“Doctor, it hurts when I do THIS”

“Well don’t do that!” the good doctor quips. I have always found this joke entertaining, not so much for the wisecracking humor, but for the subtle wisdom therein. Note that the doctor’s advice is not “I’ll prescribe some medical marijuana for you,” or “You need to learn to live with the pain,” or “You need a thicker skin.” Steeling oneself to endure pain is an unhealthy practice (pain is a message to you), and yet suffering card counters constantly prescribe this regimen to each other.

Here’s a sample of the discussion when card counters commiserate on their losing streaks:

• “I have recorded back to back 5 figure loss days. … I will survive this. It will all work out in the end.”
• “But it is the nature of the game. … dog lifting his leg to pee on you. The sooner you learn to deal with that, the better off you are. Maybe I will master it …”
• “You have to get used to losing and just put out what’s called for like a machine.”
• “I have to constantly consider re-sizing if/when I take big losses”
• “I’m thinking about this again while I’m in the midst of a terrible losing streak. … assuming a non-replenish-able BR how many Maximum bets do you insist upon having? … So is 150 maximum bets sufficient? 175?”
• “Losing 5 figures to variance, meh, done that.”
• “How many -SD are you?”
• “Still it would be helpful to run a sim to estimate how many SD to the left of center you are.” (!!!!!!)

So our prescriptions from the counter folk are to embrace the pain, resize bets, blame variance, and my personal favorite: use computer resources to answer the all-important “How unlucky was I?”

Resizing bets is the player’s equivalent of the casinos’ capping of games they consider vulnerable. Treasure Bay in Biloxi had a $10 max bet on one game for years, and Harrah’s St. Louis had a $5 max bet! Gee, if our edge isn’t big enough (or is negative), we’ll solve it by lowering the bet. Genius casino management, now mimicked by counters. (I wish Dilbert would cover casinos.)

Does a professional football team spend the entire week looking at their previous loss trying to figure out “how unlucky were we?” No, they spend the entire week correcting the mistakes that were made, as part of a single-minded approach to maximize their edge for the next game. Without overanalyzing or even knowing what their win probability is, they do the only productive thing—maximize that probability, whatever it is. They certainly don’t tell each other, “Half the teams lose every week; it’s the nature of the game. You just have to get used to losing, and the sooner you do that, the better off you’ll be.”

Counters love making excuses for their losses. “Nature of the game,” “variance,” “cheating,” hah! Thankfully, this loser’s mentality has never been shared by the members of my crew. After every session, we discuss the mistakes we made and how to correct them. We often develop new signals to improve our gametime communication for situations that triggered errors. We read, we practice, we scout. We constantly seek to increase our legal edge.

Every major loss leads to additional theoretical research, and even a $300 loss is irritating. I have produced a page of research material every four days for the past 15 years (not counting the pages of computer code!). Last year I offered some of this analysis for free on a subscriber website, and got only ONE email request from a player. Last month I gave away that same writeup to a player I met, and it helped his crew win nearly $1500 in a single session (way to go, kids!)

On the topic of teams running up the score, coach Ditka says, “If you don’t like it, don’t complain about it—stop it!” In one of my other all-time favorite sports quotes, Kevin Garnett summed up the nature of professionalism here: KevinGarnettOnBeingATrueProfessional

So if you’re a player on a losing streak and you come here looking for sympathy, I’ve got a quarter for you! (ba-dum-dum, ching!)