Solo Professional counters?

Do they really exist?? Or is every professional playing on a team?
I am looking at the numbers and I just cant imagine someone surviving the fluctuations alone.

Suppose you play with an average bet of $100 (a blackchipper), average advantage 1%(thats pretty optimistic), standard deviation typically 1.15. Suppose you log around 300 playing hours a year at 100 hands/hour - thats 30000 hands. Mean expectation = 30 000 x 100 * 0.01 = $30000 Nothing to be excited about but reasonable, but here comes the killer - standard deviation over 30000 hands = 1.15 * 100 * sqrt(30000) = $20 000 (!) That means with 95% certainty you'll be making anywhere between 30000-2x20000 and 30000+2*20000, so you'd be anywhere between -$10000 and +$70000 and these figures are before tax and not considering the travel expenses, living expenses, etc...

Now thats not a bad deal for a retired man with plenty of bankroll who plays for fun. But a professional who depends on it to make a living and sustain his family?? I cant imagine anyone remaining in the business after a year of work resulting in $10 000 loss.

I can understand pros working in team of 6 or more people, the numbers do add up to reasonable values, but for a solo player, is it possible??

Your example player there is only playing 300 hours per year, that's 6 hours a week. And then you're wondering how he is supporting his family. If he's only working 6 hours a week at blackjack, that oughta leave him 34 to do another job.

if a black chipper plays about 15 hours a week.his ev is about 120-130 an hour,but ill be conservative and round it down to 100 an hour to cover any mistakes or cover plays.thats 6000 a month.its not hard at all to live off of that.why would you have to join a team and worry about people robbing your ass blind.

There are a few solo players out there who make a living at blackjack, but I suspect you could count them on both hands and you might have a digit or two left over. I only know of one who has done it consistently over a period of years. Of course, there are certainly some who I do not know. Most solo professional gamblers are doing more than just counting cards and playing blackjack. They have other methods and other games upon which they rely along with blackjack.

There are plenty of solo players out there who make an excellent second income from blackjack. There are also a few who are retired and are earning a pension or investment income from their careers in other endeavors who also play full-time.

Your example player there is only playing 300 hours per year, that's 6 hours a week. And then you're wondering how he is supporting his family. If he's only working 6 hours a week at blackjack, that oughta leave him 34 to do another job.

Yes, but then he is not a true BJ professional, his main income comes from elsewhere, and thats fine.

And you cant compare 9-5 working hours with a high-stakes player's working hours. A blackchipper cannot camp at the casino working 8 hours a day 250 days a year like you can on traditional jobs. He would travel around most of the time, stop at one place and play for a couple of hours before they boot him out.

There are a few solo players out there who make a living at blackjack, but I suspect you could count them on both hands and you might have a digit or two left over.

If there are only a dozen or so successful solos, it really makes you wonder if their success was due in large part to luck. I mean, if you gather 1000 people who try, there is gotta be a dozen way on the positive side of the Bell curve who had steady reliable winnings instead of the massive fluctuations the other 980 people are having.
I guess you'll also find hundreds of ploppies who had nothing but steady victories, with millions of people playing there is gotta be someone on the freaky side of the statistical distribution.

There are plenty of solo players out there who make an excellent second income from blackjack. There are also a few who are retired and are earning a pension or investment income from their careers in other endeavors who also play full-time.

Those people I can understand and thats much more reasonable.

It seems to me that most people calling themselves BJ pros actually generate(d) most of their income elsewhere. Some have a real job, some write books/run training courses, most use other advantage play like stockmarket, sports betting and poker, some are using their spouse's money as bankroll, etc...

What amuses me are various BJ training courses that promise golden mountains to potential students. "Tired of your job? Quit and start a new career playing blackjack!" "Be your own boss and make 100 000 a year!", etc... not a word about standard deviation. Very immoral in my opinion.

The correct calculation is this,

Known facts:
30,000 hands
$100 average
$3,000,000 total action
1.00% average advantage

Calculation for One Standard deviation:
StDev = (1.15*100) / sqrt(Number of hands) or 115/173 = 0.664%

Now if you have and average 1.0% advantage, that will get you the following:
1.0% +0.664% = +1.664%
1.0% - 0.664% = +0.336%

This related to your total $action:
$3,000,000*1.664% = $49,929
$3,000,000*0.336% = $10,080

For a 95% confidence level you will use 2 Stdev. So in this particular case you will have:
2*49,929 = $99,858
2*10,080 = $20,160

Conclusion:
Playing under those conditions your results will be somewhere in between +$20,160 and +$99,858. You can say with 95% confidence that you will have a positive cash flow if you maintain that 1.0% advantage. Further more, if your advantage is under 0.664% instead of 1.0% you can lose money. But as long as your estimation of 1.0% is correct, you probably will make money playing under those conditions.

Puiu

if a black chipper plays about 15 hours a week.his ev is about 120-130 an hour

130/100 = 1.3$ per hand.
at an average 0.5% advantage, thats an average bet of 1.3/0.005 = $260
which means that you max bets are somewhere in +$1000 range. In most places such spreads will get you booted before your seat gets warm. A better quality game would allow to reduce the spread, but good games are becoming an endangered species.

How did you arrive at the $120-130 an hour 15 hour/week figure? Sounds hard to believe that you can do that consistently over years.

For a 95% confidence level you will use 2 Stdev. So in this particular case you will have:
2*49,929 = $99,858
2*10,080 = $20,160

The 49929 is not standard deviation, why are you doubling it?
Its the mean +- 2 standard deviations.

In your calculation its

3 000 000 * (1%+2*0.664%) = $70 000
3 000 000 * (1%-2*0.664%) = -$10 000

which is same a my calculation, I just found the mean first

I don't know if there are that many people who really give full-time solo play with no other source of income a real try. I have known a few and most of the ones I have known who tried were underbankrolled and wound up running into the inevitable losing streak that wiped them out. I suspect there are many who try and don't stick with it for very long once they discover that it is not an easy road to riches. I agree that those books which seem to promise such a road are deceiving their readers.

Solo blackjack play needs a very large bankroll to start out with or pure dumb luck if one is starting out with a small bankroll. It is boring and it is frustrating. Casinos are not all that exciting if that is the place where you have to make a living day in and day out. You must always be on the lookout for heat and must put up with constant barrings and backoffs. It can get very old, very fast. A solo player needs money, skill, persistance and yes, a little luck, to survive. The more money he has in his bankroll, the less luck he needs. The problem is that if a person has the ability to accumulate a large enough bankroll to play successfully, he could probably do much better in another endeavor.

I do know of at least one solo player who came by his bankroll through an inheritance, but he plays more than blackjack.

No! My friend,
From your advantage of 1.0% you have to add and subtract the StDev in percentage format.

So, for ONE StDev,
1.0% + 0.664% = 1.664%
1.0% - 0.664% = 0.336%

For TWO StDev you got to multiply the ONE StDev by 2 �etc

After 300 hours you will be on the positive side no matter what as long as you�ve got that 1.0% overall advantage against that particular game. If I say so, IT IS SO!

I�m doing this game for over 20 years and I know what I�m talking about. Yes, card counting works as long as you can pull that 1.0% over the long run.

Puiu

Solo blackjack play needs a very large bankroll to start out with or pure dumb luck if one is starting out with a small bankroll. It is boring and it is frustrating. Casinos are not all that exciting if that is the place where you have to make a living day in and day out. You must always be on the lookout for heat and must put up with constant barrings and backoffs. It can get very old, very fast. A solo player needs money, skill, persistance and yes, a little luck, to survive. The more money he has in his bankroll, the less luck he needs. The problem is that if a person has the ability to accumulate a large enough bankroll to play successfully, he could probably do much better in another endeavor.

I agree with all of the above and wish I knew this earlier. If I ever teach someone how to play BJ, that paragraph is the very first thing I will tell him.

When I first heard that BJ is beatable (went to casino once for a concert, gambled a bit and witnessed a counter getting kicked out), I was pretty excited. I thought - wow, I can just start small and as I win, I'll increase my bets, and win more, and it gets exponential from there. I spent next month studying and practicing at low stakes preparing to get serious. But after I learnt more and got battle-hardened, I really doubt I want to move on to high-stakes now. The bottom line seems to be that to make a small fortune you need a large fortune to start with, and if you do have it, you'd be better off investing it elsewhere.

Perhaps thats why casinos let people live at low stakes - they know that most redchip rookies will tie the rope around their own neck, and serious players will not bother wasting time at low-stakes.

Plus its a dead-end job. No career and no valuable skills learnt. "10 years gambling experience" is not something that looks good on a resume. So I think I'll just leave it as a part-time hobby for now. Unless I convince some friends to learn the game and form a team, being a professional solo doesnt sound very promising.

Sorry to but in, but I am a bit confused and you may be able to enlighten me. You said:

"From your advantage of 1.0% you have to add and subtract the StDev in percentage format.

So, for ONE StDev,
1.0% + 0.664% = 1.664%
1.0% - 0.664% = 0.336%

For TWO StDev you got to multiply the ONE StDev by 2 �etc"

I agree with this principle, but isn't .664% the standard deviation, so 2 standard deviations would be 1.328% and the expected result with 2 standard deviations would be:

1.0% + 1.328% = 2.328%
1.0% - 1.328% = -0.328%

With $3,000,000 in action, this would give results between +$69,840 and -$9,840. However, you also say:

"After 300 hours you will be on the positive side no matter what as long as you�ve got that 1.0% overall advantage against that particular game. If I say so, IT IS SO!"

So I guess I must be wrong. Like I said, I am no math expert. By the way, I disagree with everything else that Wongy is saying.

Coug Fan

Bootlegger's got it right--there are very few solo players, for the reasons he mentioned, and most of them do other things in casinos besides straight counting at bj. No one who really makes it as a gambler does it with a 1% edge. Most of the guys I know look down on a 2% edge -- they want 6%, 8%, 60%... Also, most of them could probably have done as well financially at other jobs -- successful pros tend to be SMART. But they also tend to not be able to stand working other types of jobs--they can't stand fixed hours, bosses, being underappreciated, etc. Most of the successful pro gamblers I know did not start out with big banks, however. They started with ridiculously small banks, earned at low-paying jobs (many former bartenders and cab drivers in my crowd) or from gambling with buddies in college, and went on to build them into big banks. They were willing to deal with the huge stress that goes with starting out small in this risky career, because it was better than the boredom and frustration of slowly working your way up in a regular job, where you are always held back by kiss-ups and idiots. This is, in fact, the best way to get rich from gambling--play extremely smart, and on your own money. Of course, some of the solo pros I know never really did succeed hugely in financial terms--they are still scraping by on those original small banks after a decade or two. They tend to be smart about scraping by on little money, and they value freedom and free time more than money.

my figures came from bjrm,but i will do it the old school way so you will understand.if your average bet is about 140.00x100 hands=14,000
multiply that by 1% and you get 140.00 an hour.you have some new kind of math:)

about using your large bankroll for a small business like a restaurant or invest in the stock market- i lost my ass in the stock market.if i would of stuck with bj instead of dabbling in the stock market i would have much more dough.i do think you should work a couple days a week and play the other days to keep your sanity.i was forced to play bj as my only source of income due to a layoff and havent looked back for the past year.it can be done.you need a special drive and stomach of steel to handle the swings.for example,if you can handle this swing your ready:I play at one casino and win 5000 in about 90 minutes.very HAPPY!!.drive to the next casino and lose 7000 in 2 hours.not HAPPY AT ALL!!!thats the kind of shit i have to put up with.when i die and finally meet MR Standard Deviation im going to kick his friggin ass.

getting a team.quit reading million dollar bj.ken uston was a overhyped ahole who cost me SD and DD games on the east coast.what kind of moron sues the casinos and actually thinks if he wins the case the casinos are going to say "you win ken,spread anything you want on our sd/dd games".teams are not as great as you think and as great as uston made it out to be.solo play is much better.if you play with a team your stuck playing those god awful shoes.wongy if you think sd/dd hardened you -go play shoes.

Wongy's numbers are quite realistic with the exception of the number of hours played.
I spend at least 600 hours at the tables every year. This would give $60000 for the expectation and $28000 for the standard deviation.
So, even with a swing of 2 sds.,the year wouldn't be negative.
But I agree that a negative year is still possible and I'm prepared for it (it actually happened once but at that time I was only a parttimer).
Apart from revenue from capital,BJ is my only source of income.
I enjoy having much more spare time than with a regular job.

Francis Salmon

PS. I know two other solo-professionals personnally.

Buy him a drink instead. Mr. Standard Deviation is what allows counters to play as long as we do.