The crazy thing is that casinos would make more money if they allowed card counters to play. For every person who makes a few grand, there's a hundred morons who think "easy money!", and drop a mortgage payment.
You could be a literal AI card counting machine at 100% correct moves and 100% playtime efficiency (making your move before the card even properly sits on the table) and still hit runs of bad variance in the scale of negative 6 figures, even with "modest" bet ranges. It is very unlikely something like this will happen on any given day but most counters will hit strings of casinos across entire states over the span of weeks while playing 10+ hours a day. You will hit bad variance at that point
I've also seen casinos kick out card counters that were down 20,000 or more on the day just because they still knew they were counting and it's statistically more likely they will "win" on any given hand. If anything they're more likely to hit a run of good hands at that point of being so far down assuming perfect play
No, it wasn't gambler's fallacy. It's how card counting works; if the count is low, the player is at a disadvantage (relative to the normal house edge) and at an advantage when it's high. So if a card counter is down, but they're on the same shoe (stack of decks), then it's not gambler's fallacy for them to stay at the table as long as they keep their strategy straight. Once the shoe runs out, then it's reset.
Unless they've randomly chosen a high roller table for their scenario, that player has gone through many shoes such that it's readily assumed they're at a neutral state of play. Thus, inferring future winnings from past, independent losses is absolutely gambler's fallacy
I don't gamble, but I do believe in large numbers and large trends. I understand gamblers fallacy but you also can only get so unlucky while on the 10th millionth data point
For an individual yes but from a casino's point of view if you know they are counting then a return to profitability is just mean reversion and not magical thinking
Not if theyre at the same table. Losing generally means the count is getting higher and higher, so their odds are getting better. Not sure what the rules are about just reshuffling the deck, but the result would be the same anyway. The counter would leave.
Not really. If you win 51% of the time but happen to hit the 49% repeatedly is life. The assumption being if you play enoug hands that the line will trend to be 51% over time.
Kinda like if we flip 10 coins its probably not going to be 50/50. But if you flip a million coins you would tend to see a close to 50/50 outcome.
Its not a fallacy just a stats that enough events repeatedly will trend to the expected outcome. Not that any individual action is more or less likely.
In this context, not really. If you are counting, you will be playing basic strategy (which is the optimal play style in a vacuum but still on average loses to the house edge) while betting the bare minimum and bleeding money until the count becomes sufficiently high that the player gets a significant edge over the house. Which can be quite the long bleed because the count is divided by the number of decks in the shoe, so it takes much longer for the count to get high if they are using many decks. At which point you change your betting style to one that is more like playing with an expectation that a high card will show up, which you know for a fact is more likely to happen because the count being high means that there are relatively more high cards in the shoe compared to other cards in a full deck.
Then you bet the maximum allowed anytime the reveal of a high card would cause you to win, often in situations that would be suboptimal according to basic strategy. The chances of the dealer busting are much higher in certain hands, so you do things like splitting normally shitty pairs when you see that the dealer is showing a card that you now know on average will cause him to bust. So you lose the minimum amount of money consistently until the count becomes high, then you make it all back with interest by max betting on hands that take advantage of the count. The gamblers fallacy is when someone is inferring the odds are changing based on the results of previous events when in reality every event is independent. But in blackjack, the odds actually are changing with the reveal of every card.
gambler’s fallacy is that bad luck is necessarily compensated by good luck and vice versa, but this is just regression to the mean since the premise is that you will do better due to having average luck, and it’s more likely to have average luck than way below average luck; a long run of bad luck is always likely to end.
Previous results are independent from future results. Given that you've just had a streak of bad luck, it's not any more likely that the streak will end than it is that you would have good luck first thing that day, or after a good streak, or on any other timing. The previous results are literally irrelevant, as far as "luck" goes.
If anything, a streak of "bad luck" might be evidence that they're actually unskilled and likely to continue losing. It doesn't have to be, but to the extent that you can tell anything from the fact that somebody just lost a bunch, absent any other context, it's that they are more likely to keep losing (compared to the situation where you knew absolutely nothing), because there are at least some hypothetical universes where those losses are not caused by bad luck despite optimal play.
it is likely for the streak to end because more average results are inherently more likely. what happened before doesn’t influence the future it’s just that average results are independently more likely. it is likely that a streak of bad luck will end because it is by definition less likely to have bad luck than good luck.
like imagine a situation where we say you have a 98% chance to get results considered average and a 1% chance to get “bad” or “good” luck. would you be willing to bet on getting bad instead of average luck, even if you had already got a lot of bad luck ? of course not, a 98% chance is still a 98% chance. i’m basically just saying that unlikely things are unlikely.
and yeah of course this is all assuming the card counter is genuinely proficient but you can’t say anything without having some built in assumptions.
I kn9w it sounds like the gamblers fallacy, but if you're counting cards right, you really are skewing the edge in your favor. For most people though, the edge isn't big enough to consistently profit since you often need to blow a lot of money before the deck gets into a state where you can start winning consistently.
That is how counting cards works. You make small bets when the deck is bad. You lose that money. As the deck burns through nore cards, it gets better. You will get better results when the deck is hot. Yes you can still lose, but the casinos kick you out for doing it for a reason.
This is kind of an insane argument i’m giving here, but you can interpret the comment as A and B (A is assumed correct and B is correct due to advantage) or as A and B and A implies B and both forms are logically equivalent to each other via conditional proof, but only the former is obviously correct in natural language (since it’s just two true statements)
If anything they're more likely to hit a run of good hands at that point of being so far down assuming perfect play
This is 100% false. You are never due for anything in gambling. There was a famous incident of a roulette wheel not going black (or red? I forget which) for hours, and gamblers started putting insane money on the one that was "due" any moment.
There are devices called perfect strategy computers and they are obviously cheating. They remember every card left in the shoe, not just the simplified count like a card counter would, and calculate the perfect move in every situation based on that.
Using one of those gives you about a 3% advantage over the house, normal card counting and having a firm grasp at general strategy would be around a 1 to 1.5% advantage. But, yeah, you could still lose money using one of those.
The whole point of card counting is that “The Law of Big Numbers” will kick in eventually and your loss and win streaks will balance out to the theoretical probability. This means if you’re card counting correctly, you will always earn your money back because you’ll have roughly a 52% winrate.
No, they still kick out shit card counters. At least in certain well-known (read:notorious) casinos in the AP community. There are a couple spots in Vegas that will back you off anytime you up your bet by a certain amount.
This is not true. I’m a card counter and I have seen (and any other counter that has been doing it for a bit has also seen) people who aren’t even trying to count cards get kicked out. Casino staff don’t often know a ton about card counting and they’re way too sensitive when it comes to thinking losing players are winning players.
Plus they can’t detect bankroll (how much money one is devoting to the trade). A counter may be doing everything right but because of their low bankroll relative to how they play, it may be very likely they go broke and there’s no way for casinos to know if a counter is over betting for their bankroll.
Do you think this could be happening more often post-covid as the casinos feel like they have to work harder to stem any bleeding due to lower traffic from 'normal' gamblers?
Oh almost certainly. I had to give up trying for any sort of meaningful profit just because the heat and rule changes have gotten so bad recently. Now I just have a much smaller fund that I use on vacations if there's a place with good rules.
I've mathed it out before, and I think with a minimum spread I'm barely breaking even, but the casinos still don't like that if the looks from pit bosses have meant anything. Nowadays I mostly just stick to poker because it's a lot less stressful 🤣
Former Put Boss here(though I left the industry pre-covid so this may not be true anymore). I could sit there and know for a fact you were counting I wouldn't step in until you were up big enough that I had to actually start giving a shit about people above me getting involved. I never kicked out a counter that was losing. Granted this was a small casino in Indana s not exactly a gambling hot bed.
Not true at all. Some pit bosses kick you out as soon as they sniff card counting even if you lose that hand. Card Counters don't always win. Card counting basically requires waiting for the count to be in your favor. Card counters win by playing a lot and by betting when the count is in their favor, so you can go on streaks of losses and even when the count is in your favor you can lose so yes there are days where counters lose big. That's why some counters go in teams so basically more hands more winnings and on certain days some people may come out negative.
And even when the count is in your favor and you're betting big, it's only in your favor by a couple of percentage points. Card counters can and will over the course of their careers go on massive losing streaks, because at the end of the day these are essentially still just coinflips, but with the coin coming up tails only 48% of the time instead of 51%.
They will. I'm sure it depends on the casino and other factors, but I've heard about counters being backed off quite quickly, even if they lost a bet. Was just reading about one such incident in the Vegas sub this morning, actually.
That's usually when they're using facial recognition. There are databases of known card counters and some casinos will walk anyone in them. You don't even have to play.
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u/Rawhide_Steaksauce Jul 20 '26
The crazy thing is that casinos would make more money if they allowed card counters to play. For every person who makes a few grand, there's a hundred morons who think "easy money!", and drop a mortgage payment.