Sherriff AP chucked it all to become a professional card counter. He had one of the worst losing streaks I have heard of, and I’m not just talking about losing money. Everything in his life seemed to all go wrong at the same time. I think most people would have quit, and never looked back, but he stuck it out.
Continue reading Podcast – Sherriff AP episode #9At the recent World Game Protection seminars, casino expert Sal Piacente said: “Advantage players don’t want to cheat and aren’t doing anything illegal, but instead use their minds to beat the game, whether watching to see if a dealer exposes a hole card or by card counting.”
I’m not so sure.
Continue reading Do APs Cheat?Last time, we discussed the value of being female for an AP. Since female skill will tend to be underestimated by predominantly male casino bosses, females can be ringers at the game. Unfortunately for the female AP, that benefit is tempered by the increased visibility and memorability that they’ll have. But Munchkin’s statement was that being an “Asian female” would be worth an extra $1 million for an AP’s career. So let’s look at Asian-ness in the gambling world.
Continue reading Fact-Check: Munchkin’s Claim that Asian Female ==> +$1 MillionNowhere in The 21st-Century Card Counter did I see the percentage of BJA members that are women, but I’m quite curious. I suspect the figure is quite low, as it is even in some other fields that do not involve a meaningful physical component—such as chess or computer science. I remember scanning the auditorium for the first lecture of CS51 (CS150 in those days), and seeing maybe three women out of 100-200 students.
Continue reading Colin Jones (S2 E6): The Woman at the Card TableListeners to the GWAE podcast know that Richard Munchkin is one of my favorite storytellers. When a guest on the show takes us through memory lane, it sometimes jogs one of Richard’s stories and I just sit back and listen with enjoyment.
With that in mind, Richard’s brother Jake made a long post on Facebook in late December that caught my eye. It was about blackjack in the early 80s and their team was playing in Atlantic City somewhere. At that time, there was no device law in the New Jersey gaming statutes and so it was completely legal to use electronic devices inside the casino. Teams tried various forms of computers to assist them in playing blackjack and other games. At that time, computers were very primitive relative to today, and often this involved pressing buttons with your toes and getting tiny shocks on your leg to tell you what to do. There would be wires running up your legs to your battery pack. All kinds of things could and did go wrong with this, but in general the process was successful enough that casinos finally banded together and lobbied the state legislature to ban electronic devices used to predict the outcome of casino games.
Continue reading Tonight’s the Night!My co-host on the Gambling With An Edge podcast is Richard Munchkin, a table games player who’s been successful at gambling for several decades.
We often answer listener questions on the show and if anyone asks about a table game, Richard is the go-to guy. Sometimes I’ll have a bit to add, but mostly what Richard says covers the subject very well.
He has used one particular phrase in his answers over and over again. The questions vary, but part of the answer stays the same.
For example, some blackjack player is using one particular count and is considering learning another count because it’s more powerful. Richard will discuss the features of each count, but say, “You’re stepping over dollars to pick up pennies. A slightly better count is NOT where the money is in blackjack. There are far more important things to spend your time learning.”
I’ve heard him say variations on this numerous times and I started to wonder if the way I tackle video poker makes me guilty of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies?
As many of my readers know, I try to learn most video poker games at the 100% level. In NSU Deuces Wild, for example, letting a W stand for a deuce, I play W 4♠ 5♠ 3♥ J♥ differently than I do W 4♠ 5♠ 3♥ J♦.
For the five-coin dollar player, if he holds W 4♠ 5♠ both times he is making a quarter of a penny error half the time. If he holds just the W both times he is also making a quarter of a penny error half the time.
I avoid this small error. I learned the game this well when I was playing $25 games so the error every other time is 6¢ rather than a quarter cent. I still have that play memorized even though the larger games aren’t available, insofar as I know.
Although this particular distinction is one of many many I have memorized, it is safe to say I’ve spent dozens of hours, probably more, learning these exceptions in the first place and reviewing them often enough to keep them memorized.
Have I gained enough to make the difference between learning these things worth more than even an additional $2 per hour over all the hours I’ve spent studying? Probably not.
Without spending this time learning these exceptions, could I have played games worth substantially more than $2 per hour and been better off financially? Definitely yes, insofar as finding games worth more than that.
So, is this a case of stepping over dollars to pick up pennies? Have I been violating Munchkin’s advice (never mind that I spent most of those dozens of hours studying that game before I ever heard Richard give that advice)? Maybe, but if so, as
they say in Traffic Court, I plead guilty with an explanation.
Although in the Dancer/Daily Winner’s Guides for both NSU Deuces Wild and Full Pay Deuces Wild, we distinguish between penalty cards and “power of the pack” considerations, for the sake of simplicity today I’m going to include both of these into the term “penalty cards.”
The underlying assumption behind the question “Is learning penalty cards worth it?” is that without studying the penalty cards you can play the penalty-free strategy perfectly. For me, at least, that assumption wouldn’t track with reality.
Just the study and practice I undergo to learn the penalty cards causes me to be practicing the basic strategy simultaneously. For example, the difference between W J♦ 9♦ 5♣ 6♣ and W J♦ 9♦ 5♣ 7♣, which is a basic strategy play, is probably ignored by all players who have not also made a serious attempt at learning all the exceptions. Even though this play is clearly shown on the Dancer/Daily Strategy Card and Winner’s Guide for this game, I suspect most players simply ignore it or don’t understand why the two hands are played differently.
So, while learning the penalty cards might only return $2 an hour on my study time, I also gain considerably more than that because I learn the basic strategy better during the process.
For me personally, since I’ve chosen a teaching career and a how-to writing career, there are additional income streams available to me for learning this stuff that wouldn’t be available to most others.
Plus, I like being a student. I was good at school and continue to try and learn new things. So even if learning penalty cards doesn’t make great financial sense, it brings me pleasure. Can you really put a price on that?
I’m going to conclude that Richard’s “stepping over dollars to pick up pennies” warning doesn’t apply to me in this particular case. And I make this conclusion knowing full well that others may disagree with my conclusion. That’s okay. I’ve made my own bed here and I’m perfectly happy sleeping in it.
Yes, I know I mentioned that certain hands were played differently than others, but I didn’t explain what the differences were. If you want to know, you’re going to have to look up the information for yourself. If that annoys you, so be it, but the learning process isn’t easy and you need to go through it to become a strong player.
I’m showing my age, but I remember the “Who Do You Trust?” television show hosted by Johnny Carson before he got the Tonight Show gig. He always said later that the first word should have been “Whom” rather than “Who,” and if you can’t trust Johnny Carson, whom can you trust?
Many of the people who attend my classes are quarter or dollar players. It’s no secret that I play for higher stakes, at least some of the time. Usually once or twice a semester, someone says something like, “Although I would never play for the stakes you do, I’m really curious as to what games you play and where. Will you tell me?”
My standard answer is that I write about the places I play that I don’t mind you knowing about, and don’t write about the ones I would rather keep secret. So, if they don’t already know about one of my plays, I’m not going to tell them.
The reason for this is simple. Many plays can only support one or two competent players. Telling the world about such a play would be the kiss of death to the play. No thanks.
One player followed up with, “But I promise I won’t tell anybody, and I certainly won’t be playing those stakes myself. Don’t you trust me?”
Well, I’m not sure. I’d rather not put it to the test. If I trust 20 people and 19 of them never told a soul, the secret is still out. Is this guy one of the 19, or the one who says, “It won’t hurt anything if I mention this to my brother-in-law?” I don’t know beforehand, so it’s better that I keep quiet.
I’m not a proponent of the “Two can keep a secret only if one of them is dead” philosophy. If Richard Munchkin wants to know the where and why on any of my plays, I’m going to tell him. I trust him — even though he has the bankroll along with family members and close friends who could burn out any play I told him about. Among top gamblers, their word is their bond. If I told him, “I’ll tell you about it but you can’t play because of xxxxx,” I believe he’d honor that.
On the radio show, we’ve had blackjack team captains describe teams they were on where one of the team members ripped off the others. This is rare — but it happens — and it’s always a shock when it does. You can protect yourself from this by never telling anybody anything, but that’s going to be a lonely life you lead.
Trusting somebody has similarities with marriage. Although it ends badly some of the time (and I’ve experienced my share of that), overall, I’m convinced my life works better being married than being single.
I’d actually be more comfortable telling Richard about a play than I would be telling Bonnie! Bonnie is not a player at all and although she’s definitely on my side, if I tell her I’m going to be playing at the (pick a casino), it’s possible that she would inadvertently tell her sister, daughter, or a girlfriend where I’m playing. If I tell her over and over again, “This is a secret — you can tell no one,” she’ll honor my wishes. But she has no good gambling sense about what is a secret and what isn’t and she’s not really practiced in keeping secrets. It’s better not to tell her.
If I took her to a comped meal at the Wicked Spoon buffet at the Cosmopolitan, she would figure out that there was some play (now gone) that I had there, but she isn’t really capable of understanding why the play there was better or worse than playing at some other casino. She’s willing to listen and nod her head if I tell her, “The game pays xxx% off the top, with yyy% from the slot club, and zzz% from the mailers. This other promotion they’re having now adds another vvv%, and there’s a pretty good chance I can talk them into www% worth of comps.” These are just numbers to her and it’s all kind of gobbledygook.
Richard, however, would understand each of these things and if he didn’t, he’d ask me to explain further. And he could put the numbers into context of other plays he knew about. That is, a 100.5% play is pretty good if the best you can find otherwise is 100.3%. But if you can find a 101% play for the same stakes, a 100.5% isn’t such a good deal.
Someone pointed me to an article in a West Hollywood publication about the Cavendish West. I was surprised to find that I was quoted in the article as the author never spoke to me. He did, however, paraphrase some things I’ve said on the radio show.
The Cavendish West is the place where I learned many lessons about gambling — from about 1975 – 1991. Although I did play a bit of contract bridge there for money, I was never a winning player at that game. My game of choice was backgammon, where I was successful — for a time.
In the mid-1970s, when backgammon was a sexy game, was played in discos, and was written about in popular magazines, I was sufficiently above average that I did quite well financially. Eventually the game passed out of favor and the Cavendish was left with only the good pros beating up on the not-so-good pros. I fell into the higher end of the lower category — and eventually, around 1980, I had to go out and get a job to support myself. It was awful.
I wrote a “Lessons from the Cavendish West” chapter in my Million Dollar Video Poker autobiography, but today I want to primarily address other things.
At the Cavendish, there were a LOT of good players. You could sit and watch them play, and so long as you were quiet you were generally allowed to look on. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” You could take notes and see how the big boys did things.
Sometimes they’d take three or so minutes to make a play and you could see what they finally did, but you had no idea of what their thought process was. For me, just watching was pretty boring. Playing was a lot more fun than watching. Still is. I basically had a free backgammon university education available to me, but instead chose to go and play backgammon against somebody over whom I had little or no edge. That led to a form of gambler’s ruin.
Today I hope I’m smarter than that. Video poker opportunities are less plentiful and less lucrative than they used to be. Studying, scouting, and waiting for the good ones are all part of succeeding these days. It’s easy to predict a day will come that I’ll be playing two hours a week or less. I’m preparing for that day. Perhaps you should too. Those who continue to play even though they are not the favorite will continue to lose.
Other factors that were drummed into me concerned sleep management and substance abuse. During certain periods in the 1980s, I worked 50+ hours a week in IT departments and then tried playing and/or studying 40 hours a week of backgammon. Both careers suffered — as did my social life. Today I can’t stay alert and play more than 6-8 hours at a time, although if I get a good four hours of sleep I can put in another session of that length. However much EV I calculate a play is worth, that calculation presumes an insignificant number of errors. If I play long enough, I make many more errors than I calculated and lose all my edge.
The Cavendish was housed in an office building and one flight up was a small roof that covered a portion of the building. Players frequently smoked marijuana or other substances on the roof and getting an invitation to join them was fairly easy. I didn’t do that very often, but when I did, my results suffered greatly. I am not someone who can smoke a joint and then concentrate on playing the way I need to in order to succeed.
Because of our last election, recreational marijuana is about to be legalized in Nevada. That’s fine for those of you who want that, but for me it’s poison. I’ll stay away. It’s possible that someday I’ll be in sufficient pain that I will take marijuana to help deal with it, but I’ll give up gambling for as long as I’m consuming.
The end of the article tells of the last days of the Cavendish, when voters of the then recently incorporated West Hollywood decided they didn’t want the club in their city. Previously, West Hollywood was a part of the City of Los Angeles. It was said around the club in the 70s and 80s that the mother of the DA (or was it the chief of police?) regularly played gin rummy at the Cavendish, so the club was safe from being raided. That was probably true, but I don’t know which public official, which mother, or even which jurisdiction this applied to. I was just happy that I could play there.
The Cavendish died a couple of years before I moved to Las Vegas. I was sad to see it go, although by that time it was just a time-killer for me. There were relatively few backgammon players at the end and, although I could get into a game where I was a slight favorite (I was a MUCH better player at that time than I was back in 1980 when I had to leave and go get a job), the house rake absorbed most of my edge. Still, it was a pleasant diversion one or two nights a week and I liked that.
When I got to Vegas, there was a backgammon club here. I briefly considered staying active in the backgammon scene, but I already knew I couldn’t support myself playing backgammon in Los Angeles and had heard it was tougher in Las Vegas. No thanks. I decided to stick to games I thought I could beat.
If you read the article, you’ll see a picture of a backgammon board at the top. This is a folding board, sold at toy stores with toy store dice. This is NOT what we used at the Cavendish. In a reply that I sent in response to the article, I explained what the differences are.
The picture is also missing the most important part of the game — i.e. the doubling cube. Without a doubling cube, backgammon is just a game. With a doubling cube, backgammon is a great gambling game.
I suspect my many thousands of hours at the Cavendish helped make me a better gambler today. After you’ve been through many many dozens of winning streaks and losing streaks, it’s easier to keep your balance when you’re in another one.
At the time, especially when I was losing and had to go and get a job, I thought I had “wasted” several years of my life. Today I believe I couldn’t have gotten to where I am today without going through that first. Among other things, the Cavendish introduced me to Richard Munchkin and for that I’m very grateful.
When I was in graduate school 45 years ago, plus or minus, I heard about an incident many years prior to that at the University of Chicago. It appears that there was an elevator for a campus building with a “Students Only” sign on it. One professor entered and was challenged, presumably in a friendly way, because he wasn’t a student. The professor answered, “We are all students. I study much more today than when I was your age.”
I’m that way too. I study gambling as much or more today as I ever did. One “advantage” of hosting a radio show about gambling is that I am “forced” to read gambling books that I wouldn’t otherwise pick up. I read the book in order to try to ask interesting questions of our guests. This gives me a much broader grasp of gambling than most players have.
I have many gurus — in the sense that I listen to what they have to say and try to apply it to my own situation. Two (of many) are Ed Miller and Richard Munchkin. Recently I realized that they said virtually the opposite thing about a subject — although ironically they both respect each other and would probably agree with the point of view of the other guy.
Sounds strange, right? Let me continue.
Ed Miller writes a lot about No Limit Hold’Em cash games with an emphasis on low stakes games. His recent book, The Course: Serious Hold’Em Strategy for Smart Players, is an excellent treatise on how to make money in $1-$2 and $2-$5 games. We’ve spoken about the book on the air, but we barely scratched the surface of what the book holds.
Near the end of the book is a section entitled “The Pitfalls of Running Good.” Miller says, “Running good out of the gate is one of the worst things that can happen to players. If they rack up big wins early on, a couple of bad things can happen. First, they develop unrealistic expectations. . . . Second, these early wins reinforce bad habits.”
I’m not going to quote his entire argument, but I found it persuasive. You need to guard against the dangers of running good. And Miller discusses several ways to do that.
Richard Munchkin, of course, is my co-host on the Gambling with an Edge radio show. However much I’ve prepared to listen to what our guest has to say on the air, I’m always eager to hear what Richard has to say as well. Although I often prepare a script beforehand and Richard knows where I’m going to go in the discussion, I never know beforehand what he’s going to say and I find that interesting and educational.
On more than one occasion, Munchkin has opined that a disproportionate number of successful gamblers ran good at the beginning. Why? Because a disproportionate number of the players who ran bad quit gambling! Somebody who always seems to lose has a tendency to give up and conclude that gambling is not for him.
So Ed Miller says running good at the beginning is one of the worst things to happen to you and Richard Munchkin says it happened to most successful gamblers. Not exactly contradicting each other — but close.
After mulling this over for a while, I decided they’re both right!
Running good does create some unreasonable expectations and bad habits, but gamblers who end up successful eventually learn to deal with these things. (If they don’t, they’re not successful gamblers. Nobody runs good forever.)
However bad running good is in terms of learning to play the game the right way, I’ll take it every day! While I understand Miller’s argument, I’d rather be $10,000 ahead than $10,000 behind. And so would you.
As to whether Munchkin was right about today’s successful players running good at the start, I started to examine whether it was true for me in particular. A case could be made that it was — but it also doesn’t matter. Anecdotal evidence about any one player (including me) doesn’t come close to proving or disproving any statement starting with “Most players . . .”
But I found Richard’s argument persuasive as well. The early loser tends to quit. The early winners tend to keep going. He’s looking at tendencies — not something that is correct 100% of the time.
I like it better when my gurus disagree with each other. It forces me to think about the arguments and come to my own conclusions. That’s how I improve my craft. And the fact that these two gurus are addressing games other than video poker means I always have to see if what they said applies to my game as well. Again, that’s how I improve my craft.
This is the second part of a story about this year’s Blackjack Ball. If you didn’t read last week’s installment, check it out here
The game of 21 Questions as devised by Max Rubin is very difficult. Success requires some specific knowledge, often some mathematical ability, and a lot of fortuitous guessing. In 2013, I won this part of the competition (only to blow out quickly in the skills contest). In 2014, my guessing hat must have been on backwards and I didn’t do well at all. In 2015, I barely missed qualifying for the finals. In fact, if I had only correctly answered the question that I had submitted, I would have advanced to the skills contest. I’ll soon describe how this happened. Continue reading Attending the 2015 Blackjack Ball — Part II of II
