Card Counter`s blog. COUNT CARDS AND WIN!!!

Lawrence Revere was both a serious player and talented author. He died in 1977. His only book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, initially published in 1969, is still in print. If you look at the “true count” methods that was employed pre-Revere, you will see why Revere’s name was placed into the hall of fame. The earlier methods were cumbersome and mentally fatiguing to use. In the second edition of Beat the Dealer, in which Thorp first proposed the Hi-Lo Count, he mentioned a simple method of using the count, though he failed to develop it as a full system. Revere had a leap of brilliance that led him to come to the conclusion that the simplified method of obtaining a “true count” that Thorp had mentioned could be fully developed and employed with the most powerful of point count systems. Revere’s method was so simple compared to the alternatives, it has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Stanford Wong, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, Bryce Carlson, Arnold Snyder, and others. As a serious player, Revere’s knowledge of blackjack included such esoteric techniques as shuffle tracking and hole card play.

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In the whole vast selection of casino games you can play there’s one simple notion: either you win or you lose. And there is no way you can go around it with any given strategy. Still, there is one casino game where this rule can be avoided and there are real working ways if you have the right strategy for the game.

Surely there is no way you can predict the outcome of a natural blackjack during the game, but before you actually go to a playing table you can check out the numerous charts to see if your chosen strategy gives you any advantage during the game and what are the odds of winning.

In blackjack the main goal is to have a card count that is as close to 21 as possible without exceeding it. Besides, you should beat the dealer’s count in order to actually win. The are different numbers of cards used in each and every casino, so you should make sure you know whether it’s a single deck or 4 decks before going to the table and placing your bet.

Let’s look into the so-called Basic strategy. It uses these variables to mathematically evaluate your chances of hitting the winning combination and there are numerous charts which take regard of the deck number at the table.

Using such charts is very easy. You have your totals outlined to the right, and the dealer’s totals sitting on top. All you have to do is match the raw and column of your and the house totals and see whether you have to hit, stand split or double on the next turn. There are numerous variations with online blackjack tables, taking in account whether you have soft, hard totals or pair splitting. When playing this game online using such charts is very easy and helpful. No one restricts or limits you in using any additional information while playing blackjack online because it’s simply impossible to control such things at an online casino.

You should however remember that Basic strategy is not about winning every time you sit at the table. There will be wins, and there will be losses, but over the long-term use of this method you will clearly see that it raises your advantages and lets you win more.

The card counting system is another method that is often used as a substitute to the Basic strategy is. If simply put, this method counts every card in the game to foresee what possible combinations are left within this particular game and give a player an advantage in knowing what to expect.

Like with numerous variations of the Basic strategy, there are many different types of card counting systems that all relate to different circumstances and playing variables. The key to success here is to know which one works best for you by trying them all in different situations and seeing which is the most comfortable and effective to use. Online blackjack gives a very important advantage here - you won’t have to perfect your skills in front of real impatient player, having only to deal with virtual representations. Much less stress and much more learning opportunities!

After getting enough confidence in your skills and new-found methods, you can join numerous online blackjack playing tables and see what advantages these strategies really offer.

Traditional land-based tournaments have always been favored by poker players, yet in recent years there is no doubt that the real poker action takes place in the online poker tournaments held by the variety of online poker rooms (Biggest poker room PokerStars offer great tournaments). Before you make your choice of an online poker tournament, it is important that you know everything there is to know about tournaments of poker online:

Just like in a regular poker tournament, all the players begin the poker game with the same amount of chips, and the game continues up until the point that only one poker player has remaining chips, the winner of the particular poker game and tournament.

In order to make sure that the poker tournament will be concluded after a reasonable amount of time, the antes or blinds are gradually incremented, making the poker players think twice before they continue.

Usually the winner does not take it all and the online poker room divides the prize pool between the top positions, and the winner gets to pick the biggest share.

Poker Tournaments can be about ten people in one table or thousands of players in multiple tables, they can be about Texas poker or 7 card stud but the types of poker tournaments are usually fixed and they are as follows:

Sit &Go Tournaments: These tournaments of poker online, as their name implies, begin as soon as enough players, usually 9 or 10, have assembled around the table.

Multi-Table Tournaments (MTT): These poker tournaments are scheduled for a predetermined time and involve hundreds and sometimes thousands of people playing Texas Holdem or Omaha poker at various tables.

Knockout Tournaments: This type of poker involves two online poker players with the same amount of chips. The one who cleans out the others poker chips will be the winner.

Satellites: This poker tournament is different from the rest in that the first prize is not only money, but a buy-in to another poker tournament. This prize usually includes a package of plain ticket, hotel and spending money besides the desired buy-in to that poker tournament. The idea behind this type of tournaments is to give good players the chance to participate in a big poker tournament which they probably cannot afford otherwise.

Re-Buys: Once your chips run out in this kind of poker tournament, you can purchase more chips. You can make a limited or unlimited number of purchases depending on the establishment or online poker room you play in.

Freezeouts: Once your chips run out in this type of poker tournament, you have no choice but to withdraw from the race to the prizes since no re-buys are allowed here.

Online slots is a new phenomenon that has spawned hundreds of sites in the past several years, and the numbers keep growing. If you haven’t seen online casino adds and offers to play play free slots than you haven’t been online at all. Only a few years ago online slots were simple downloadable programs that had to be run in DOS mode and had graphics similar to the 80’s game consoles.

However, today online slots are state-of-the-art web applications developed by teams of programmers and designers, that deliver realistic graphics and all the features you will find in a land-based slot machine. If not more. Due to the hight commercialization of the Internet, slot games have also become a good source of revenue for online casinos. That’s why you can play play free slots, high roller slots or any other types of slot games by just clicking on a link in your browser.

Many specialists state that this segment of electronic commerce has become one of the largest among online industries. What does it have to do with a simple player like you? Well, you can be assured that the competition is pretty tough and online casinos will try to give the best they can just to make you play on their site. And this means you are going to get a lot of quality gambling action online!

During the early 70th, Dr. Keith Taft began developing the first specialized blackjack computer, and by 1972, Keith had started using a computer in the Nevada casinos to play “perfect” blackjack. Nevada had no laws at that time prohibiting the use of devices at their tables. He went on to develop dozens of concealable computers and other electronic devices over the next two decades, ever smaller and more powerful.

This computer communicated its decisions to the player with buzzes and taps on the sole of the player’s foot. It was not easy to use one of these devices. Even once you had memorized the codes, inputting them via the toe switches was a chore. It took weeks or even months of practice to get to the point where you could use the device at casino-dealing speed without foot cramps stopping you.

In the toe of each shoe there were two “switches”, or buttons - one above each big toe and one beneath - for a total of four switches. Each switch conveyed a different code to the computer, which was a small epoxy-encased device that was strapped to the calf beneath the trousers. By using a series of toe taps, kind of like Morse code, the player could relay to the computer everything it needed to know in order to make a decision in a blackjack game: which cards had already been dealt, what cards the player held, and the dealer’s upcard.

Social rewards. This is a major reason behind the traditional home game. Many friends like to hang out and play cards, and many people become friends over the card table. If this is one of the major reasons you wish to play, stick with low stakes, where the games are more fun and friendly.

Entertainment. Poker is a competitive game. To win, one needs the skills and the bit of luck the game necessitates. Many find this enjoyable and compare poker to playing a sport. Make sure you don’t get swept up in the ‘entertainment’ nature of poker, because it is possible to lose a lot of money at the game.

Education. The skills necessary to become a good poker player apply well to other aspects of life. Poker will help you to improve your judgment skills (reading people) and sharpen your logical and strategic skills (how to play your hand).

To make money. Most people play poker for fun, but some make considerable money at it. Of course, these people are few and far between. Not everyone can make a lot of money from poker.You an make a lot of money playing pokerturniere and boni. Nevertheless, the desire to win more is definitely a reason to improve your poker skills. Beste Pokerraum - Bwin pokerboni.

In 1978, Resorts International opened in Atlantic City, the first legal East Coast casino in the twentieth century. Their four- and six-deck blackjack offered a new form of surrender, dubbed by card counters as “early surrender,” since the casino allowed players to surrender half a bet even when the dealer showed an ace or 10 up, and before the dealer checked for a blackjack. This rule gave basic strategy players a small edge over the house right off the top, without any card counting whatsoever! And the advantage to card counters was even greater. From opening day, card counters had a field day at Resorts’ tables. Ironically, as word spread through the gambling community that card counters found the Resorts’ blackjack game to be the most lucrative game for players in the country, gamblers from all over the world - most of whom knew nothing about basic strategy or card counting - flocked to their tables. And, ironically, Resorts International was soon the most profitable casino in history, winning an average of $650,000 per day.

A team of blackjack players whose founders were from Czechoslovakia that had been playing in Las Vegas flew all of their members to Atlantic City to take advantage of this new surrender rule. This team, which later became known in the casino industry as simply the Czech Team, found the Resorts’ game to their liking and stayed for months.

A New Jersey college student named Tommy Hyland, who had just turned twenty-one, started going to Atlantic City in 1978 when he heard about the favorable black-jack game at Resorts. Within a year, he had organized about twenty of his college and golfing buddies into a team of blackjack players. Hyland’s team continues to this day as one of the most successful casino gambling operations in history.

It was also in 1978 that the first MIT blackjack team was started. This team actually consisted of students from MIT, Harvard, and other East Coast colleges. Johnny C.j now a legendary player who joined the team in 1981, plays high-stakes blackjack to this day and continues organizing teams of professional players. The Czechs, the Hyland teams, and the MIT teams would be the scourge of the casino industry for decades to come. Many believe these teams owe their existence to the Resorts’ game with its early surrender rule that made the game so easy to beat. College kids found that they could pool their money, play blackjack with a modicum of intelligence, and get rich quick.

In fact, it was a combination of that easy-to-beat early surrender game and Ken Uston’s The Big Player that had just been published in 1977 that worked together to create an environment where new teams of smart young kids could make millions playing blackjack.

To the public at large, one of the most incomprehensible things about professional blackjack strategies is hole-card play. Hole-card play is not a single strategy, but a whole range of strategies. The one feature that can be found in all of these strategies is that the player either knows the dealer’s hole card, or has valuable information about that hole card, whether it’s a paint or not. To most casual blackjack players, this seems absolutely incredible and impossible, unless there is some sort of cheating going on. But it’s not impossible, and in fact, most hole-card strategies are perfectly legal.

In the Spring 2003 Blackjack Forum, Richard W. Munchkin, author of Gambling Wizards, interviewed “RC,” one of the most successful hole-carders of modem times. In introducing us to RC, Munchkin writes, “For every one hour spent on the table playing, the hole-card player may spend ten hours scouting… Most players, even if shown a dealer who is flashing, would not be able to spot the hole card anyway. Holecarders spend hundreds of hours training their eyes to see something that flashes by in a fraction of a second, often cast in shadow.”

James Grosjean’s Beyond Counting (now out of print, though a second edition has been announced) is widely regarded as the hole-carder’s bible. A meticulous mathematician, Grosjean was the first person to accurately figure out the hole-carder’s edge at blackjack with perfect reads and perfect play (just over 13 percent), and in addition to his work on blackjack, he provided some of the first detailed hole-card analyses of games like Three-Card Poker, Let It Ride, and Caribbean Stud Poker.

Hole-card players speak their own language and have their own heroes. Most consider card counting too weak to be worth the trouble. Many quickly attain notoriety in the casinos and a degree of fame among other pros that appreciate the rare skills they have developed. But let’s look at some of the forerunners of today’s players, describe some of the most common hole-card strategies, and get a historical overview of this type of legal strategy.

In 1980, Stanford Wong published a book, Winning Without Counting (now out of print), with an initial price tag of $200. To pros, the book was well worth it. Wong discussed many methods of hole-card play for the first time and provided the only detailed description and analysis of “warp” play ever in print.

What is warp play? In the old days, dealers used to manually peek under their tens and aces to see if they had a blackjack before satisfying the players’ hands. This constant bending up of the corners on the tens and aces tended to put a warp into these cards if the casino did not change its decks frequently. An observant player could see the arc in a dealer’s hole card created by hours of bending the corners of the tens and aces. Warp play was simply using this information to make strategy decisions.

Then, Ken Uston’s Million Dollar Blackjack was published by SRS Publishing in 1981. In addition to everything Uston wrote about card counting and team play, Uston went into more detail about two of the hole-card techniques Wong had revealed the year before in Winning lnthout Counting: “spooking” and “front-loading.” Uston, in fact, had become quite adept as a hole-card player after his first book, The Big Player, was published in 1977.

What is front-loading? A front loader is simply a sloppy dealer who flashes his hole card as he is placing it beneath his upcard. It’s actually a pretty descriptive term, since one common way that such a dealer inadvertently flashes the hole card is by tipping the face of the card up toward the “front” of the table as he is “loading” it. A player who sits in a seat that provides him a view of this card is said to be “front-loading.”

Spooking is something else again. It used to be standard procedure for dealers to manually peek under any 10 or ace to see if they had a blackjack, in which case they would immediately turn up the card and collect all bets without playing the hands. Some dealers, in peeking, angled the card in such a way that a person standing behind them, or sitting at another table on the other side of the same pit, could glimpse the card also. It wasn’t long before players started working in teams to take advantage of such dealers. The guy behind the dealer was called the spook. He would signal his buddies playing at the table with whatever information he could get on the hole card. Dealers don’t peek this way anymore, and this is one of the reasons why.

Revere had one message for those who wanted to be card counters. You must be Perfect. Practice, practice, practice. A single mistake per hour can kill your edge.
While he was alive, Revere taught lessons in his Las Vegas home to aspiring card counters. Many players from that era tell a similar story about Revere. At the end of each lesson, he would require his student to count down a deck ofcards without error. Inevitably, the student would fail. Unbeknownst to the student, Revere had surreptitiously removed a card from the deck, and actually caused the student to fail.

Revere’s self-published, 1969, 36-page Playing Blackjack as a Business

Although lawrence Revere died in 1977. his book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, is still in print. Remarkably, Revere’s card-counting systems are still as powerful as any counting systems ever developed. Revere was probably more responsible than any other author for the number of professional players that plagued the casinos in the early 1970S. His book is a classic “how-to” text. He spends very little ink describing the theory of card counting or telling personal anecdotes. He simply presents the material that must be learned and the ways to. practice what you need to win. No fluff, no filler. I believe any card counter could benefit from Revere’s book, if for no other reason than to acquire more of his no-nonsense approach to getting the edge.