I have not been to Las Vegas in a few years. I am surprised that most games are h17, except for the high limit games. Last time I was there I played a favorable game at Mandalay Bay, now only the $200 minimum games are s17.
The same trend has occurred in AC. When did this start happening in Vegas?
Marc
Conditions change all the time. Rules, dealer rotations, cards, felt layouts, maxims, minimus, number of decks, chips, floor personal, even your favorite Coctail waitress. There are even more changes than I can think of in this short post. The bottom line is that this is what Vegas is all about. Changes. Before you know it there will be mostly all CSM's.
I hate to say that but watch what the rest of the world is doing. It use to be Vegas all single deck. Foreign casinos only had shoes. Then next Vegas had shoes. This is the evolution of the game of 21.
I wrote these lines almost nine years ago, and, sadly, they have proved to be rather prescient:
Postscript:
It�s been seven years since I wrote the above lines, and, unfortunately, the anti-counter casino tactics to which I alluded have proven to be far from �shortterm.�
If anything, the climate for playing professionally or otherwise has gotten considerably worse in the interim. Surveillance measures have become, in some venues, quite oppressive, with new facial recognition software and fancy, hi-tech gizmos in place to more readily detect the presence of counters. Once apprehended, players are facing rude barrings and sometimes even ejections from hotels at which
they are staying. As they move on to a new casino, counters often find that through SIN (Surveillance Information Network) � which truly is a sin! � their photo, which has been faxed around town, is already awaiting their arrival in the next blackjack pit.
As if all of this weren�t bad enough, game conditions have deteriorated, as well. What was once strictly an Atlantic City curse � the 8-deck shoe game, has now reared its ugly head along the Las Vegas Strip. And, the policy of �no mid-shoe entry,� aimed
at thwarting back-counters, has proliferated in A.C. and is creeping, ever so slowly, into the Nevada games as well. In addition, good penetration is extremely hard to come by, as unenlightened casino managers �throw the baby out with the bath water,� shuffling
so frequently that they lose volume to the masses, simply to stymie the occasional card counter in their midsts. Finally, insane rules variations, such as short-changing players by offering 6 to 5 (120%) bonuses for naturals, instead of the customary 3 to 2 (150%),
rob players, in this case, of that extra 30% return on the blackjacks that they receive in the single-deck games at which this horrible rule is offered.
No, sad to say, twenty-first century blackjack isn�t exactly a picnic! My hat is off to those who continue to ply their trade successfully in this never-ending cat-and-mouse game. There was a time when I felt an ebb and flow to these kinds of shenanigans.
We could always count on the pendulum�s swinging back the other way, towards more favorable conditions. Well, it�s been quite some time now, and, truth be told, the pendulum is stuck! All we can do is wait and hope for better times ahead.
New York, March 2004
I know of a couple of casinos that recently brought in new table game managers. Both of these places already had the kind of standard poor game that is found all over today.
So in one place the new table game manager ends the re-splitting of aces on their 6 deck game and in the other place they change the 2 deck game to double only 9,10 and 11. Both places already seem to have lost volumne at their tables, so I can only guess that the plan is to increase the hold on their remaining players.
These changes are not as important as going to H-17, but once you made that big change, you start looking for smaller ones to help destroy the game.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a "casino exec" at a strip place years ago concerning their video poker. This casino had probably the best VP of the mid sized places on the strip when it came to their multi hand machines which were 5, 10 and 25 cents. Play ten hands on a quarter machine and it is $12.50 a shot. I look at the machines and they are all now 1,2,and 5 dollars and after staying there 3 days, no one (not one single person) was playing them when I went by. So I asked this exec about the machines and he stated that the hold was too low so they upped the amounts. My answer to him was "what good is even a 100% hold when the drop is Zero" and he basically changed the subject.
There is no lower form of life than a casino executive -- no one more hopelessly clueless or ignorant.
Don
...may be a lower form of life than a casino executive, but I will grant you, Mr. Schlesinger, it is debatable.
Cobbson
Is to win big. You do that by betting big. $10K or more per hand.
The biggest worry for any AP trying to recycle a casino where he was backed off at some point in the past are employees with a long memory and a good high quality photo in the database.
FRS is incredibly overrated
I've had LV backoffs after never having a sizable win, no recognizable faces, and backoffs in the middle of the first shoe played, ala Tropicana, and others. Their FRS must be first rate. However, there is much truth in your statement.
You had a face and someone recognized it. A photo database indexed by keywords (such as age, hair color, moles, jewelry, weight, facial hair, etc) is enough to narrow down the entire database to a 50 or so photos with a few keystrokes. From that it doesn't take complicated FRS software, just a pair of eyes.
