Author: Arnold Snyder

How to Bet NFL Futures

by Dan Gordon

[From Blackjack Forum Vol. XXI #2, Summer 2001]
© 2001 Blackjack Forum

[Dan Gordon is the author of Beat the Sports Books. Portions of this article are excerpted from Danís book, but most of the nuts and bolts of his NFL futures handicapping system are available only in this issue of Blackjack Forum. ó Arnold Snyder]

As Labor Day approaches, one of the biggest businesses in the world prepares to restart. Itís a business that generates well into 11 figures over a five-month period and involves the participation of millions of Americans and citizens from other countriesóand those numbers grow every year. This business is wagering on National Football League games.

Pro football is the biggest betting sport in the United States, with total wagers on it now running more than $1 billion a week. According to USA Today over half of the American adult population had a financial stake of some sort in the outcome of last yearís Super Bowl. That meant over $5 billion wagered on that game alone.

Because of extensive media coverage of the point spread, increased access to betting through the Internet, and the fabulous returns promised by sports touts, millions of fans now believe they have the expertise to beat the sports books, as if the people who book NFL games were the biggest suckers in the world.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Bookies love the NFL season. It provides them with their greatest profits in sports. Many local bookies operate only during the NFL season because the profit from these few months enables them to live well the rest of the year. Bookmakers represent the vast majority of people who make a profit from wagering on the NFL.

The late Bob Martin, manager of Las Vegasís first casino sports book, once told me that the number of bettors who win betting pro football is so small that “Öit is virtually the same as if no one won.”

Year after year, NFL bettors go into the season filled with confidenceóand end up losing. How can you avoid being one of them?

This is the question I answer, in part, in this article. But first, for beginners to sportsbetting, letís go over a few basics.

How Pro Football Is Bet and How the Line Is Set

Before you can win betting pro football you have to know how the line is set.

Many years ago all sports, including football, were bet according to odds. If someone liked a favorite in a game, he could give, say, 2-to-1 odds on the game (meaning he would have to risk $2.00 for every $1.00 he hoped to win). On the same game, a bettor could take 8-to-5 odds if he liked the underdog (risking $5.00 for every $8.00 he hoped to winóor roughly 63¢ risked for every $1.00 hoped for), thus making the “true” oddsóor how the betting public perceived the gameó9-to-5 for the favorite. (The odds of 9-to-5 are the midway point between 8-to-5 and 2-to-1, which can also be expressed as 10-to-5.) The difference between the give on the favorite (2-to-1, or 10-to-5) and the true odds (9-to-5) was the edge for the bookie on the favorite; the difference between the take on the underdog (8-to-5) and the true odds (9-to-5) was the bookmakerís edge on the underdog.

A problem with this type of betting on football came in mismatches, where a bettor might be asked to give 5-to-1 or 6-to-1óor moreóon the favorite. Few bettors wanted to lay such high odds because they had to risk so much to win so little. Neither would many bettors bet the underdog when it was perceived as having so small a chance of winning. Getting high odds was no consolation if your team seemed certain to lose. Thus, mismatches drew very little betting action (and very little “juice”óor profitófor bookmakers.) This was a situation odds makers could never feel happy about.

This problem was solved with the advent of the point spread (also called the “spread”). As far back as the 1920ís, point spreads were used on a limited basis. By the late 1940ís, the point spread had become the accepted way to bet on individual games.

The point spread is a handicap given to the favorite in terms of points. In the last regular season game of 1996, for example, the New England Patriots closed as 9 1/2-point favorites over the New York Giants. In this game, the odds makers believed that the Patriotsó-in the eyes of the betting publicówere 9 1/2 points better than the Giants. This meant that the Patriots had to win the game by more than 9 1/2 points (ten points or more) for a Patriots bettor to collect. An outright Patriots loss or a Patriots win of less than 9 1/2 points meant a loss for a Patriots point spread bettor.

If you bet the underdog Giants, on the other hand, you received 9 1/2 points on the Giants on your bet. If the Giants won the game outright or lost by less than 9 1/2 points (nine points or less), you won your bet. If the game landed exactly on the point spread (which obviously canít happen with a line of 9 1/2), the game is considered a “push” (or tie) and neither the bettor nor the bookmaker makes a profit.

Thus, when you bet a favorite, you are giving (or laying) points; when you bet an underdog, you are taking the points. In the above example a way of writing up a Patriots bet would be: “Patriots -9 1/2.” For someone betting the Giants, the bet would be: “Giants +9 1/2.”

The reason the point spread is considered better than odds is that, in theory, a handicap makes a game an equal proposition in the eyes of the betting public, with bettors just as likely to take one team as the other no matter how great the mismatch might be. In mid-season of 1996, the lowly 1-6 Bucs went to play the 6-1 Packers (the team that would eventually win the Super Bowl). In the old days, the Packers would have been prohibitive odds favorites and the game would have received few wagers. But with the point spread, the line eventually settled at Packers -17, making the game just another of the 14 games played that weekend that got its share of betting action.

The point spread method also makes it easy for sports books to adjust the “price” (or handicap) on a game as money comes in on one side or the other. Letís return to the Patriots-Giants game discussed above.

Las Vegas Sports Consultants (founded by Michael “Roxy” Roxborough, who is now retired) in Las Vegas, the largest odds-making office in the world and the one with the most clients (sports books that use their numbers), felt that making the Patriots an 8Ω-point favorite would make the game an equal proposition to the nationís bettors. How- ever, as the week went on, more money came in on the Patriots than on the Giants. Sports books in Nevada and bookmakers around the country were quick to raise the price on the Patriots, moving their handicap (the “number” or “line”) to -9 and then -9 1/2. When wagers continued to come in on the Patriots despite the higher price, some books were even forced to move the number to -10. Finally, Giants money came in and most bookmakers closed the game at -9 1/2.

As you can see, betting on pro football is truly a free market activity. Most bettors who wagered on this game considered the Patriots a bargain at -8 1/2 and -9. Their betting pushed the price on the Patriots up. When the line reached -10, bettors at last considered the Giants a good deal and their wagers pushed the line back down. The closing number of Patriots -9 1/2 was the result of pure supply-and- demand.

And this is where opportunity arises for the professional sports bettor.

The reason you can make money betting the NFL is precisely because the lines put out by the odds makers are made not to predict the actual outcomes of games, nor to educate the public about the relative strengths of the teams, but to try to split the betting public by making one team as attractive as the other. And the publicís view of a match-up is occasionally incorrect.

A professional bettor looks for lines that are inaccurate in terms of the real differences between the two teams. When he finds such lines he wagers on themóand that is the only time he wagers.

While good odds makers have to tie their lines to public sentiment, the professional maintains a distance from such sentiment in order to be able to recognize those games where public sentiment is incorrect.

Before going on to specifics about how you recognize good bets, I want to mention three points about how I view the NFL.

The league, like the rest of pro sports, has become one of big contracts and big money. Itís my impression that this causes players and even coaches to become, at times, mentally fat. If a game or two has been played well and won, details might not seem that important for the next game. Letdowns happen more now than in the days when players were less well-paid and when todayís job security and guaranteed money did not exist. This doesnít mean that the game was better in the good old days. It just means that it was different to handicap. Teams tended to play more true to form in those days.

What big money and big contracts also mean now is that when teams perform beyond their capabilities for a game or two, one is more likely to see a bounce-back than in years past. For a handicapper this means that it is important to track and be ready to pounce on situations where such bounce-backs are likely to occur.

Second, there is tremendous parity in the league. That means, despite public perception and constant media star-making, that there is not much difference between the leagueís best player at a position and the worst. When a team of slightly worse players is more motivated than a team of slightly better players an outright upset is possible. Most certainly, itís possible for the “inferior” team to cover the point spread.

Third, the point spread tends to nullify any obvious scrimmage edge (skill or power advantage) a team has over its opponent. In the 1995 and 1996 seasons, for example, there were 166 games in which the point spread was seven or more points. These were games where one team was perceived to have a big edge over its opponent at the line of scrimmage. While the underdog won just 39 of these 166 games outrightó23.4 percentóthe underdog covered the point spread in 87 of the games (while tying it in three): a success rate of just over 53 percent. In 1997, there were 69 games with a spread of seven points or more. The underdog won just 12 of these games outright (17.4 percent), but had a 36-31-2 record against the spread for a success rate of 53.7 percent.

Also, as I shall demonstrate shortly, the difference between teams in the middle of the league is not as great as most bettors think. The statistical difference, for example, between a 10-and-6 team and an 8-and-8 team is only three points on a neutral field.

In summary, the team that most bettors think is the better team may in fact be better. However, the point spread usually more than nullifies that edge. Thus, bettors who bet favorites are often betting poor value.

On the other hand, sometimes a team will perform very well or very poorly for just a game or two, and these short-term performances will give the public a false reading of the team. The odds makers mirror this public reading with their numbers. At this time anyone betting on an overrated team or against an underrated team is again betting poor value.

How can you tell if a team is overrated or underrated?

Power Ratings

In their strictest sense, power ratings are values given to each club that tell where that club stands in skill and strength in relation to every other club. The difference between one team and another in my power ratings tells me what should happen in a game between the two clubs on a neutral field with everyone healthy.

Of course, teams donít play on neutral fields in the NFL, but weíll deal with that later. In the meantime, when the rest of the betting public is blown astray by what happened in the last game, power ratings are my guide to the real strengths or weaknesses of a team.

Some handicappers rely mainly on objective factorsóscores and other statisticsóto set their power ratings. Other handicappers rely mainly on subjective factorsótheir own feeling about a team based on certain types of team-membersí behavior.

Through my experience in over twenty years of handicapping, I have come to use bothótwo sets of power ratings. I have devised these two ratings to reflect both my judgment about teamsí strengths, and their performance as measured by scores.

he first ratingóthe only one we will discuss in this articleóis a letter power rating in which each team is ranked someplace between A+ (the best possible rating) and E- (the worst)ósee Chart #1.

Chart #1: Power Ratings

Letter Rating	Projected Record
A+	15-1 or 16-0
A	14-2
A-	13-3
B+	12-4
B	11-5
B-	10-6
C+	9-7
C	8-8
C-	7-9
D+	6-10
D	5-11
D-	4-12
E+	3-13
E	2-14
E-	1-15 or 0-16

These letter rankings correspond to how I feel a team is playing presently, and are meant to reflect how a teamís record would look after a 16-game season playing at this level, assuming that their competition was average. For example, if a team is playing like an 8-8 team, I give them a ranking of Córight in the middle of my range and in the middle of the league. At the very top (A+) of my ratings would be both 15-and-1 and 16-and-0 kinds of teams, while at the very bottom (E-) would be any 1-and-15 or 0-and- 16 teams. Only tthe 1985 Chicago Bears ever made it to A+ in my ratings. No team has ever sunk to E-.

Because they reflect a teamís current performance, letter power ratings are updated continuously throughout the season. And, in my letter power ratings, teams donít always end up ranked according to their actual record. This is because their actual wins and losses may involve an unusually easy or tough schedule, or unusually good or bad luck. Instead, I look closely at the games teams have played to put a “team picture” together.

The letter power rating is to some extent a subjective one, and will only be as good as the experience and judgment of the rater. One way to check your power ratings, as you acquire experience and judgment, is to compare your ratings to those of other respected handicappers. (The Gold Sheet and Power Sweep are among the reputable publications with power ratings in them. You may obtain the current issue of either of these publications from GBC in Las Vegas, or you can subscribe to them directly. The Gold Sheet also has a website at www. goldsheet.com, where you can download a sample back issue of their publication.)

However, if power ratings could be reduced to a simple formula, all good handicappers would be betting the same games. Theyíre not. Different winning handicappersólike different winning card countersócan be looking at different things. Ultimately your ability to find value in a line (and make winning bets!) will depend on your developing your own skills.

Once I have assigned letter power ratings, I use a simple chart to assign corresponding points by which to separate various teams. Iíve arrived at these point assignments through twenty yearsí study of how NFL teams do in pointwise ratio (that is, points scored versus points given up.) The “Average Edge” in Chart #2, below, is the average number of points by which each rank will outscore opponents or be outscored by opponents.

Chart #2: Power Rating Edge

Letter Rating Point Differences		Average Edge (points)
		A+	17
A to A+	4	A	13
A- to A	2 1/2	A-	10 1/2
B+ to A-	2 1/2	B+	8
B to B+	2 1/2	B	5 1/2
B- to B	2 1/2	B-	3
C+ to B-	1 1/2	C+	1 1/2
C to C+	1 1/2	C	0
C- to C	1 1/2	C-	-1 1/2
D+ to C-	1 1/2	D+	-3
D to D+	2 1/2	D	-5 1/2
D- to D	2 1/2	D-	-8
E+ to D-	2 1/2	E+	-10 1/2
E to E+	2 1/2	E	-13
E- to E	4	E-	-17
A to A+	4	A	13

My study shows that when a team goes 8-and-8, it gives up and scores the same number of points on average over a season. When a team goes 9-and-7 it outscores teams by 1 1/2 points per game on average. When a team is 7-and-9, it is outscored by 1Ω points per game. Thus the difference between a C- (7-and-9) kind of team and a C (8-and-8) kind of team is 1Ω points. The jump from C to C+ (a 9-7 team) is also 1Ω points. The jump from C- to C+ (two steps) is three points. This means that if a C+ team plays a C- team, a C+ team will be three points superior on average on a neutral field.

In my letter power ratings, I list the majority of NFL teams someplace between B- and D+. At the end of the 1996 season, for example, just eight of the 30 teams fell outside of this range.

When the ratings move above B- and below D+, note that the equivalent point values get bigger. Teams above the B- class outscore their opponents by more and in larger jumps per class than those that are rated between D+ and B-. Teams below D+ tend to be outscored by more and in larger jumps per class than the teams in the D+ to B- range.

Thus, from Chart #2 you can see that a B+ team will outscore an average (8-and-8) team by eight points a game (which is the same as saying it will outscore all opponents, on average, by eight points a game). Teams that are rated A- will have a 10Ω-point-per-game edge, while “A” teams will have, on average, a 13-point-per-game edge. Meanwhile a D- team will be outscored by eight points per game; an E+ team will be outscored by 10Ω points per game; and an E team will be outscored by 13 points per game.

And, at least in the world of power ratings, if an A+ team plays an E- team, the A+ team should be ranked 34 points better on a neutral field.

However, since most NFL teams are ranked between D+ and B-, with a difference between these two letter rankings of only six points, the teams in this area of my letter power ratings are very close to even. It is in this area, incidentally, that I concentrate my handicapping, because it is here that emotional edges mean more.

Now, let us go on to how you can convert power ratings into winning bets.

Uncovering Profitable Season Over/Under Bets

I have mentioned very briefly how power ratings can be used to find value in a gameís line.

But straight bets on games are only one of a number of types of wagers an NFL bettor can make. In addition to straight bets on one team or the other against the point spread, you can wager on over/unders, also known as “totals,” in which you bet against a number that represents the total points scored in a game, betting on whether more or fewer total points will be scored.

There are also a number of “exotic” bets, including parlays, teasers, and reverses ómost of which are sucker bets most of the time, and all of which are beyond the scope of this article. In this article, we are going to concentrate on season over/under future bets, which are some of the first profit opportunities that will arise this football-betting season.

“Future” wagers in the NFL are basically bets you make on how a team will perform in the upcoming season, including the playoffs and Super Bowl. These wagers can be bet at a number of reliable sports books in Las Vegas, on the Internet, and offshore. In regular season over/under future bets, you bet on how many wins a team will garner. In other future bets, you can wager on particular teams to win their conferences or the Super Bowl.

But how do you make money predicting how a team is going to do over a whole seasonóparticularly when you have to overcome a healthy house edge? This again is where your power ratings come into play.

You begin by assigning each team a letter power rating at the start of the season. You do this either by starting with your power ratings from last year, modified for changes in team personnel, or, if you are a beginner, by consulting the power ratings of a more experienced, reputable source. Chart #3, below, contains my power ratings for the start of the 2000 season. Note that there were no teams on the A+ through B+ levels and none between the E+ and E- levels at the start of the 2000 season.

Chart #3: Preseason NFL Power Ratings, 2000

B	Rams, Titans
B-	Broncos, Colts, Jaguars, Bucs, and Redskins
C+	Ravens, Bills, Cowboys
C	Bears, Lions, Jets, Raiders, Chargers
C-	Falcons, Packers, Chiefs, Dolphins, Vikings, Giants, Seahawks
D+	Cards, Panthers, Patriots, Saints, Eagles, Steelers, 49’ers
D	Bengals
D-	Browns

The next step is to convert your letter power ratings into projected point spreads for each game, using a schedule for the upcoming season, and the Power Rating Point Differences in Chart #2. [Note: You can download a complete 2001 NFL schedule at the NFLís official website: www.nfl.com] In addition, because over the long run in the NFL the home field advantage has been shown to be worth about 2 Ω points, every home club should be given an additional 2 Ω points in your seasonís projected point spreads, unless there is a very compelling reason not to.

After projecting point spreads for each game, I convert the point spreads into decimal numbers (see Chart #4) that represent fractions of games won, according to the percentage of times a team should win a game at a given projected point spread. (This fraction, like the other statistics in this article, is derived from my own research.) These fractions (decimal numbers) can then be added to project each clubís season number of wins.

Chart #4: Spreads as Decimals

Point Spread	Decimal Equivalent
1/2 or 1	.507
1 1/2	.512
2	.519
2 1/2	.524
3	.600
3 1/2	.615
4	.630
4 1/2	.643
5	.655
5 1/2	.667
6	.688
6 1/2	.706
7	.722
7 1/2	.737
8	.750
8 1/2	.762
9	.773
9 1/2	.783
10	.792
10 1/2	.800
11	.810
11 1/2	.818
12	.833
12 1/2	.846
13	.857
13 1/2	.875
14	.889
14 1/2	.900
15	.917
15 1/2	.933
16	.944
16 1/2	.952
17	.962
17 1/2 and more	.968

After you project win records for each club, you are ready to check the over/under totals the sports books have put up. You need a two-game or more difference between a sports bookís total and your projected number of wins to make a wager.

Letís take an actual wager I made in the 2000 preseason as an example.

As you can see from Chart #3, before the 2000 season began, I gave the Washington Redskins a B- rating, a letter power rating that translates to ten winsóagainst an average schedule. This is what I wrote about them as the pre-season was closing: “Team is under enormous pressure to win from owner Daniel Snyder. However, the main defensive additionsóBruce Smith, Mark Carrier, and Deion Sandersóare well over 30. The offensive line also has two old starters. Last year the Redskins were just 1-5 against other playoff teams. The loss of Cory Raymer (center) will hurt badly. The defense will be better but the Redskins will be overrated early in the season. Look to bet against early in the year.”

However, teams seldom have a totally normal or neutral schedule. To develop a projected win record strong enough to be the basis of a wager, I had to see how the Redskinsí actual season schedule would play out mathematically.

In their first game, the Redskins (B-) hosted Carolina, a D+ team. Since there is a six point difference between B- and D+, I rated the Redskins an 8 Ω-point favorite (remember, they got an additional 2 Ω points for being the home team). The decimal number equivalent for 8 Ω points is .762. I rounded off that number and gave the Redskins .76 for this game.

In their second game, the Redskins would play at the Lions, a C-rated club. That meant the Redskins were a half-point favorite (the three-point difference for the letter power ratings minus the Lionsí 2 Ω-point home edge). The decimal equivalent gave the Redskins .51 for this game.

In their third game, the Redskins would play the Cowboysóa C+ teamó at home. I projected them a four-point favorite and used the decimal .63. (For the complete Redskins schedule, and projected wins for the 2000 season, see Chart #5 below.)

Chart #5: 2000 Redskinsí Season Projection

Game	Location/Opponent	Rating Gap	Projected Line	Decimal Equiv.
1	Redskins (B-) host Carolina (D+)*	6	Redskins -8 Ω	.76
2	Redskins (B-) at Lions (C)	3	Redskins -1/2	.51
3	Redskins (B-) host Cowboys (C+)*	1 1/2	Redskins -4	.63
4	Redskins (B-) at Giants (C-)	4 1/2	Redskins -2 1/2	.52
5	Redskins (B-) host Tampa (B-)*	0	Redskins -2 Ω	.52
6	Redskins (B-) at Philadelphia (D+)	6	Redskins -3 Ω	.62
7	Redskins (B-) host Ravens (C+)*	1 1/2	Redskins -4	.63
8	Redskins (B-) at Jacksonville (B-)	0	Redskins +2 Ω	.48
9	Redskins (B-) host Titans (B)*	-2 1/2	Even	.50
10	Redskins (B-) at Arizona (D+)	6	Redskins -3 Ω	.62
11	Redskins (B-) at St. Louis (B)	-2 1/2	Redskins +5	.34
12	Redskins (B-) host Eagles (D+)*	6	Redskins -8 Ω	.76
13	Redskins (B-) host Giants (C-)*	4 1/2	Redskins -7	.72
14	Redskins (B-) at Dallas (C+)	1 1/2	Redskins +1	.49
15	Redskins (B-) at Pittsburgh (D+)	6	Redskins -3 Ω	.62
16	Redskins (B-) host Cardinals (D+)*	6	Redskins -8 Ω	.76
			TOTAL:	9.48 wins

*Home games. At home, the Redskins get an additional 2 Ω pt. home advantage. On the road, they get a -2 Ω pt. road disadvantage.

In the end, adding up the decimal numbers for all sixteen games of the regular season, I projected 9.48 wins for the Redskins.

Once I had projected 9.48 wins, I was ready to check the sports booksí numbers. Since it happened that several sports books had set their regular season over/under total on the Redskins at 11Ω wins, I had the two-game difference I needed to wager on the under. Moreover, in addition to the two-game edge, I was getting 1.20-1 odds on my bet. When I later saw an over/under total of twelve at another book, I went even further in my bet even though here I had to give 2.20-1 odds, since I now had a 2Ω-game edge on my under wager.

There was one other team that I almost wagered on. Using the above system, I projected the New England Patriots to win 6.35 games. One place in Las Vegas had the over/under on the Patriots at 8 1/2. I had my magic two-game edge. However, to bet the under on the Patriots, a bettor had to give hefty 3.20-1 odds. That, I knew from my research, was too great a price to give. Iíll spare you the calculations here, but as a general rule of thumb, the odds you pay should be no higher than the number of games you have as an edge (donít go over 2-1 for a two-game edge, 3-1 for a three-game edge, etc.). Too bad I passed. The Patriots ended up at 5-11 for the season. Still, you have to stand by your math.

While the Redskins gave me some anxiety early in the season when they started at 6-2, they slumped in the second half of the year. Their owner, Daniel Snyder, put undue pressure on the team as I knew he would if they had any problems. The Redskins lost six of seven and ended the year at 8-8: over a game worse than I had predicted they would finish.

The Odds You Must Overcome in Sports Betting

Now letís talk about the odds you must overcome to be successful in sports betting.

When you bet against the point spread, you are not only giving or taking points. You are also almost always giving 11-to-10 odds to a bookmaker or sports book, meaning that if you want to win $50 on a game, you must risk $55. When a bettor is giving 11-to-10 odds, he is bucking a 4.55 percent edge against him.

To make this clearer, take two bettors who choose the opposite sides of the same game. If each one wants to win $100, each must actually risk $110 (the extra $10 being a fee or commission for the sports book, called the “vigorish” or “vig.”) After the game, one bettor will lose the $110 he risked while the other gets it back plus his $100 win. Thus of $220 total risked $10 goes to the bookie. Ten dollars of $220 is 1/22 or 4.55 percent.

The odds on futures bets are differentóhidden in the price. Iíve already mentioned that on my bet on the Redskins to win under 11Ω games I got 6-5 (equivalent to 1.20-1) odds. Since I couldnít bet enough at this price (some sports books have ridiculously low limits) I went further with this bet against the Redskins betting a small amount on them winning under 12 games. On this part of the bet I gave 11-5 (equivalent to 2.20-1) odds. To compute these odds (or “money line”) equivalents for yourself, simply divide: 6 ˜ 5 = 1.20; 11 ˜ 5 = 2.20.

What were the odds or vig for an “over” bettor? At the book where the over/under was 11Ω wins for the Redskins, a bettor would have had to give 7-5 (1.40-1) odds if he felt that going over 11Ω wins was a good investment. Since the difference between what I got on the Redskins (1.20-1) and what a Redskins bettor would have had to give (1.40-1) is .20, this line is often called a 20-cent line.

The odds makers who set this line were saying through their numbers that the real line on the Redskins winning over 11Ω wins was 1.30-1 in favor of it happening. Letís say these odds were true (they might or might not have been, remember, due to how lines are set). I was getting 1.20-1 odds against something that had a 1.30-1 chance of happening.

Letís do the math on this. Letís say I put up $10 on this bet and play it out 23 times (once for every possible outcome: 13 losses for every 10 wins). If the odds were the true line on this event, I would win 10 of the 23 times. I would lose the wager 13 of the 23 times. All told, I would be risking $230 and my return would be $220 (I would get back $22 each time I won: the $10 I risked and a $12 profitóremember I was getting 1.20-1 odds). Thus, the sports bookís profit would be $10. The vig in their favor would be a little over 4.3% (which you figure by dividing the $10 profit by the $230 invested).

If a bettor wagered on the Redskins winning over 11Ω wins he would risk $14 for every $10 he wanted to win. Walking through this 23 times, our Redskins backer would win 13 of the 23 times and get back a total of $312ó13 x $24 (the $14 risked plus $10 profit) on a total risk of $322 ($14 x 23). Here the sports bookís edge or vig is just 3.1% (their $10 profit divided by the $322 taken in).

Thus, any bettor who wagered on the Redskins to win over 11Ω games had over one percent less vig to overcome than us anti-Redskins bettors.

On the part of my bet where I bet the Redskins under 12 wins, the vig worked a bit differently. That is because bettors who took the Redskins to win over 12 games got just 9-5 (or 1.80-1) odds. Remember that those of us betting under 12 wins were giving 11-5 (or 2.20-1) odds. Since the difference between 1.80 and 2.20 is .40, this is often called the 40-cent line.

To calculate the vig against a bettor on this bet, you do it the same way as in the above example. The mid-way point between 1.80-1 and 2.20-1 is 2-1. Assuming thatís the real line, you play out the wager three times (once for every possible outcome), with the Redskins going under 12 wins twice. On a $10 bet, I would be putting up $66 on three bets (2.20 x $10 = $66)óor $22 a wager.

I would win two of the three bets getting back a total of $64 on my total $66 investment. The sports bookís profit would be just over three percent ($2 divided by $66). For bettors going with the Redskins over 12 wins and taking 1.80-1 odds, the sports booksí vig would be greater. These bettors would put up $10 three times but win only once, getting a return of $28. The bookís profit would be $2 on $30 risked, or 6.7%.

If the lines in sports betting represented the real odds, there would be no point in betting. In other words, if the actual odds of the Redskins winning over 11Ω games last year had been 13-10 in favor and the actual odds of them winning over 12 games had been 2-1 against, I would have been going up against insurmountable odds. Though small odds, they would still be insurmountable and in the long run, I would go broke.

However, since the odds set are not the actual odds but the public perception of them as seen by the odds maker, NFL season over/ unders and other sports bets can be highly profitable.

To give you an idea, a solid NFL handicapper with a 55% win rate has a 5.5% edge on every bet. An expert handicapper with a long-term 57% win rate has a 9.7% edge on every bet. Top handicappers, with a long-term 60% win record, have a 16% edge on every bet. You should not bet until youíre confident that your win rate is at least 54%.

It is the job of the NFL handicapper to find the weak spots in the line. As with card-counting, in sports betting discipline and patience are key. ♠

The Most Popular Casino Card Game in the World

by Arnold Snyder
(From The Big Book of Blackjack , Cardoza Publishing, 2006)
© 2006 Arnold Snyder

John Scarne, gambling’s most prolific author, had little to say about the origins of blackjack. In several of his books, he mentioned a number of the older European games that had similar structures, and vaguely concluded that the Italian game of seven-and-a-half was blackjack’s most likely forerunner.

Most other gambling writers never went beyond Scarne. As Richard Epstein put it in The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, “The exact origin of the game of Blackjack is rather murky.” Epstein was not a historian, however; he was a mathematician. The attitude of most gambling writers was that if Scarne doesn’t know the history of the game, who does?

In Playing Blackjack to Win, Baldwin, Cantey, Maisel, and McDermott said it this way: “The origins of the game have been lost in history.” As we’ll see, however, Roger Baldwin did turn up a sixteenth century Spanish game that sounded suspiciously like blackjack to him.

More modern authors never even gave it a shot. Thorp, Revere, Wong, Uston—all have little to say on the origins of the game. Others simply echo Scarne. Lance Humble and Carl Cooper, in The World Greatest Blackjack Book, stated, “The origin of the game is unknown.” And Olaf Vancura and Ken Fuchs, in Knock-Out Blackjack , agreed: “The exact origin of the game of blackjack is unclear.”

So, for me, this is going to be a fun chapter to write because it gives me a chance to reveal a lot of information about the history of this game that I’ve learned through the years, but never really had an opportunity to disclose. I’ve never read about the origins of this game anywhere. And there is a reason for this.

In researching history, we must rely on the records of human beings—a species not particularly known for either accuracy or honesty—whose statements often contradict one another. When it comes to researching the history of gambling, we are even more confounded by the facts at our disposal. Gamblers have always survived by subterfuge and deception, and the movers and shakers in the microcosm of the gamblers’ world include a vast array of scoundrels, liars, crooks, cheaters, braggarts, egomaniacs, and downright lunatics.

But then, for me, that’s why studying the history of gambling is a pleasure. The story is like a puzzle that you have to solve by figuring out which con artist was actually telling the truth. I might have actually enjoyed history class in high school if, instead of boning up on the naval career of John Paul Jones, I could have studied the three-card-monte career of William Jones, an Englishman who plied his trade on the Canadian railways throughout the mid-eighteen hundreds.

Books that Deal with the History of Blackjack

Most books that deal with the history of casino gambling are written by moral crusaders who want to expose the evils of gambling and the casino industry. Among the big sellers, The Green Felt Jungle by Reid and Demaris, Temples of Chance by David Johnston, and The Luck Business by Robert Goodman would all fall into this category.

I’m not saying I disagree with these authors’ conclusions, as the casino industry has always been controlled by some pretty slimy bastards. But these are one-sided histories. Just look at the subtitles printed on the covers of these books. In the same order as above, we have: How Politicians, Mobsters and Big-Name Talent Work Hand-in-Glove Running Las Vegas, Corruption Capital of the World; How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business; and The Devastating Consequences and Broken Promises of America’s Gambling Explosion.

On the other hand, any gambling history penned by a casino owner—be it Donald Trump, Steve Wynn, or Harold Smith, all of whom have given us their two cents’ worth—is just as one-sided, from the opposite perspective.

So, let’s do something different. Let’s look at the history of blackjack from the perspective of the player. Hey, I like to gamble. I make my living gambling. I don’t want the casinos to be put out of business by morality crusaders.

The Early History of Blackjack

Gambling scholars have argued for decades about the origins of many modern gambling games. When it comes to the game of blackjack, the most popular house-banked card game in history, many modern texts tell us that the origins of the game are “uncertain.”

Hey, just about everything in this universe is uncertain, but the origins of blackjack are not. The game can be traced to a number of popular European card games from as far back as the fifteenth century. That’s right around the time when Gutenberg invented the printing press, and cards themselves became popular (and cheap) enough to play games with. Prior to that, cards were hand-painted by artists and calligraphers for royalty only, and they were primarily used for religious, educational, or ceremonial purposes.

Virtually all card games are based on some specified number of cards being dealt, with a winner determined by some happenstance of rank, suit, match, sequence, or total.

In the simple children’s game of war—which in recent years has been modified into a house-banked casino game—the only determining factor of the winner is rank. In more complex card games, like poker, various combinations of rank, suit, match, or sequence may decide the winner.

Blackjack is more complex than war, but much simpler than poker. The winner at twenty-one is decided almost entirely on the basis of total, with the cards’ numerical values being added together.

In the Beginning . . . Vingt-Un, Napoleon’s Favorite Game

There is little dispute that the first twenty-one games appeared in France in the early-to-mid-seventeen hundreds. The game was called vingt-un, or “twenty-one,” when it was initially introduced, and was later more commonly called vingt-et-un. The name “blackjack” was not used until the twentieth century, when the game was being played in the mostly illegal casinos in America.

Because vingt-un first appeared as a private game, and was not banked by the casinos, we will never know in which French casino the game was first played. It was the custom of the time for the casinos in Europe to bank various popular games—notably roulette, hazard, trente-et-quarante, faro, and baccarat. Roulette was the most popular house-banked casino game in virtually all casinos where the game was legal. Hazard was a dice game that was the predecessor to craps. Faro was a variation of an older card game called bassette.

But the casinos also allowed players who wanted to gamble in other popular card or dice games to do so if one of the players was willing to deal and bank the game, with the house taking a commission (usually 5 percent) on the banker’s winnings. This was most common with baccarat, the player-banked variation being called chemin-de-fer.

According to historian Rev. Ed. S. Taylor (The History of Playing Cards, 1865, London), “Vingt-et-un appeared in about the middle of the eighteenth century and was to number amongst its early enthusiasts such unlikely bedfellows as Madame Du Barry and the Emperor Napoleon.” Madame Du Barry was Marie Jeanne Bécu, a comtesse and mistress of Louis XV. She died in 1793. So, in seeking the origins of vingt-un, we must look for card games that predated the mid-to-late seventeen hundreds, with a similar structure in which the winning hand was determined by the total numerical value of the cards.

Still Earlier History. . . Quinze, Like Blackjack with Bluffing

One such game is a French gambling game called quinze, which means “fifteen.” This game appeared sometime in the sixteenth century, and was popular in European casinos up until the mid-eighteen hundreds.

Here’s how quinze was played:

As a casino game, quinze was not house-banked, but was banked by the player who dealt the cards. The house merely took a percentage of the dealer’s win.

All players bet against the dealer/banker, and bets had to be placed prior to the deal. A standard fifty-two-card deck was used, with each card counting as its face value. Aces counted as one, and all court cards counted as ten.

The deck was shuffled, and each player and the dealer were dealt one card face down. Players had to play their hands before the dealer played his. Each player in turn had the option to hit or stand, and any number of hits was permitted.

If the player achieved a total of exactly 15, he immediately turned up his cards, and provided the dealer did not also make a total of 15, the player would be paid off at 2 to 1 on his bet. If both the player and the dealer made 15, the hand was a push. The only exception was that a two-card 15, a natural 15, would beat a 15 total comprised of more than two cards.

You can easily see the similarities to blackjack. However, unlike blackjack, if the player busted with any total of more than 15, he did not have to declare his bust. He was permitted to simply tuck his hole card and wait for the dealer to complete his hand. If the dealer busted as well, those players who busted before the dealer did not lose their bets. When both the player and dealer busted, the hand was a push.

Also, unlike blackjack, the quinze dealer was not bound by house rules in the play of his hand. Just like the players, the dealer could hit or stand at his preference, provided his hand total did not exceed 15.

Still, as in modern blackjack, the house had an edge at quinze based on the dealer’s not having to play his hand until the players completed their hands. Even though a player did not have to declare a bust in quinze, it was often obvious when a player had busted because the player’s hit cards showed a total of 15 or more. The dealer could then stand without hitting, on any card, even a lowly ace, and assure himself a win.

This game had some interesting strategy features we don’t find in blackjack. Consider…

In playing the game of Quinze, any time the player had a hole card of 6 or more, he chanced busting. Also, if he had a hit card or cards showing that totaled 6 or more, he chanced revealing a bust to the dealer if he took another hit.

For example, if a player had an ace in the hole (a total of one), and he hit it with a 6 for a total of seven, it was dangerous to take another hit because by standing he might convince the dealer that he’d made a strong total, in which case the dealer might risk a bust on his own hand.

If the player hit his 7 total and drew a court card, the dealer would see the 16 total on the table and know that regardless of the player’s hole card, the player had busted.

As you can see, the game of quinze had definite psychological aspects to it, similar to poker, where the player could benefit by attempting to hide the strength or weakness of his hand from the dealer.

In any case, the basic structure of this game is undeniably the same as blackjack.

If You Cut Quinze in Half . . . Still Like Blackjack with Bluffing

Sometime in the seventeenth century, an Italian card game appeared called sette e mezzo, or “seven-and-a-half.” This game was remarkably similar to quinze, and is an obvious derivative of the same family of games as quinze.

Seven-and-a-half was played with a forty-card deck, from which all eights, nines, and pip tens had been removed. The object of the game for the player was to achieve a total closer to 7 1/2 than the dealer’s total, without going over 7 1/2.

All cards counted their pip-values, except for the court cards which each counted as one-half. Unlike quinze, but similar to our modern game of blackjack, if the player’s hand total exceeded 7 1/2, the hand busted and automatically lost. The player could not just tuck his hole card and hope the dealer busted also. One card, the king of diamonds, was wild, and could be counted as any value.

As a casino game, seven-and-a-half was not house-banked, but was banked by the player who dealt the cards. All players bet against the dealer/banker, and bets had to be placed prior to the deal.

The forty-card deck was shuffled, and each player and the dealer were dealt one card face down. Players had to play their hands before the dealer played his. Each player in turn had the option to hit or stand, and any number of hits was permitted, provided the hand total did not exceed 7 1/2.

If the player busted with any total of 8 or more, he immediately turned up his facedown card, and the dealer collected his bet. If the player achieved a total of exactly 7 1/2, he immediately turned up his cards, and provided the dealer did not also achieve a total of 7 1/2, the player would be paid off at 2 to 1 on his bet. If both the player and the dealer made 7 1/2, the hand was a push. The only exception was that a two-card 7 1/2, a natural 7 1/2, would beat a 7 1/2 total comprised of more than two cards.

As in blackjack, even if the dealer busted, those players who had busted before the dealer played his hand had already lost their bets. But similar to quinze, the seven-and-a-half dealer was not bound by house rules in the play of his hand. Just like the players, the dealer could hit or stand at his preference provided his hand total did not exceed 7 1/2.

Obviously, sette e mezzo was related to quinze. And like quinze, optimal strategy for seven-and-a-half was based as much on psychology as math.

Since a player could have a very strong total without taking a hit if his hole card was 6 or 7, a dealer might be enticed into hitting his own hand if a player stood pat. And, since any hole card for the dealer other than a court card, valued at one-half, was in danger of busting, a player with a poor hole card, such as ace, deuce, or trey, might get the dealer to bust simply by standing pat. Because there was no fixed dealer strategy, both quinze and seven-and-a-half allowed trickery on the player’s part to try to get the dealer to make losing strategy decisions.

Both quinze and seven-and-a-half are so close to the modern “home” version of blackjack, where dealers may usually draw or stand at their preference, that other than the target totals of 15 or 7 1/2, there is no major difference between these games and blackjack.

I will also note that the old Hoyles describe various methods of playing vingt-un that do not resemble modern twenty-one games. In most of the older descriptions of the game, there was no hit/stand requirement for the dealer.

In some descriptions, vingt-un was played for a common pot, where all players played against each other. In another variant of the game, a natural 21 paid 2 to 1 regardless of whether it was dealt to a player’s hand or to the dealer. In another variation, the jack counted as eleven, and a jack with any other ten-valued card was considered a natural 21.

Doubling down and insurance—common options in the modern game—were not original features of vingt-un, and some old texts make no mention of twenty-one’s pair-split option. In most of the older descriptions of the game, the dealer did not show an upcard to the players. About the only major difference between vingt-un and these older European card games was the target total of 21, as opposed to 7 1/2 or 15.

As for the History of Blackjack Insurance . . .

One other older European card game probably contributed a single feature to our modern day game of blackjack. The French card game of trente-et-quarante, or “thirty-and-forty,” which was introduced at the Spa Casino in Belgium in 1780, had the same card values as quinze, and a target total of thirty-one, but a structure similar to baccarat, where the players could bet on either of two hands dealt.

But there was one curious feature of trente-et-quarante that later became a feature of modern blackjack. Trente-et-quarante was a house-banked game, and the house edge came from the house taking half of all bets when both hands totaled exactly thirty-one. But players were allowed to place an “insurance” wager against this possibility.

None of the descriptions of vingt-un in various old Hoyles mention anything about an “insurance” wager being allowed. This feature was added to the game of twenty-one much later in its history, most likely in the U.S.

According to Steve Forte, the insurance wager was probably added in Nevada casinos sometime around the late 1950s. Photographs of casino blackjack tables from the early 1950s do not show the familiar “Insurance Pays 2 to 1” signs on the layout, though photographs of tables from the 1960s usually do display this wording.

I’ll also note that in the 1957 analysis of blackjack by Baldwin, Cantey, Maisel, and McDermott, in their groundbreaking Playing Blackjack to Win, no mention is made of an insurance wager. Yet Ed Thorp provides an analysis of the insurance option in his 1962 Beat the Dealer.

Since both of these books are very thorough in their descriptions of the player options, we must assume that insurance appeared in Nevada sometime between 1957 and 1962. The similarity of the insurance option at blackjack to the insurance bet at trente-et-quarante is undeniable, and as trente-et-quarante is still popular in the casinos of both France and Italy, I suspect the addition of this rule to blackjack started with someone familiar with trente-et-quarante.

Still Earlier Blackjack History: Before Quinze, There Was Trente-Un, and a Sixteenth Century Card Sharp

A still older game that was a forerunner to both quinze and vingt-un was a game called trente-un, which was played throughout Europe back in the fifteenth century. Trente-un, which means “thirty-one,” is believed to be of Spanish origin. The game was first mentioned in a sermon in 1440 by a famous French monk, Bernadine.

We know the game was popular because there are recorded references to this game numerous times over the next two hundred years. Unfortunately, none of these references make any mention of the rules of play. Most of the commentary we have on this game came from medieval religious authorities, warning their flocks that trente-un was an evil game, and urging them to put their money into the church collection baskets and not into the hands of the profligate sinners who were running these games for Satan.

Are you getting a distinct feeling that we’re getting close to the origins of blackjack?

One modern author who recognized that trente-un was the likely predecessor to vingt-un was Roger Baldwin, co-author of the first blackjack book with an accurate basic strategy, Playing Blackjack to Win (1957).

After noting that trente-un was referenced by the famous sixteenth century Spanish novelist, Miguel de Cervantes, in a book titled A Comical History of Rinconete and Cortadillo (published around 1570), Baldwin goes on to quote from Cervantes a passage where a professional trente-un player describes his skill at the game (and I love this quote):

“I took along with me this pack of cards, for with these I have gained my living at all the publick houses and inns between Madrid and this place, playing One and Thirty; and though they are dirty and torn they are of wonderful service to those who understand them for they shall never cut without leaving an ace at the bottom, which is one good point towards eleven, with which advantage, thirty-one being the game, he sweeps all the money into his pocket.”

Cervantes provides no details on the rules of One and Thirty, other than various facts we can surmise: 1) the game is played for money; 2) it is hand-dealt from a single-deck after a cut; 3) an ace can count for eleven; 4) making a total of thirty-one will win the money; and 5) the dealer’s ability to control an ace to where he has easy access to it for his own or a confederate’s hand is pretty much all it takes to be a professional thirty-one player.

This trente-un is sounding more like blackjack all the time!

If this were all we had to go on, we would likely conclude that vingt-et-un was derived from the older European games of quinze, sette e mezzo, and trente-et-quarante, all of which were preceded by the Spanish game of trente-un. The problem, however, is that there is a more modern game called trente-un, which is more like rummy, where players attempt to achieve a hand totaling thirty-one in a matching suit by taking and discarding cards from a common pile.

The structure of this game is so unlike any of these other European banking games, however, that we would conclude that trente-un is probably not the forerunner of blackjack. That Cervantes quote from 1570 that Roger Baldwin provides, however, makes us wonder if the Spanish game of trente-un may itself have gone through some changes through the centuries, perhaps transforming as it did to sette e mezzo in Italy and quinze in France, finally becoming vingt-un, though trente-un itself no longer retained its initial structure. Digging a little deeper, we find that there was yet another old European game with the target total of thirty-one.

The Bone Ace Connection . . . where the Ace Equals One or Eleven

Walter Nelson, in Games Through the Ages, Or the Merry Gamester, says he suspects that trente-un was an early variation of a game called “Bone Ace,” of which a very detailed description is provided in a book titled The Complete Gamester by Charles Cotton, published in 1674. As with quinze, the similarities to vingt-un are remarkable. In Bone Ace, aces may count as one or eleven, with court cards counting ten, and other cards counting their pip values. This is the oldest known game in which the card values are identical to vingt-un, including the otherwise unique double value of the ace as one or eleven.

Some features of this game are unlike vingt-un, but the main play of the hands consists of players attempting to draw to a total hand value of thirty-one. A total of exactly thirty-one is an automatic winner, and if a player’s hand total exceeds thirty-one, the hand is an automatic loser. Bone Ace is obviously related to quinze, but we do not know if it predates quinze.

The question is: was the original game of trente-un, which we know to have been an older game than both quinze and Bone Ace, actually the same game as Bone Ace?

Answer: Yes. And our search for the origin of blackjack is over!

In David Parlett’s The Oxford Guide to Card Games (Oxford University Press, 1990), Parlett quotes from the glossary of a book by the famous English lexicographer and translator, John Florio, titled The World of Wordes, published in 1611. Florio translates Trentuno as “One-and-Thirty . . . also called Bone Ace.”

Although game historians insist we do not know where the French game of vingt-un came from, if any casino today started dealing quinze or Bone Ace, exactly according to the rules we know existed hundreds of years before vingt-un appeared, we would conclude that these games were merely derivatives of blackjack. That’s how close they are in basic structure. Do we actually need to know the name of the Frenchman who first said, “Hey, how about twenty-one instead of fifteen or thirty-one?”

So, I will go out on a limb and state emphatically that the French game of vingt-un (twenty-one), which first appeared in the mid-seventeen hundreds, was simply a variation of a Spanish game called trente-un (thirty-one), which had been played since the mid-fourteen hundreds. Based on a passage in a book written by Cervantes in 1570, Roger Baldwin suspected this was so before anyone else, and he was right. Trente-un is where our modern game of blackjack came from.

But why has blackjack become so immensely popular? Is there something about the number twenty-one that is particularly appealing? In our twenty-first-century society, in most jurisdictions, twenty-one years is the age at which people can legally drink and gamble, but this is just a happenstance of the age we live in. Numerous other games, however, from beach volleyball to ping-pong, have 21 target totals, and for some reason possibly known to military history buffs, when a soldier dies he gets a twenty-one-gun salute. That magic just doesn’t seem to exist for seven-and-a-half, fifteen, or thirty-one.

Vingt-Un Makes a Splash in Europe

At the time vingt-un was introduced in the casinos of France, neither quinze nor seven-and-a-half were being played as house-banked casino games. Trente-un and Bone Ace were long forgotten. The only popular house-banked casino card games prior to the eighteen hundreds were baccarat and trente-et-quarante.

The game of faro, which had been the most popular house-banked card game in the European casinos throughout most of the nineteenth century, fell into disfavor by the late eighteen hundreds because of the ease with which a crooked dealer could cheat. There were many faro scandals in the casinos of Europe in which dealers were discovered to be cheating the players.

Both baccarat and trente-et-quarante eased the gambling public’s fears of cheating, since these games allowed the players to bet on either the bank or the player hand. Plus, both games were dealt from a shoe, allowing the potential sleight-of-hand artist less control over the cards.

So, when vingt-un was introduced in the casinos of Europe, as with chemin-de-fer, the casinos simply offered their tables and dealers for a commission from the banker. The precise rules and procedures probably differed based on private agreements between the players and bankers, and the game likely underwent many transformations in its early days. In addition to some of the game’s early curiosities already mentioned, some old texts state that the dealer may take bets on ties. The dealer position, however, was not fixed, but automatically passed to any player who was dealt a natural (two-card) 21.

The major attraction of vingt-un to gamblers was that it was viewed as more of a game of skill than other casino games. The casinos knew that players liked making hit/stand decisions because of the popularity of chemin-de-fer. Remember that the main difference between baccarat and chemin-de-fer was that chemin-de-fer was player-banked, with the house simply taking a percentage of the winning banker bets.

In fact, this should have been a good deal for the house, since the house could not lose money on a game where no house money was ever at risk. The reason that casinos disliked chemin-de-fer, however, was that their potential winnings were always limited by the amount of money that the players banking the game had to risk. Often, the casino could afford to bank a much higher-stakes game than the visiting players, and if no wealthy gamblers showed up to play, then chemin-de-fer was not highly profitable to the house.

Many players, however, preferred chemin-de-fer to baccarat because in chemin-de-fer the players were allowed some hit-stand options. Although these options were restricted to when a player hand totaled 5, they gave players a feeling of some control over their results.

The chemin-de-fer banker had many more strategy options, but many players felt that some bankers made bad decisions. Those wealthy players who could afford to bank chemin-de-fer also often preferred banking the game to simply placing a banker bet at baccarat, because as bankers they felt they had more of an edge by making their own hit/stand decisions.

The casinos did not allow players any hit/stand options on their house-banked baccarat tables for the house’s protection. Based on baccarat’s performance over its long history, the casinos knew that the bank hand had an edge over the player hand, provided the standard hit/stand rules were enforced for both hands, and the house took a percentage on the winning banker bets.

But chemin-de-fer scared the casinos. Many times they saw bankers win money that seemed to stem from “wrong” player decisions, or correct banker decisions. And just as often, they saw players win money that seemed to stem from their “correct” decisions, and/or the banker’s poor decisions. In fact, it is known today that the allowed strategy decisions at chemin-de-fer are fairly inconsequential.

In any case, when vingt-un appeared on the scene, players were being given an opportunity to make hit/stand decisions—and many more such decisions than were allowed in chemin-de-fer—in a game in which neither the bankers nor the players knew what the correct decisions were! But the game proved popular, and the casinos that offered it were making money.

The early versions of player-banked vingt-un never overtook chemin-de-fer in popularity, but by the late eighteen hundreds it had become more popular than most of the other casino card games in Europe. In England, it was called “Van John,” which is simply a pidgin-English pronunciation of the French name vingt-un. In German casinos, it became known as Ein-und-Zwanzig (One-and-Twenty), and in Australia it became “pontoon” (pidgin-Australian for vingt-un).

What the History of Blackjack Teaches Modern Players and Casinos

Some players simply want to gamble. The only decision most slot machines require is, “Which machine should I play?” After that, you just keep pressing the spin button and hope you hit a winning combination. Likewise, the game of baccarat requires few decisions, primarily, “Do I bet on the player hand or the banker hand?”

Making decisions gives players a feeling of control over their results. Blackjack’s popularity is due in part to the fact that player’s always get to decide how to play each and every hand, with no restrictions on how many cards they can take.

The first slot machines that allowed players to make decisions were the video poker machines introduced about fifteen years ago. In many casinos, these quickly became the most popular slots with players.

Games like roulette and keno allow players many decisions, giving the illusion of control, but these decisions have little effect on the house edge. Professional gamblers basically look for games with decisions that matter. Blackjack and poker stand out as the two games offered in most casinos where professional players can expect their correct decisions to earn them a regular income. ♠

This article is an excerpt from Chapter One of The Big Book of Blackjack. 

A High Roller Gets Rolled

by Raymond X.
(From Blackjack Forum Volume VII #3, September 1987)
© Blackjack Forum 1987

[Editor’s note: On July 18, 1987, the San Francisco Chronicle carried a short item about “Rolex Hookers”—women who pose as prostitutes, then rob their “customers” after drugging them. They frequently seek out men wearing Rolex watches because the watches are usually worth thousands of dollars by themselves.

According to the Chronicle, one woman alone is wanted in several states for nine homicides that resulted from overdoses of the various “knockout” drugs employed. These women frequently work in airport bars, but this crime is becoming more and more common in major casino hotels. In Las Vegas casinos, these women do not need to look for Rolex watches, what with so much visible cash. Likewise, in casinos, they often do not pose as prostitutes, but simply as other guests of the hotel.

Raymond X., a professional blackjack player, was the victim of this crime, one lucky enough to live to tell his story. Some details have been changed to protect his identity, but otherwise this is his story in his own words. – Arnold Snyder]

Rolex Hookers in Las Vegas

I was in town for two nights. There was this woman who kept popping up in different places—all around the casino I would see her, whether I was playing blackjack, craps, or whatever.

I was just there to gamble. She was never on a game, to begin with. She would kind of be in the background watching. But a lot of people were watching because I was betting blacks the whole time. At times, when I would get up, I had stacks of chips. I just had large stacks of blacks—20, 30, 40 of them. And so people were stopping and watching. I didn’t really attribute seeing her to anything else other than that she was just kind of interested.

Later, as I would go to the bathroom or something, I’d see her coming the other way. She’d kind of smile, almost like trying to get me so I would know who she was. I’d go listen to the music for awhile, take a break, I’d see her around the other end of the bar.

That night, the first night, as I was going up to my room, I was waiting at the elevator. She came up and got up right next to me and punched another elevator to go up, looked at me and just smiled, said, “Hi.” And that’s it. That was the end of it. Never saw her again that night. I went up and went to bed.

Next day, I would start playing again, and all of a sudden, there she is again. It dawned on me, this girl might be a prostitute. She’s probably a prostitute or something, because I I keep seeing her around.

Finally, near the end of the night she comes on my table. I’m getting ready to leave. I’m getting to the point where I’m getting tired. Again, I had a good night. I was lucky. I’d won about $5000 or so. She gets on the table and starts playing, but never talks to me, never says a word. Again, just casually looks over and smiles, just like anybody would, just about. Finally, when she’s getting ready to leave, she says something like, “Good luck,” and she’s gone again. I’m wondering what’s going on here. Is this girl doing anything? Has she got something on her mind? I’m not sure.

Anyway, I quit playing. I’ve got about a $5000 win. And I’m feeling pretty good about it. I’m walking around the casino just looking at other games. I’m by myself. I’m walking around and she’s playing at another table, sees me coming and says something to me like, “How’d you do over there?” I stop and chat with her a little bit at her table. So we get familiar, sort of. And she seems like a real nice girl, kind of soft-spoken and that type of thing.

I go to the bar. I’ll be honest with you, I was at the bar wondering if this girl is going to come by the bar. I’m figuring she is and I’m going to find out. If it seems like she’s a prostitute or something of that nature, I’m going to decline and I’m going to go to bed. She comes over and sits down at the bar. I invite her to come over and sit down. I’ll buy her a drink.

From that point I fully expect something from this girl. I expect some sort of a proposition or something. But she doesn’t come through with it. We talk casually. First thing she says, she walks up and says, “So, are you a professional? Do you do this for a living?”

And the first thing that pops into my mind is, maybe she’s with the casino. Maybe it’s her job to get close to me and talk to me and find out if I’m a professional card counter or blackjack player or something. But that doesn’t make sense. They can just watch me and figure out if I’m good. And I don’t want to give her a line, so I just tell her: “Oh no, no, no. I’m a businessman. I just like to come up and play.”

She goes, “Well, you play awfully well.” Which, even if I do, how could she tell from what she saw, which was not very much. Anyway, really, I was just having a lucky night. She starts discussing blackjack. She likes blackjack too and she plays often and she thinks a lot of the typical things about it—“I like to play with good players on my table” and all that kind of stuff. So, I get into a discussion with her about that.

She told me that she was on vacation with two girlfriends, and her friends had picked up some guys and they were with these guys, and she was reluctant to go back to her hotel room that she was sharing with her friends. She didn’t know what the situation would be with the guys that they went with. So I said, “What are you going to do?” She says, “No problem. I’m going to stay out and gamble. My plane leaves tomorrow. I’m going home tomorrow. I’m going to stay out all night and just gamble.”

Again, she doesn’t make any blatant overture or anything. She just leaves it open for me to say, “That’s convenient.” Then I won’t sound so stupid if I end up asking her to stay with me. I won’t sound so dumb. So the real clincher was, I’m still worried about her, but the clincher was I ask her where she’s from. She says, “I’m from New York State,” which by pure luck and happenstance is where I’m from.

And not only is she from New York, she’s from an area upstate where my folks have lived for a long time. And she knows the area and right there I start talking about old home week, like “Is this place still there? Did you ever go to this place? Did you eat dinner at this place?” Whatever. And I’m starting to like this girl. We’re kind of having a good time talking about this. All my fears start to just completely go right out the window. She’s smooth. Really smooth. Talking just like another tourist, and she’s lucky that she hit on the place where I’m from, otherwise I don’t think my guard would have been down so much.

Anyway, one thing leads to another. We have drinks. I buy her a drink. She’s playing Keno. She hits a Keno ticket. And she goes to cash the Keno ticket. At this time I start saying to myself, “I have to decide what I want to do now because it’s about 6 o’clock in the morning and I’m getting tired. I’m not going to sit here and drink with this girl. I’m going to do one thing or the other. I’m either going to tell her goodnight, I’m going to bed, or I’m going to invite her to go with me. Do I want to do it or don’t I?”

So I start weighing the good and the bad about the whole thing. I think: Is there any chance that this girl could be a prostitute or something? And I think about it and I go, “No, she’s not good looking enough,” which is really tough for me. That’s one of the tough things about this whole thing. If this girl had been a goddess or something, I would probably have had more of an excuse for doing what I did. But as it turns out, it works in her favor that she’s not beautiful, because you don’t have all those thoughts of “This girl is a professional and somehow she’s a danger.” That’s not the case. I think she’s probably not a hooker because she’s not very good looking and I don’t think she’d make a very good living at it.

I know it doesn’t sound very good to say this, but it goes to show how good her act was—I really thought that if I asked her to come to my room, I’d be doing her a favor. I thought, here she was with her girlfriends. They’d come to see the big town, and go out gambling and drinking and maybe have some crazy fling, you know, pick up some guys—which was what her friends did.

But she was by herself. I looked at her and thought she’s on the homely side, and she’s all alone and she’s not going to find anyone. So I thought, this would be a nice thing to do. Honest to God. Not that I’m anybody’s gift to women or anything, but I thought that if this girl really likes me, then this could be a nice thing to do for her. I’m being candid. That’s really what went through my mind. That was probably the deciding factor.

Then I think, as a matter of fact, if I have a couple of more drinks this is all going to go a lot smoother, it’s going to be easier on me. I really wasn’t that attracted to her. So, she goes to cash a Keno ticket and I order a shot of Jack Daniels and a drink for her. And I drink the shot and her drink and I just about guzzle mine. I’m trying to get drunk enough to ask this girl to spend the remainder of the night with me. So I do. She comes back and I say, “I’m going to be going up to bed. Do you want to go with me? You’re welcome to stay with me tonight if you’d like.” She says, “Well, I’ve been thinking about it. I’d consider it. You’re a cute guy. I’ve been considering it.”

I said, “Well, it’s up to you. You’re welcome if you want to.” She says, “Okay.” So I say to her, “Why don’t we take our drinks with us?” She doesn’t have to say or do anything. She goes, “Okay.”

So, we go up. The whole time in the back of my mind, I still think there is a possibility that this girl is a prostitute. Either she’s going to solicit me for money and tell me that if I want to go through with it, it’s going to cost, or she’s just some sort of a money grubber and one way or another she’s going to put a hard luck story on me and try to get some money out of me, not as a blatant sex-for-money or prostitution thing, but “how about you take care of me a little bit.” In which case I’ll tell her I’m just not going to or I’m not in a position to do something. Or, maybe all she wants is she’s going to expect me to buy her a nice dinner or something tomorrow.

That’s in the back of my mind. But one thing that’s not ever anywhere in any part of my consciousness is that this girl is somehow going to subdue me and take the money from me. There’s where ego comes in. You just don’t ever think, “What can this girl do to me?” This girl can’t do anything to me. All she can do is ask for money and I can turn her down. She can’t take the money from me.

By the way, I didn’t put my money in the safe deposit box, a) because I’m stupid, b) because I think the money’s safe with me. There’s no problem. There’s a little less than $10,000.

So, we get up to my room and I go to the bathroom. Again, perfect. I spend a lot of time in the bathroom because I’m trying to think of a place to hide the money. That’s when she must have put the stuff, whatever she put, into the drink that I had.

So, I take the money and flatten it out, and it’s a wad because it’s all in $100 bills. I’ve got a hundred $100 bills basically, and I put the whole wad underneath the bath mat that’s draped over the side of the tub. And it’s a pretty good hiding place really. It doesn’t show or anything. But I think to myself, “At some point this girl is going to be in this bathroom by herself and if she stumbles upon this, she might take $100.” So I don’t do that. I come out and she goes into the bathroom and I put the money on a drapery cord behind the drapes. I kind of latch it onto that.

Later, when I try to reenact what happened, I figure she slaps me. “All right, he’s asleep. Now I’ve got to find the money. I need some light.” So she goes to the drapery and opens it. And there it is on the cord. Really good place to hide the money!

Anyway, she comes out of the bathroom. I take one drink. She doesn’t even prod me to do it. Then we go right to bed. While we were having sex I found out she was wearing a wig. It came off accidentally. And, she said, “Well, now we know that.” I realize now she must have been trying to disguise herself. I didn’t think much about it at the time. Afterwards, I fell asleep right away.

I was effectively out for two days. I could not talk or function the whole next day and I slept a total of 20 some hours before I was finally back to normal. The police say it typically takes anywhere from 12 minutes to about 20 minutes for the drug to take some sort of effect.

It was about eight or nine hours later, anyway, when I first awakened. Actually, I found out later, my friend, Ralph, who was staying at a hotel across the street, called my room about 45 minutes after we got there, and she answered the phone. This was around 7 am. We had gone up to my room about 6:15. So at 7 o’clock, Ralph calls to see if I’d called it a night yet. He was still playing.

She answers the phone and he says, “Is this Ray’s room?” I was already out at this point. I had felt just a sweeping tiredness, but not that I said, “I’m in trouble, I’m drugged.” I said, “I’m tired. It’s been a long night. I’ve been doing a lot of drinking,” which was true. I drank a lot at the end of my work at the tables. I always drink a lot after I play. So, alcohol mixed with the drug doesn’t do me any good, obviously. But all of a sudden I just went goodnight. And I just went to sleep. Bang, I’m out.

One thing I remembered later. As I was losing consciousness, she made all kinds of little remarks. She was making fun of me. She knew she had me and she was making comments like, “We’ll see who gets the last laugh here.” At the time I didn’t know what she meant.

Anyway, the phone rings. I’m so out it doesn’t wake me. She picks it up and answers it. Ralph asks for me. She says, “You’ve got the wrong room. It’s the wrong number.” He says, “Sorry.” He hangs up and calls again. It’s busy. She had taken the phone off the hook.

But Ralph’s call may have saved me from her getting into my credit cards and things. She might have thought, “I’d better get out of here.” She had the money and she probably didn’t go any further looking for anything else. The only other thing she took was my pants. There was no reason for her to take them. She was just adding insult to injury. Maybe she hangs them up as a trophy.

So, she leaves the phone off the hook. Ralph told me later he was calling me all day, for hours, and the phone is busy, busy. He didn’t know what to do. Finally, he said, “Forget it. Something could be wrong.” And he called security and told them, “Look, I have a friend up there. I know the guy’s in there. His phone’s been off the hook for seven hours now. You’d better go in.”

Ralph comes to my room with the security guard. The next thing I know is I hear the guard yelling my name asking me if I’m all right. He wouldn’t come into the room. It’s their policy that they don’t go into the room. They’ll only go to the door, open it, and yell in. I wake up to this. And he says, “This is security. Are you alright?” I go, “Yeah, I’m all right.” And immediately I swivel around.

Now, it dawns on me. I look and she’s gone. I thought, Oh God. It falls into place now. For some reason, though I was really drugged and out of it, I still knew that there was a problem.

It turns out that the guard yelled at me for about two minutes before I woke up. He stood there yelling at the doorway for two minutes, I was told by Ralph. Ralph didn’t want to come in either for some reason. The guard probably wouldn’t let him. This is all goofy. I don’t know why. I never did ask him. But he said that it took the guard about two minutes to wake me. I said, “I’m all right, I’m fine, go ahead.”

He said, “Your phone’s off the hook.” I said, “Okay.” I put it on the hook. They closed the door and left. I got up and walked over to where the money was. I looked and it was gone. I knew that she had taken it. I was so goofed up I just went, “Gee, this is bad.” I walked back to the bed and I fell asleep.

Ralph comes back, I guess about an hour later. He wakes me up by pounding on my door and yelling at me. He says, “Jesus, Ray, we got things to do. You’ve got to stay in touch.”

I look at him and his words were, “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?” I guess my eyes were glazed. He thought I’d been out all night and had just gotten in. At that time it was about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. He thought I’d stayed up through the night getting drunk at the bar. He says, “What’s wrong with you?”

I said, “Ralph, I got trouble.”

He says, “What? Tell me.”

I said, “My money’s stolen. I brought a girl in here and she stole my money.” And then I went to sleep again.

He knew I was drugged. He woke me up again. I insisted I wasn’t.

He says, “Are you alright? You look terrible.”

I said, “I’m just tired.”

He goes, “You’re not tired. She did something to you.”

I said, “No, I’m fine.” Then I went out again.

He got the house detective up there. As I was being talked to by the house detective, I kept going out. I kept insisting that I wasn’t drugged. Ralph told me a couple of days later, “One time you kept insisting you weren’t drugged. I told you, I said, ‘Ray, you’re drugged.’ And you looked at me and said, ‘I’m not drugged. Watch me dance.’” And I got up and started dancing. And I said, “See.” And I went to the bed and went out again.

I remember that my speech was slurred. I remember having trouble talking. I couldn’t get my words. I was taking big giant steps trying to keep my balance. And I was incredibly sleepy. As the security man talked to me, I remember I’d say something and my head would droop over the bed and I’d go out again. And I’d remember hearing—I was half awake and half asleep—I remember hearing Ralph say, “See, there he goes again.” Ralph was getting mad. “There, he’s out again.”

They took me to the police station. The police have their own hospital. They took blood and urine samples to test for the drug. That’s another thing. They couldn’t just analyze my drink. The glasses were washed out and tipped over to dry in the bathroom.

“Didn’t she give you the line about the back rub?” one of the cops asked me.

I said, “She did ask me if I wanted a back rub. I told her no. I was so tired, I was afraid if she did it I’d fall asleep before we got to the sex.”

They thought that was very funny. Apparently, these girls never actually have sex with their victims. You’re supposed to lose consciousness during the back rub. Actually, she asked me if I could give her a back rub first. I told her I wasn’t any good at giving back rubs. She really wanted it all—the money and a massage. Then I turned down her offer to rub my back.

So they not only had to test for the drug, I had to get VD tests, too.

In other ways, according to the police, she was very typical. They told me these girls make it easy for you to invite them to stay with you. Some examples they were giving me: “I’m out of money,” or “I lost my room,” or “They’re booked up and I haven’t been able to get a room.”

As it turns out, in the final analysis, in talking with the police, they said that these women work on the premise that most of the men they rob can’t take the embarrassment of it, so they’re not going to go to the police. They’ve got wives, girlfriends—that type of thing. Even if they do go to the police, the next morning after they think it over, they decide it’s not worth it to pursue it because of the embarrassment or whatever, so that this type of crime is getting more and more prevalent.

The information they gave me was that two guys had already died from overdoses in casino hotel rooms. These girls are not pharmacists. They don’t know what they’re doing, and they’re going to make sure they give you enough to put you out if you don’t drink much, which is what I did. I had one slug, one good drink of this drink. I didn’t finish it. And it effectively put me out for two days. I don’t know what would have happened if I drank it all. I could be dead. The cops said it’s very dangerous and it’s a growing problem, not just in casinos, although it’s very prevalent in casinos now.

That’s the whole story from beginning to end. And the main ingredient of it is that when you meet a girl like this, it’s not what you would expect. You would expect a beautiful woman, someone really good looking who’s going to entice you. But your fears are put aside because this is not that kind of a girl. This is the kind of girl that you think, “This girl is a tourist. She’s a simple, everyday, middle-America type girl.” And that’s exactly what she was going for. That’s exactly the role she played. She didn’t try to come off as some glamorous thing that was going to seduce me in that way. She came off as, “I’m on vacation, you’re on vacation. We’re on vacation. Let’s have fun.” She let me do it all. And she scored.

I’m telling you this because I think people can die from it. Not only can they lose a lot of money. $10,000 is a lot of money to me and it would be to other people and I’m sure that others would be in danger of losing that much. But, this girl is a pro. This is her business. I met her head-on and she beat me.

She just outsmarted me, outfoxed me. I was no match for her. I was no match and I was even trying to look out for trouble because I was worried about all that cash. I was looking out, and still, I was putty to her. She used me so easily. That’s why it’s dangerous. That’s what’s scary about the whole situation. The glasses are all turned over. Everything was out of the glasses, cleaned.

I just don’t want it to happen to anybody else because it’s horrible. I would have never known how good this girl was. At nights, when I think about this, I almost admire her for her skill. I think about how smooth she was. Her story was beautiful and the way she presented herself. She reeled me in like a fish. She just had me for dinner. And the worst part of it was she stole my pants. Insult to injury all the way. ♠

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun: Those Losing Streaks That Never End

by Arnold Snyder
(From Blackjack Forum , Vol. XXII #1, Spring 2002)
© Blackjack Forum 2002

In the decades I have been writing about blackjack, I have heard many players’ horror stories of bad fluctuations — losing streaks that seemed as if they would never end. There have been pros who lost most of their savings over months of play, blackjack teams that took years to make a bank. Every experienced player has his story of the impossible losing streak. Two standard deviations. Three standard deviations. Four. I’ve also heard a few stories that went the other way.

Some years ago, Bill Zender told me about a truck driver who blew into Vegas with a few hundred bucks, and went on a winning streak that seemed without end. Over a period of months, he won more than a million bucks at the blackjack tables.

The casinos courted him like a king for awhile, waiting for him to fall. But he just kept winning. Despite no evidence that he was anything but lucky, one by one many of the Strip casinos stopped dealing to him because they couldn’t take the wins any more. The winning streak didn’t make sense to the pencil pushers and number crunchers; they felt he had to be doing something.

But he wasn’t. The casinos that had lost bundles to him, then refused to deal to him anymore — and these were some of the biggest properties in Vegas — came to regret it. The lucky trucker gave it all back even faster than he made it to the one joint that had the wisdom and patience to wait for his luck to turn.

After a few months of living the Vegas high life, he left town pretty much the way he came in, with a few hundred bucks in his jeans, and some tall tales to tell his buddies that none of them would ever believe.

Every religion has a unique vision of God, and that includes the First Church of Blackjack. All gamblers, from the most sophisticated and savvy advantage players to the hapless compulsives on tilt with their rent money, place their offerings at the Altar of Flux.

Our Supreme Deity is known by many names: Standard Deviation, Variance, Fluctuation, Luck, Fortune, Chance. Regardless of name, all gamblers know that Luck is a Lady. With the fickle heart of a vamp, she delights in toying with men’s lives and dreams. Many gamblers offer heartfelt prayers to Dame Fortune, but the sad fact is: the Goddess of Flux is stone deaf. Neither prayers of thanks, nor pleas for mercy, are ever heard.

We humans are so arrogant. If a man wins ten times his net worth in a weekend, he boasts of his skill, his daring, his timing, his intelligence. If, on the other hand, he loses his life savings, he jumps to blame the Goddess of Flux. Do not ask how she can be so cold-hearted, she who never gets the credit, but always the blame.

But this myopia of man does not anger her; for unlike the male God of the Christians, the Jews, and the Muslims, the Goddess of Flux doesn’t really give a damn.

Our Goddess is not a Fair Provider, but a wild and crazy Party Girl. She lets the good players go unrewarded, and the bad go unpunished. Good and bad mean nothing to the Goddess of Flux.

Many who have lost their fortunes to the whims of the Goddess ask how she can allow such catastrophes to occur. The Goddess of Flux never explains herself. She tempts, she teases, she lures, but she never explains. Cursing the Goddess of Flux has the same effect as pleading for her mercy, which is to say, no effect whatsoever.

Because we humans are logical and rational creatures, we long to believe that the Goddess of Flux shares these admirable attributes. When, alas, men see neither rhyme nor reason to her treatment of them, some fall into a state of deep despair. These lost souls turn away from the Goddess, and deny her existence. Like all atheists, they make Logic their new God, and they seek rational explanations for the wild and crazy results the Goddess puts before their eyes.

Should one of these infidels lose eight sessions in a row, he’ll say: “I must have been cheated. They must have been using altered decks. The running count was +20, I had three max bets on the table, and when I was dealt all babies against a dealer five up, the count jumped to +27! I had three double down hands, and every one of them caught a 4, 5 or 6; then the dealer hits to a six-card 21. It had to be a rigged shoe!”

But it wasn’t a rigged shoe, nor was it an altered deck; just the Goddess of Flux having her fun at the expense of a puny mortal.

Other atheists might blame different factors: “This system doesn’t work. I win when the count is negative, and lose when it’s positive. So, either the system sucks, or card counting is just a myth made up to sell books; it has no validity in the real world.”

Meanwhile, the atheist who has just won on eight consecutive sessions, is singing a different tune: “I’ve finally gotten my skills sharpened to perfection. I’m as close to invincible as a player can be. I do have to give credit to the side count of aces which has really made my bet-sizing pinpoint accurate. The casinos don’t stand much of a chance against me anymore. I’ve got to play all short sessions these days just to keep their suspicions down.”

But neither this player’s skill, nor his system, is any better than that of his counterpart who has just lost eight consecutive sessions. Both are merely playthings of the Drunken Mistress of Inexplicable Results.

Many intelligent and educated men claim to have a deep and intimate understanding of the Goddess of Flux. They devise charts and tables and graphs and spreadsheets to describe her crazy twists and turns. To these men, it is a mortal sin to call the Goddess by her common nickname, “Luck.” They speak of her in authoritative tones as “Variance,” or “Standard Deviation,” as if by changing her name they have reined her in, corralled her, broken her, dominated her.

But as with all men, she neither serves them, nor obeys them. They serve her, and she treats them as she pleases.

“There’s something wrong, Charlie. The team is four standard deviations below EV. That’s impossible!”

But to the Goddess of Flux, nothing is impossible. And she specializes in the highly improbable.

Most of those who believe in the Goddess of Flux regularly curse her existence. Likewise, those who have forsaken their belief in the Goddess would agree with the believers that if the Goddess did exist, then she is the enemy of men.

There is but a handful of men who worship the Goddess tirelessly, and always thank her for her attentions, whichever direction they take. Among those few who sing her praises are those who own the casinos, the race tracks, the lotteries. These faithful know that were it not for Lady Luck, they would have no customers.

She is the foundation of their business. And each time she dips into their coffers to rain fortune down upon some undeserving rube, a glimmer of hope is ignited among the masses of losers, a glimmer that keeps their fantasies alive, and their dollars flowing out of their pockets.

Likewise, the Goddess of Flux is not the enemy, but the friend, of all professional gamblers. This is why she is worshiped by the faithful followers of the First Church of Blackjack. Were it not for our Goddess, we card counters would extract our small percentage from the tables each and every time we played, and soon our action would be welcome nowhere.

The Goddess of Flux has but one objective: to skew the path of man. Because of her, at the blackjack tables the shortest distance from Point A to Point B is never a straight line. There are always mountains to climb, valleys to negotiate, and so many bends and forks in the road, it seems at times the dizzy path leads nowhere but in circles.

But for all her wild and crazy spirals, there is an equalizer to her whims that man has at his disposal – Persistence. For all her power to steer man’s destiny, the Goddess of Flux has no follow through. Like so many in today’s world, the Goddess suffers from ADD. Just when you’re sure she has her heart set on crushing you, she turns around and goes the other way.

Persistence is the only tool man has to overcome her folly. It’s a secret that every professional gambler learns, and it’s the knowledge that separates the pros from the wannabes. Time and work, work and time – the players’ only hope. How ironic that most of the people who attempt to enter the profession do so because they don’t want to work, and they don’t want to wait. They want easy money, and they want it now. Gambling is a magnet for those who lack discipline and patience; yet it is precisely these virtues that are required to succeed at this vice.

The fact is, if a man is determined to arrive at Point B from Point A, he will get there in the long run. Because of the machinations of the Goddess of Flux, no man may ever know how long that run will be. No formula, no spreadsheet, no graph can predict how long the Goddess will have her fun at our expense. But if we keep Point B in our sights, we will eventually arrive.

So, the next time Dame Fortune toys with your heart, your soul and your wallet, raise your glass and praise her thus: “Thanks for nothing, you cold-hearted, evil, damnable, nefarious, low-life, malicious monster from Hell!”

She is, after all, stone deaf. ♠

What Are the Odds?

by Arnold Snyder
(From Casino Player, July 1995)
© Arnold Snyder 1995

Question from a Blackjack Player:  What are the odds against three players and the dealer all getting a blackjack on the same round? This actually happened to me on my last trip to Las Vegas. The dealer was so amazed, she called the pit boss over to see it, and he said he’d never seen anything like it before. As a side note, I was the only player who took even money when the dealer asked us if we wanted to take insurance. (She had the ace up.) Both the other players declined because they thought it would be impossible for the dealer to also have a blackjack. I figured if the dealer had just dealt three naturals, she most likely dealt a fourth! I was right! Have you ever heard of anything like this?

Answer:  There are a couple of pieces of information lacking from your description of this event that are crucial to analyzing the exact probability of occurrence. First, you don’t say specifically whether or not any other players, who did not receive blackjacks, were playing hands at the same table, or if any of the three of you who received blackjacks were playing more than one hand (one of which was not a blackjack). I’m going to assume that only three players were at the table and that each player was playing only one hand.

Obviously, if four out of seven or eight hands dealt were blackjacks, it would be far less unusual than if four out of four hands dealt were blackjacks. (Or, at least, this would be obvious to anyone who’d taken an introductory course in probability and statistics. It may not be obvious to you, but take my word for it.) I’ll make the assumption that there were only four total hands in play — three players and the dealer — because you relate that the dealer was “amazed” and the pit boss stated he had “never seen anything like it before.” I’m sure most dealers and pit bosses of any experience have seen four simultaneous blackjacks dealt at a full table of players, in which three or four non-blackjack hands were also dealt, rare as even this would be.

The other pertinent fact you fail to mention is how many decks were in play. This is a crucial detail if you want to figure out the precise likelihood of occurrence. In a single-deck game, where there are only four aces in play, it would be far less likely for one of each of these aces to be dealt to each of four players than it would be in an eight-deck game where four aces represent only 12.5% of the total number of available aces in the shoe.

Technically, this is a fairly simple blackjack math problem to figure out, and you can easily do it on any pocket calculator, though it is a bit tedious. You simply calculate how many total possible ways four simultaneous blackjacks can be dealt, out of all the possible four-hand two-card combinations, and you get the odds against it occurring. Of course, it could take you a month of Sundays if you’re going to sit there and actually run through every possible two-card combination, four hands at a time, then count the totals of those which are four blackjacks vs. those which are not; and to do this for an eight-deck game, would take you multiple lifetimes. Fortunately, there are easy shortcut methods for figuring out problems like these.

In a single-deck game, the odds against being dealt four blackjacks out of four hands are about 1.8 million to 1. Most of us are unlikely to ever see such an event. A dealer who deals only single-deck games, 40 hours per week, always to three players at a time, at the average rate of 400 hands per hour, would likely see this about once every 112 weeks. Since dealers actually have constantly varying numbers of players when they deal, it’s probable that many full-time dealers would not actually experience such an occurrence as you witnessed in their careers.

In an eight-deck game, the odds against this are only about 237,000 to 1. For any number of decks between one and eight, the odds against this occurring will fall somewhere between these extremes, the fewer the number of decks in play, the greater the odds against it occurring. In any case, it’s not something that happens frequently by any means.

Regardless of the number of decks in play, if you were not counting cards, and you had not been keeping track of the ratio of tens to non-tens which had been dealt at the time these four simultaneous blackjacks had been dealt (and I assume you had not), you made a mistake when you took insurance. I realize you were the only player who made money on the hand, and that you “can’t lose” whenever you insure a natural, but the fact is, purely from the perspective of the statistician, the odds were strongly against the dealer having a ten in the hole. So, remember that the next time this happens to you! Don’t fall for that sucker insurance bet. (For some reason I feel you’re not going to take my advice on this one. . . .)  ♠