe.

But if you thought my betting strategy made sense, you’re hereby officially warned: it’s explicitly called out as a misleading and dangerous strategy by nearly all professional gamblers.

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The boys love them some good BJ

Dec. 30th, 2005 12:21 pm

So my buddy [livejournal.com profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.

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