If a big casino offered a great BJ game, would they lose money on it?

Hello Friends,
I want to see what everyone thinks about this. Suppose that a casino manager reads our forum and decides to offer a great blacjack game and decides that more hands per hour played offsets the advantage given in deeper penetration. So, this casino manager offers this BJ game:
DAS
split up to four hands
hit aces after split
double on any first two cards
dealer stands on soft 17
single deck
cut card at 1/10 of a deck (giving 90% penetration)

This casino manager also decides not to treat every player as a potential cheat and gives ZERO heat for bet spread, altering play with the count, counting in general. Also the casino relaxes the rules about handling cards, chips, etc., so that the dealer isn't yelling at the players every few minutes when they unknowingly violate these rules. Don't you find this terribly annoying? The theory being that if you treat the players like you trust them then the atmosphere can be a lot more friendly and people will like playing better. The casino uses shills, the dealer, the pit crew and the eye in the sky to catch cheats, instead of assuming every player is a cheat and having these annoying rules. And, the casino uses statistics software to alert the pit to possible cheats. I used to do consulting to the casino industry and I have seen software that tracks each player's play, this software can tell you what counting system the player is using, what their win rate is, etc. It can also alert the pit to anomalies like a player doubling on hard 18 and pulling a three or other card marking, hole card spooking, or other cheating technique, type plays.

Anyway, all in all, the casino offers a great game of BJ and a great atmosphere to play in.

So, here is my question. Would this casino make money, given more hands dealt per hour with the great penetration and more players wanting to play here with the great rules and friendly atmosphere, or, would the counters descend on them like locusts and clean them out?

I'm curious to see your answers.

Steve

There are so few good games now that a game like that would probably not last. What casino would want the headaches of chasing away counters all the time.

As well, the game you describe has an off the top edge for the BS player.

Bert

I doubt any software can tell the pit what counting system a player is using.

The best of the current software:

1. Scans the cards and keeps the count.

Frankly, I don't know if they keep the count for every system out there, or just keep 3 counts: (a) the optimum betting count; (b) the optimum playing count; and (c) the optimum insurance count. If I were writing the program, I'd just do the latter, but I suspect they actually do the former.

2. Scans the cheques on each betting station.

The software then correlates the betting pattern and the playing decisions to the count, and alerts security and/or pit critters when the correlation is too high.

The ability to scan the cheques is fairly new, but card scanning has been around at least 10 years.

I once had the General Manager of a casino on the Gulf Coast tell me precisely how I was betting and which counting system I was using -- all from computer software. Since we had a supplier/customer relationship, they did not bar me, but did request I keep my bet spread down to four.

When you add facial recognition technology to the above, that doesn't leave a lot of room for "acts" and other forms of camoflage.

About all that's left is hit-and-run Wonging with serious money and not playing enough hands at any one time/place to give the software enough data to analyse.

Far too many ploppies,wanna be's,progression systems,and voodoo players exist in the casino world. The table would have a never ending crowd of all sorts. As a result the table would always be packed and the casino would not be able to offer 90% pen due to not having enough cards in reserve to finish a round. On average a full table will use 22 cards a round. This is equates to 2 rounds per shuffle. The game slows down to a crawl. I wouldn't even waste my time playing. Other good card counters would probably be turned off as well. There are far too many ploppies to compete with.

Then end result is more likely to be a profit expection of about 1-2% for the casino due to bad players. Bad players actually enjoy gambling at crowded tables,they think it's team work :)

TG

within a few months. If every casino offered such a game then it is very possible that all of the casinos "might" make enough extra money from deeper pen...but if only a few do then teams will concentrate on the few and the business of regular customers won't be enough to make up for the difference.

They're is no possible way a casino will go bankrupt from offering this single deck game. It's not that big of a deal. True,this single deck game certainly wouldn't be that profitable and at times the casino will have losing or break even months,but to say a casino will go out of business from offering this game is nonsense.

Let's put it this way ,it's going to take a hell of alot more than
a single deck blackjack game to close a casino. If that's all it took then the casino was headed for bankruptcy before they even offered the game. Use a little bit of logic before you post.

The El Cortez manages to make a pretty good hold dealing single deck deep to a customer base that usually has about $20 to their name.

And these people betting their last $3 usually play better and have more table smarts than a lot of the big high roller ploppies I see on the strip.

One or two big rolling ploppies who think that single deck game is a real good beatable deal will finance 20 counters (Who might get greedy, overbet, and go broke themselves).

they put good games on $5 tables with about a $200 max. This assures that they are always filled up and nobody with a bankroll that can hurt them gets any good opportunities. Occasionally you will see good games with higher limits and minimal heat. The casino doesn't generally go under but these games are burned out and cancelled rather quickly, or there is a very sudden shift in the heat level.

very often exceptional games are only a marketing ploy and available on only one or two of the casino's 60+ tables.

THEY CAN`T TELL WHAT COUNTING SYSTEM YOU ARE USING ! PERIOD.

What I do for a living is advise companies on the benefits/risks etc., of adopting different technologies, usually software, sometimes hardware. Either I give this advice after having looked at their problems and then seeing what is out there and then making a recommendation, or the company has made a tentative decision to buy some software/hardware and they ask me what I think about that decision.

For a few years I was a consultant to a Native American tribe which owns several casinos out west and I spent a great deal of time looking at different software/hardware products the tribe was thinking about buying.

One of these products was a piece of software which watches the play of each player, it does this by using optical character recognition. The eye in the sky is focused on the table and makes a snapshot of each player's hand every time the dealer calls out the total for the hand (the software also uses voice to text translation). The software then uses optical character recognition to see what cards the player has. This tells the software what hit/stand/double down/split decisions the player has made. also, using optical character recognition, the software determines the player's bet size for each hand. If I know what bet sizes you are making and I know the hit/stand/double down/split decisions you are making, then I know what counting system you are using.

If you think about how the dealer operates, you will see that this is very easy to do. The dealer shuffles and calls out "shuffling", using voice to text translation, this tells the software to start a new "game", next the dealer deals to each player and then looks at the first player and calls out their total, say the player has an Ace and a Seven, the dealer would call out "eight or eighteen", the eye in the sky snaps a shot of player 1, the optical character recognition piece of the software determines what cards the player has. If the player hits, the dealer calls out the new total, triggering the cycle all over again. The dealer then goes to the next player, repeating the cycle. The casino can train the dealer to say "players stands with eighteen" to let the software know that the play is moving to the next player, but this isn't necessary, it just optimizes the software.

As each card is recognized by the software, the software keeps a track of the card having been seen, so the software always knows the "count" using every known counting system. By comparing what each player does to the count when the player does it, then comparing these decisions to the decisions called for in each known counting system, as well as determining the player's advantage using every known counting system and then comparing the player's bet size to the player's advantage, it is very easy to tell what counting system the player is using.

I know for a fact that the more paranoid casinos use this software.

Steve

It doesn't matter if you run out of cards, just shuffle the discard stack and keep playing. Taht is what casinos used to do before Thorpe wrote his book.

Just burn 10% of the cards after the shuffle. This is the purpose of the cut card. This simulates the desired % of penetration.

Steve

Why are you guys arguing?? Obviously you are both correct. If the casino offers 1 or a few tables with $200 limits it's not going to make a difference. However, if the casino offers twenty tables with big limits, the casino will go bankrupt just like bigplayer says!!!! In fact, bigplayer himself would go nuts and probably destroy it by himself. On bjstats.com using AOII with "deep" penetration and a 1-10 spread I get a score of $400!!!!! If this casino had multiple tables with big limits it would have to change the game or lose money left and right.

TG - I hope you are not arguing the other side only so the casinos might offer this game. I don't think they are that dumb.

from the Royal Match side bet.

Dr 21

I phrased this question based on some research I have done on number of hands per hour and loss rate per hand for BS players and non-BS players (not counters, idiots). Increasing penetration, and thus hands per hour results in an increase in win rate per hour because the number of hands per hour goes up so much.

Overall expectation of the total number of blackjack tables in the casino is number of tables X win rate per hour X number of hands per hour.

So far, so good. Now you have to take into account that some people will be counting, so you have to deduct their win rate from the overall win rate.

My thesis is that so few people, compared to the number of blackjack players, can actually count proficiently, and will actually be sitting at the tables during a positive expectation for them, that it really won't affect the outcome of the casino winnings as much as increasing the number of hands played per hour will increase their winnings.

I guess I should have clarified that when I mean "offer a game like", I meant that all the BJ tables in the casino would offer this game, because the goal was to increase the number of hands played per hour as much as possible.

What the casino would have to consider would be whether or not there would be swarms of counters descending on them, so the number of counters playing during positive expectation would be far greater than the number of counters you would get at any one time based on the "averages" of the number of counters to non-counters in the general population.

So, I guess the answer to my original question really comes down to this: will swarms of counters ruin any excellent game offered, or can a casino offer an excellent game in order to get the number of hands per hour, thus the win rate per hour, increased?

It seems that the consensus is that swarms of counters would descend on the casino.

Steve

If you take 10 different counting systems, MOST of them will give you the same answer as to when to increase you bets. Also MOST of them will tell you where to deviate from basic strategy pretty close one to the other and these strategy deviation USING THE SAME COUNT might look different because of truncating, flooring, rounding,etc.

How can a software tell you if you are using UAPC or Won`g half since they are almost the same ? It is also almost impossible for any observer to say if you are using Uston simple plus/minus or Hi-Lo.

And I am not speaking of how many index numbers you are using...

People need to stop and look around. Slightly more than 1 out of 100 blackjack players have a clue (play with an advantage). Out of that 1%, half are under bankrolled, or have other problems, and will go broke anyways.

That means 99.5% of the losers are financing what the .5% can carry off the tables. If a casino was smart enough to attract players with good games and deal the cards fast and deep for extra money, it would probably be smart enough to back off any of the .5% that became too greedy and became pigs with the table hold.

The only reason you don't see casinos offering good games and good pen, and instead resort to cheap rip-offs like 6:5 single deck, etc., is because casino management just isn't that smart.

I walk up to a shoe in progress, chunk down $300 on two spots, get a BJ on 1 hand and a 20 on the other, collect my money, check my watch, realize I am late for dinner and leave.

Quick! What counting system was I using?