Powerful Profits From Blackjack

By Victor H Royer

Solid Advice From A Casino Industry Insider

In this outstanding, fully updated guide to winning at blackjack, gambling columnist and consultant Victor H. Royer provides a wealth of tips and step-by-step techniques for enhancing the casino gaming experience and becoming a more knowledgeable and more successful player. With methods proven on casino floors around the world, he guides you through the basics of blackjack, from knowing when to split cards and when to stand pat to the finer points of betting for maximum success. Powerful Profits from Blackjack can increase your odds of winning and getting more enjoyment from every trip to the casino.

Here are just a few of the valuable tips you'll learn:

The truth behind Shuffling Machines—which are OK, and which to avoid, and why
Includes a Modified Basic Strategy for your best advantage!
Also includes a card-size Modified Basic Strategy that you can copy (print) and carry with you
Why you should never split 10s—except in some Blackjack Tournaments
The importance of "soft hands," and why casinos hate them
How the number "17" can make or break your hand
Why all blackjack games are NOT the same
How to find a casino that offers you the best chance of winning
And much more!

Can This Book Give You An Edge? Bet On It!

134,500 Words

• Language: English
• Publisher: Citadel Press
• Release date: Jul 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780818407857

Victor H Royer

Victor H. Royer is the author of several major works on casino gambling, and is a syndicated columnist for national gaming magazines. His columns have appeared in Casino Magazine, Midwest Gaming and Travel, Casino Executive, Card Player, and many others. He has also served as a marketing and gaming consultant to the world's largest casinos, and to gaming machine manufacturers. He lives in Las Vegas.

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Introduction

I have been playing casino blackjack for many years. I played blackjack when the game still resembled that of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when the original group of blackjack theorists and authors first came up with the rules of profitable play that later became known as the Basic Strategy. Originally conceived and published in the mid-1950s by Baldwin, Cantey, McDermontt, and Maisel, these early principles of blackjack playing strategy were later improved and further defined by Edward Thorp in the breakthrough book Beat the Dealer. Later, the brilliant mathematician and computer programmer Julian Braun refined the strategies by programming what was then the world’s fastest IBM computer to simulate millions of hands of blackjack. Building on this information, later author Stanford Wong, in a series of books, further refined and defined principles of blackjack Basic Strategy, Advanced Basic Strategy, and the various point-count and card-counting systems. Most of the succession of books on blackjack since around 1960 have been based in some way upon these principles of play. Later authors took advantage of the increasing sophistication in computer technology to refine and improve these strategies and to combat casino rule changes, the introduction of multiple decks, and other casino refinements designed to combat the sophisticated blackjack players. Even as far as the late 1970s and early 1980s, most books on blackjack still carried the same focus and philosophy that had been established over the previous two decades.

Then a funny thing began to happen. The world of the casino environment began to change. First, there was the opening and legalization of Atlantic City casinos in New Jersey. Prior to that, the casinos in Nevada, mainly Las Vegas, Reno, and Lake Tahoe, had the only legal blackjack games in the United States. Then, in the 1980s, the computers hit the casino. For the first time in the history of American legalized gambling, the slot machine took over. No longer was the pit the main focus of the casino. The slot floor took over and millions of people flocked to new slot games like video poker. Shrinking profits from table games, and the increased perception of the sophistication of blackjack players, soon led to a sharp decrease in the availability of blackjack. Among the games that were left, casinos began to substantially alter the various rules of play, such as having the dealer hit soft 17s, using two decks but cutting off 50 percent of the cards from play, later using extended playing decks of four- and six-deck shoes, and so on (more on this in later chapters).

These and other changes took their toll not only on the blackjack game as it was supposed to be, but also on the blackjack game as it was written about in most of the books available at the time. The casinos were first scared of the seemingly large numbers of players who flocked to blackjack games armed with Basic Strategy books. Later, the casinos thought that slot machines would take over entirely. Since blackjack players were now seen as more sophisticated, cutting out the tables to make room for more slots seemed the thing to do. This kind of mind-set was, fortunately, short-lived.

Casinos soon found out that most blackjack players were not nearly as sophisticated as they had assumed, since so much information on how to beat blackjack was now available. It turned out that most people did not understand the principles of playing blackjack with a professional strategy and mind-set, or they simply couldn’t remember all the rules all the time and made mistakes. Since the Basic Strategy player was able to get the game to about even odds, casinos thought that these players would break them. There were many stories in the media at that time about professional blackjack players and player teams who took casinos for millions of dollars. What the majority of the casual blackjack players failed to understand, however, was that these professional players and player teams were actually card-counters, who used advanced strategies that exploited the casino’s blackjack rules at the time, and not just players like everyone else who happened to read some books on Basic Strategy and got lucky. Casinos, first scared of the general player armed with knowledge of blackjack strategies, were then scared of the card-counters and their teams. Finally, they thought slots would be better since they were machines and not people. In the end, all these thoughts proved wrong.

Slots were not a source of never-ending casino profits. Yes, they did take over the majority of gaming positions in the casinos. Today, casinos consist mostly of video slots, and all slots—regardless of how they may appear—are computerized (for more information on slot machines please refer to my book Powerful Profits from Slots). Casinos gain anywhere from 60 percent to 80 percent of their overall profits from slots. So, in one sense, the casinos were correct in the assumption that slots would account for the majority of profits, but casinos with nothing but slots would be no more than video arcades—and that was not the answer either. However, at the time of the first boom in computerized slots, which coincided with the emergence of the knowledgeable blackjack player, no one in the early 1980s could have foreseen the impact that computers would have on everything. After realizing that slots would not be the only route to regular and steady casino profits, the casinos were surprised to find out that the popularity of table games actually increased, with the media exposure generated by the reports of huge wins by the blackjack experts, and the general availability of more and more books on blackjack strategies. Even more surprising was the simple fact that profits from blackjack also increased as more people came to play—each armed with their own book on blackjack, and the knowledge of strategy they thought they had mastered. How was this possible?

Entertainment—that is the simple, direct answer. People came to play blackjack because it was simple to learn, and it was fun. Fun. People were entertained in the casino. For the first time, the general public could find entertainment in a gambling game—the same kind of simplicity and entertainment found in video poker, which came on the casino scene in the 1980s. Prior to this social phenomenon, the casinos were thought of as somehow dark, and their denizens were cigar-chomping hustlers out to make a score. This was the sort of image portrayed in films and books of fiction, and was a mixture of historical misunderstanding and a lot of misconceptions about gambling in general. Fortunately, the last vestiges of this pseudoreligious stigma were about to crumble.

Many people learned at least something about blackjack, and they came to Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos to try it out. Many lost money because they didn’t learn the game as well as they could have. Many others lost money because they became caught up in the casino atmosphere, with the free drinks, shows, dinners, and so on—the general ambiance of the casino scene that is so overpowering. Still others lost money because they weren’t able to practice their skills in reality as they were able to do in the privacy of their homes, or in the various blackjack clinics and clubs that sprang up. There were others who lost money playing blackjack because they knew nothing about the game, but found so many people playing it and seemingly having a good time that they tried it out themselves. Some won money. Some won because they were lucky, very few because they actually did learn how to play the game to win—but these winners were so few, overall, that the casinos found out they didn’t have to be afraid of them. On the contrary, with all that was going on in the media about blackjack, the game actually increased in popularity to such a level that today it is still, by far, the most popular casino table game on the gaming floor. Every casino that has a full casino license will have more blackjack tables than any other table game.

What the majority of these blackjack players had in common was not so much that virtually all of them lost some money. Instead, what all these people actually had in common was the fact that they had a great time. Here, in blackjack, they found a simple game that was easy to play, with some rules that were likewise easy to learn, and a game that provided them with a whole bunch of great times and stories to tell their friends back home. Thus the legend of casino blackjack was born, reinforced time and time again across the past decades by countless stories by countless millions of casino visitors who played blackjack and had a great time, win or lose. Mostly lose. Surveys conducted among casino visitors asked what was more important: winning money, or having a great time. Many of these surveys indicated, time and again, that players wanted to have a good time more than they cared about winning money. These are the casual players, and about 96 percent of all casino visitors fall into this category. This doesn’t mean that each person thus defined has to come only twice a year and stay for the average three-days-four-nights. This can mean anyone, even a person who lives next to a casino and plays every day. What defines a casual player is the fact that the person enters the casino for reasons other than purely winning money. Many go there for the food, the shows, the music, the entertainment, the bowling, the movies, the conventions, the meetings, and gambling. Although they may say that they go to the casino for reasons other than gambling, all these people say that they will gamble. At the same time they will also state categorically that winning money is secondary. If they get lucky, so much the better. If not, ahh, well, maybe next time they will. Even those who say they go to a casino specifically to gamble also say that winning money is not the first priority—having a good time is. What we can learn from this is what the casinos have learned: that gambling to win money is the aim of only the very few and very knowledgeable people, while gambling for fun and not to win money is the overwhelming choice of the vast multitudes who visit