Then you should probably keep in mind that not all blackjack rules are set in stone. From my younger days I recall various casinos having different rules regarding things like dealer having to hit on soft 17, the number of times you can split pairs, and a different rule for splitting aces. Also blackjack payouts are sometimes 2:1 and sometimes 3:2, IIRC.
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That’s hilarious, because roulette is a game of chance, you have zero control over the outcome, there’s no strategy and no way to “win.” Some bets are worse than others, but even the best bets have a casino advantage. There’s no thinking required and no way of being “good” or “bad” at it. If you won, you got lucky, that’s all.
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OK!!
Guess I just got lucky enough that I didn’t lose all the funds that I began playing with at the start of the evening. So for me I’m a pretty decent roulette player…. Give me a break! 
I’m better at 
luck than counting cards.
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Buy the way scripta, are you a winning gambler?
You talk like you know all the winning gambler strategies.
But then again you think 
you are always right on most categories. lol
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Anyone can win or lose short term. The test of skill is if you’re a net winner after 500-1000 hours. The more volatile the game, the longer it takes for the wins and losses to average out.
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I’m not a gambler. I played a little just to learn the rules and kill time and was close to even in terms of $ (I kept track). I learned that at least for blackjack, the odds at the Indian casinos in California are worse than in Vegas, and that cruise ship casinos are the worst. I also learned that playing the machines is dumb, that I don’t like gambling, and that I hate the Vegas strip (the smell of cigarettes, the resort fees, and enticing-but-ultimately-disappointing buffets are top reasons), but there are lots of good restaurants and places to stay and visit off the strip.
I said nothing of the sort. You can only win against the casino by luck or by cheating (or, I suppose, by being smarter than the people who make the games and finding bugs or loopholes before they do). IMO if you want to win gambling, you have to play against other people. And to do that you have to be better than the people you’re playing.
You can also win by counting cards, and if so, especially by betting a lot more when the counted cards indicate it’s a favorable time.
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Best thing I’ve heard.
I’m not a gambler, but when traveling, vacationing it’s fun to give it a try. Never expecting to really make a fortune. Luckily I don’t begin with much $$’s . So I can’t loose much. Just fun for me.
Living in California there’s close enough casinos to get a chance to play. A favorite for me is Lake Tahoe. Although it’s not nearly anything like years ago when the Friday Nite buffets were special. 
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Casinos do make mistakes and misjudge things sometimes. For instance, in the analog days, casinos would mail paper cash marketing coupons to entice players to make return visits. Problem was, they had to be printed a month or two at a time, so one could get a stream of 6-8 weekly coupons off of a single day of play. Play big on a single day, with risk but at 99.5% games, then collect $500/week until they run out.
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The good stuff is almost never in just walking into a casino and trying to beat them straight up. It’s almost always some special situation or promo that gives a smart player the edge. And it usually comes with significant vol, or everybody would be doing it.
I essentially quit due to a combination of not tolerating the volatility, and getting kicked out of too many places.
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I think a lot of people are too lazy to spend the time to learn how to count cards and perfect the strategy for blackjack, so it all works out. 99% of the players will lose money and not play smart, and for the other 1% you can just back them off the casino and ban them.
It’s kind of like the 0% credit card offers. They work because you have a lot of irresponsible people blowing the money and paying 17% interest. A few people game the system and use it for App-O-Rama to access free money, but most of the time the credit card company wins so it makes sense to keep offering it.
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The golden era of advantage play in Las Vegas is simply over. And there was (and likely will never be) a golden era anywhere else because the lack of density of casinos (and therefore the lack of competition) just doesn’t require the casino to run those sort of promotions. There are still some advantage plays left in Las Vegas, but VERY few for the guy working alone with a small bankroll. And even then, you have to live in Vegas and have a job or some other stream of income (and a lifestyle) that would allow you to drive all over the city at random times to take advantage of that play. The people truly making money are part of teams, have big bankrolls, do it full time, and spend as much time researching as they do playing. There is no way to make more than $20/hr counting cards with a small bankroll doing it part time even if you live in Las Vegas. Forget about trying to do it anywhere outside Vegas. Heck, it was barely doable in the golden era of advantage play.
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Absolutely. Access to information is key. There’s no way to scout conditions in every casino by yourself. Better to work together on that. The saying goes “you have to give action to get it.”
I do know quite a few pros who still make a good living from it. 100%/year on the first 100k, then diminishing returns after that.
And as I said before, none of the pros I know are making money counting cards. It’s simply too hard to sit down and play at any sort of reasonable scale. The good stuff is advanced plays like hole carding or shuffle tracking, or coupon chasing, which is more like churning bank bonuses but with gambling risk and multiple identities.
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And that’s $20/hr at the table. It will take thousands of unpaid hours of learning and practicing before one could even get to the point of making $20/hr they’re actually sitting down and playing.
If it were 20 years ago and I were retirement age, I could see myself retiring in LV and playing the random positive EV video poker promotion as a way to keep my mind sharp and to pay for some meals and hotel stays. But nowadays, those barely exist. Forget about counting cards, that’s WAY harder and more difficult to keep playing for a positive EV. Casinos don’t kick out VP players that only play during promotions. They do kick out counters.
I could teach someone to count in an hour or two. Then it’s just a matter of practice until you do it well enough not to make any errors. Counting and playing isn’t really the hard part. Doing it while looking like an unskilled drunk asshole the entire time is the difficult part.
We always refered to the gambling trade as “a hard way to make an easy living.” I sure do miss all the fancy comps.
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Possibly two “never truer” statements. I didn’t really have to deal, too hard, with the first one.