Our guest this week is a young card counter named Yoshi. Yoshi lives in the Midwest, started with a bankroll of $3,000, and built it to several hundred thousand in a bit over a year.
[00:47] Counting cards in the Midwest
[01:13] Yoshi’s origin story and the how the BR grew
[06:36] Using players’ cards
[10:45] Casinos in Oklahoma: the ante and the casino personnels
[14:50] Networking with compatible, competent AP’s?
[18:39] Proving age without showing ID
[23:16] Exchanging casino chips with other players and managing cash outs.
[31:39] Interesting back-off stories
[34:53] Card eating effect of splitting 10’s
[38:12] Other advantage playing
[40:28] Yoshi’s quitting point?
[43:48] Dealing with the family’s reactions and traveling with cash
[50:03] Unfair treatments and getting ripped off
Ian Anderson, Burning the tables in Las Vegas: https://www.lasvegasadvisor.com/shop/products/burning-the-tables-in-las-vegas/
Stanford Wong, Professional Blackjack: http://amzn.to/2yZvX1h
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That was quite a run to take $3000 to $300,000 red chipping.
Interesting story about the incident in Missouri when you pushed your black chips forward and got shorted $2000 for a color up. I ALWAYS count my chips before I color up and NEVER NEVER leave it up the dealer. I once got shorted by a poker host when we were racing off a lower denomination chip on break, he probably thought I was the type of player who wouldn’t count my chip stack before walking away from the table, big mistake by the poker host. I immediately called him out on his deviance and noticed I was short in my chip stack and was rewarded rightfully so by putting him on the spot.
I have also been shorted several times over the years. Each time, I called over a supervisor and they called upstairs for a review. It has always taken at least 20 minutes but in each case they wound up paying me the correct total. I believe that they were careless errors but since a supervisor has to approve them, it shows that they don’t always pay attention to what they’re doing. My advice would be to stack your chips by yourself and then push them forward. Of course, many people are too drunk to accomplish this so they run the risk of getting shorted.
Don’t even give the dealer the chance to screw you over. Players should count up their chips before coloring up, don’t count on the dealer to do it correctly for you. Everytime the dealer asks me, “I’ll count the chips up just slide them over.” I respond back with a NO, I’ll do it myself. I don’t trust casino dealers.
I had a post written up, and I guess it got lost before I submitted to GWAE quite some time ago. I’m attempting to resubmit from recollection.
The Yoshi show had me thinking about some of Mike Caro’s old poker writings. Yoshi started out with $3,000 and got it up over $100K rather quickly if I recall. What I understand Mike Caro to have written is that you should treat small bankrolls as if they are disposable, and big bankrolls with a lot more care – the reason being is that you can just “drive a cab” and get back on your feet again (i.e., get a new starter bankroll), but this can’t happen if you screw up with a big bankroll. Yoshi seemed to be saying in the podcast that he should have been a little more careful with his bankroll but things worked out OK.
http://www.poker1.com/archives/3467/mike-caro-poker-word-is-bankroll
Specifically, I quote from the above:
“Question 4: Should you ever risk losing your entire bankroll?
Sure. There’s no big disgrace in losing a small bankroll. Tiny starting bankrolls aren’t worthy of the protection that you afford larger ones. Of course, you can protect small bankrolls by playing in extremely small-stakes games. But often that isn’t worth your time, because you’re putting more effort into preserving your bankroll than you would if you went broke and replenished it from real-world activities.
But when your bankroll grows, it becomes more important to protect it. That’s because, as its size increases, it becomes harder and harder to replace if you lose it. So, simply, you can roll the dice with small bankrolls, but you should be conservative with large ones.”
It was cool to see how Yoshi applied this concept to his Blackjack career.
I obviously agree that it would be OK to “overbet” when your bankroll is $3K, but not when it is something like $25K, $50K, etc., or any amount that would be difficult for Yoshi to re-establish if he went broke.
As a side note, sometimes it’s fun to answer the question “Can you afford to play that game?” with “I dunno. I can afford to win, that’s all I really care about.”