Oh, that awful heat!

I refer, of course, to the searing inferno deep inside David Miller's rectum after being rogered yet again in Vegas. You'd think he'd get tired of it.

I'm not without pity for him, though. I think we should take up a collection to buy him a 55-gallon drum of Procto-Soothe analgesic cream. He doesn't have any money left to buy some himself.

Read David's comments about gambling after Bob Dancer's article this week.  You might be right about his Vegas trips afterall.  Sorry David but you had a couple of zingers in that comments section about gambling.  

    Let me know what you think after you gamble for 30 years - you might have a different opinion. But like I say, to each their own... By the way, I have 3 trips planned before the year ends, next trip August/ September.

Rarely have I read anything so stupid as his comments. He also apparently believes that the player at third base on a blackjack table has a mysterious power to affect the table's destiny. What a fucking joke. What a fucking idiot.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and surmise that David has, on multiple occasions, screamed at the player at third base for a "mistake," called him/her a liar and claimed they were destroying America.

His whining in the Dancer column comments sounds EXACTLY like some lifetime loser who wants to find someone or something to blame for his results. Keep in mind that he's already confessed to not bothering to use the correct video poker strategy. So how does his make himself feel better when he indeed loses? He claims that it's all rigged and strategy and game selection don't really matter.

"It's all rigged." Sound a wee bit familiar?

(Oh, and re his hilarious reply to you: 30 years of doing it wrong is still...wrong.)

If the 3rd base player, or for that matter the player at any spot who doesn't know/care about basic strategy, wouldn't make such a spectacle of pausing, hemming/hawing, rubbing their face, other gestures, then there wouldn't be so much "you/he took the dealer's bust card."  This applies to every spot at the table because nobody 'knows' what their next card will be and every player's move has impact.  

It is just so easy when 3rd base holds up the game doing all that, as everybody will be looking at him as if "do something, dude". 

I'm a 'do it right' kind of person and I'd like my fellow players to all be hitting/standing per basic strategy. Makes it "feel" more like a fair game, win or lose.  That is also baloney, but is JMHO.

Candy

As I've been playing BJ at an expert/professional level for decades, one thing I had to get rid of early on was caring about things like how the other players at my table played or behaved. Initially, like everyone else, I was annoyed when Bigbeak Chuckletrousers at third base made a decision that affected the table's outcome and that decision was dumb. But two things made me stop caring: 1) I wasn't going to, nor was I prepared to, praise or thank Bigbeak for doing something dumb that worked, even though that would only have been fair (right?), and more importantly, 2) the next card, including the next card that the dealer would draw if he/she was drawing at all, was randomly determined. And that determination was from a combination of factors, including the decisions that the players made. So the cumulative decisions made by Chuckletrousers were just as much of a randomizing element as the shuffle and cut had been! When he hit that hard 16 against the dealer's 5 three hands ago in the same shoe, that had the same exact effect as if he did it during the current hand. And that effect was: no effect at all. Not really.

That said, I agree with you that a table where everyone knows and follows basic strategy and makes their decisions briskly and confidently just feels better and is more fun to play at. Do you ever wonder, when Chuckletrousers hems and haws and consults the ceiling before acting, where is he expecting his inspiration to come from?

(Reminds me of last year, I was kibitzing at a $25 table at South Point, when some turista at third base went into an eternal funk trying to decide what to do with a hard 14 against a 4, and I thought, "Stand, you moron!" He turned around and looked at me in surprise, and I realized that I'd actually said that out loud. Oopsy :) )

David, that is pure superstition my friend.  I've gambled about 30 years as well.  I'm an expert card counter and got booted out of tons of Vegas casinos in the 1990s and early 2000s because of it and because I just looked too much like a "card counter."  Didn't drink and holler, etc.  By 2008, I was onto video poker because of 1) the game became bad, 2) it just became boring to me and 3) more than anything was the superstition and having to put up with it.  That is the only reason I pointed to your comments; it brought out some old nightmares.  Your comments are equally as bad on video poker.  Trust me, I've made $ on both games over those 30 years.  But you are free to believe what you want.  

It got so bad that I will now only play BJ for amusement for maybe 30 minutes or so and the first thing I tell 3rd base or any other position is "do whatever you want;  you want to hit two card 20s, go for it.  I couldn't care less and it has zero effect on me."  

       Like I said, to each his own. FYI, I also keep my black jack sessions short - but I quit when the cards (and the  decisions of others) turn bad. I'll stick around when there are people at the table who actually know how to play, but when those who play "their own way" start their crap, I color up. My video poker comments are solely based upon what I see and know to be actually happening, at least to me. For myself, it has become easy for me to cash out and move to another machine when I know that my funds in the machine are being slowly bled away - I have seen and experienced this too many times not to believe that the so called "randomness" is just bullshit. But then again, everything I say here is my opinion. Good luck to you with your future gambling. 

Well, yeah, when the lucky gambling fairies decide to flit away, what can you possibly do but cash out?

I do wonder why anyone would play a game if they truly believe that it isn't actually random. I mean, wouldn't that be the absolute height of stupidity?

Also, just an aside, when "the cards turn bad"--does that mean that a malevolent spirit has descended on the table and you're now going to get nothing but hard 16s? And will that persist even after the dealer shuffles them bad cards?

I've played a lot of video poker. Most sessions are losers. Most samples of hands, large or small size, are net losses.So if you play for any given length of time, you probably WILL find that you're losing--until you hit that royal or four Aces or whatever. If I walked away in a huff every time I was having a losing session, convinced that the machine was deliberately screwing me over, well...I would have pissed away a LOT of moneymaking opportunities.

And I feel I must reiterate that blaming your bad results at the blackjack table on the poor play of other players is at the very least, stupid--since they have NO influence on your results, from a rational, mathematical standpoint--and at worst, fuel for fights to break out.

I think my timing was beneficial, though accidental. I got on the BJ/AP train kind of late in the game. My eight years during which it was my primary game were marked by the publication of LOTS of blackjack books, many of which were written by former APs for whom the environment had gotten too "hot." Thus, in reading those books (and I read them all), I learned probably more about "cover" than I did about systems and strategy.

Thus, I adhered to a fairly primitive 1-level count (with a side Ace count for betting decisions) and focused my efforts on never getting detected, never mind kicked out. I decided to adopt a happy-go-lucky "drunk" tourist attitude, talking and joking constantly with the other players, the dealer, the floorman, the cocktail waitresses--whomever. The play itself, once I got warmed up, was trivially easy--I could do it with one brain tied behind my back. I asked for, and gave sincere thanks when I got, meal comps from the pit. And I actually toked the dealers (which of course lowered my win rate, but got me a TON of breaks, such as preferential shuffling IN MY FAVOR).

So in eight years, I never got kicked out. Like you, Jerry, I finally just got tired of it. But I put two nieces and one nephew through college with the money :)

(Cue nostalgic music, a single-deck game dealt 80% through before shuffling, a 1-75 betting spread, and a pit boss who told me, "I know you're counting, and I don't give a crap." and went back to fondling the cocktail waitress's butt. Those were the days...)