There are 3 kinds of texts . . .

. . . that are useful to the advantage player :

1. The texts that contain the whereabouts of a juicy game. Such a text is, for instance, the CBJN when it informs about a 2:1 promo. However, chances are that by the time you are reading this, the game is long gone! Unless it's a private e-mail, forget about it.

2. The texts demonstrating that specific casino games are beatable. Beat The Dealer is the prime example: After that one came out, it was no longer a surprise that Blackjack can be beaten. Lots of books followed BTD with elaborations on the theme, offering more powerful systems and more insights, but without anything astonishingly new. A book that demonstrated novel weaknesses in casino games is the relatively recent Beyond Counting.

3. The texts that teach how to attack a beatable game, whatever that game might be. The prime example here is Blackjack Attack, offering insights which apply not just to BJ but to any beatable game.

I am putting all this down just to show the fallacy in the claim that "the pros are laughing with Don Schlesinger's book". Things are like this:

A pro is NOT looking out for text #1 : He is actively seeking out the juicy games himself or through his associates. At worst, through the grapevine, which nowadays may be an e-mail. He is certainly NOT looking to see such information published! As a matter of fact, he is pissed to find out about a good game opportunity on a goddamn internet message board, such as bj21.com, 'cause it means that game's now gone.

A pro is also NOT looking out for text #2 : What kind of "pro" is he when he's waiting from some kinda book to enlighten him about front-loading or legal past-posting?! The pro learns these things the hard way, meaning by himself, by the teachings of other pros or through the school of hard knocks. Grosjean's book did NOT teach the true pros much. It merely brought to the masses of casual players out there the information that the pros already knew - albeit in a very disciplined, concise and precise manner. Any pro who only found out by that book that there's a way to beat craps, was no pro really.

A pro is actively searching for guidance that will help him improve and better materialize his advantage against a beatable game, in other words text #3 : Bankroll requirements, risk taking, risk measurement, elimination of unnecesary work, focus on the essentials, ways to achieve discipline - all these things are vital for the professional player. [Look up the dictionary definition of pro, aka professional player, to understand this better.] Which is why it is laughable, if not completely ridiculous, to claim that "pros are laughing with Don Schlesinger's book"! On the contrary, that book contains precisely what the serious professional player wants to know.

--Cyrus

A professional player (a person who makes more than 75% of his income on blackjack) Problably does not read many BJ books anymore.

But if they did, why would they laugh at a book that states good sound principles and backs them up with computer data?

They might think it overstates ideas, or tarries too long on some point, (I do not in either case) They would not laugh or mock the book based on the fact that it is correct and true information.

Hell Tiger Woods might not read Lee Travino's new book but he would not laugh at Lee's insights into the game.

This sounds like crap to me. Who ever said it was a fool. The value of the book to me in dollars is many times more than I paid for it.

Hey If you play BJ and have not read BJ Attack! buy the damn book.

Also BJ for Blood, and Beat the Dealer, and Kenny's Book Million Dollar BJ is good, any of S Wong's stuff.... Some of these are dated but they all contain information from BJ deity. These are the sharpest minds in the game today.

If pro's are laughing its at GIGO and all that pattern betting garbage that is being pumped onto the ignorant public by the sewage makers of todays book market.

to convince me Cyrus.

A pro is actively searching for guidance that will help him improve and better materialize his advantage against a beatable game, in other words text #3 : Bankroll requirements, risk taking, risk measurement, elimination of unnecesary work, focus on the essentials, ways to achieve discipline - all these things are vital for the professional player. [Look up the dictionary definition of pro, aka professional player, to understand this better.] Which is why it is laughable, if not completely ridiculous, to claim that "pros are laughing with Don Schlesinger's book"! On the contrary, that book contains precisely what the serious professional player wants to know.

You seem to have forgotten Schlesinger's own advice on turning
pro, that "you can, but you probably shouldn't try".
Well, screw that, I am not interested in a book for bourgeois playboys with time to kill.

BJA is a good book. It is however, completely useless to most professionals, for the simple reason that it is about card-counting and most professionals do not use card-counting exclusively, and BJA is a book exclusively about the use of card-counting. That should hardly be surprising.
Investors will not back a player who can spend the best part of a decade in the red. Teams fall apart for the same reason, the flux. The method is easily detected.
You need more EV and less risk, and less casino awareness, to make the proposition viable.
As soon as you start fortifying your blackjack skills with non-counting methods, the data in BJA becomes useless for obvious reasons.
If I am sequencing, or card steering, or whatever, the optimal game conditions I am searching for are very different from those of a card counter and writings about card counting are irrelevant. How could it be otherwise?

dear cyrus,

"pros are laughing with Don

Schlesinger's book"!

since you put quotation marks around this please cite the post where i said that. i said the pros are laughing at him! i stand by that statement.

"What kind of "pro" is he when he's waiting from

some kinda book to enlighten him about front-loading or legal past-posting?!"

apparrently, some who frequent this page.

"Grosjean's book did NOT teach the true pros much".

yeah, cause you know i was all over that bj partial card perfect strategy before he wrote it. 1 card poker perfect strategy etc...

when i say bja has not made me or the many people i play with a penny, it's the honest to gods truth! we had moved beyond counting and made huge sums of money years before that book came out. don cannot seem to get over that fact claiming i'm jealous lol..

we have taken millions of dollars legally out of realworld casinos. some of this even came from gasp the game of baccarat! because the methods are not in print according to don they don't exist, calling me a fraud. i would bet my considerable bankroll don has never played a frontloader, cut himself an ace or the dealer a five, tracked an ace etc, etc, etc.

amazingly, even with my double digit iq and my seething jealousy of don schlesinger we have managed to do all these things for many years. the casinos and griffin are so pissed at us they have even resorted to false cheating accusations which they now will have to answer to in court.

bja is a good book for cardcounters. it's worthless to me and my associates. sorry, that's the truth.

don schlesinger's internet personality is comical. don schlesinger is a cardcounting expert. show me one time where i have EVER denied that. don schlesinger is a great teacher to cardcounting fledglings, and i have said that many times. don schlesinger is NOT an all around advantage play expert. not even close. his continuing ignoring of the baccarat moves for instance shows this to the working pro LOUD AND CLEAR . once again, his enormous ego where he must be thought of as the authority of every subject which interests him overwhelms the conversation (did you know that don knew the answer to every "millionaire" question before it was even asked???). using "blurbs" from the back cover of his book from other back slapping authors does nothing to change the facts, sorry to say.

so i leave you with this my favorite cybersniper cyrus, if you're going to take a shot at me, you'd better get your facts straight.

stalker

"Please cite the post where I said that pros are laughing with Don Schlesinger's book. I said the pros are laughing at him! I stand by that statement."

This is correct but notice that I avoided mentioning you or your comment. My point was specifically about the charges levelled against BJA. The quotation was used for these charges, although it is easy to see that it was your remarks that set it off.

"If you're going to take a shot at me, you'd better get your facts straight."

I am not taking a "shot" at you. You seem just a little paranoid at times, not to mention very jittery with that flame-thrower trigger. As to my facts, they are as straight as they come! Or so I believe.

"You know I was all over that bj partial card perfect strategy before he wrote it. 1 card poker perfect strategy etc...

When I say bja has not made me or the many people I play with a penny, it's the honest to gods truth! We had moved beyond counting and made huge sums of money years before that book came out.

Bja is a good book for cardcounters. It's worthless to me and my associates. Sorry, that's the truth."

This is where we disagree. I do not doubt that you find BJA "worthless". What I doubt is that you have arrived at, for instance, the optimal betting strategies, the bankroll requirement formulas and the risk of ruin notions independently of Schlesinger, if not ahead of him.

And since I steadfastly believe these notions, among others in the book (not necessarily about what you dismissively call "counting"), to be essential for a professional player, well, for this reason I find it hard to accept that any pro in his right mind would find the text "worthless". Let alone be "laughing at Don", if i have quoted you right this time.

In any case, it was a refreshing change seeing you addressing specific arguments rather than resorting to childish (and totally un-professional) behavior on these boards. I welcome this and wish you that it becomes a trend.

Take care.

--Cyrus

I have provided Cliff Notes too. I think it specifies the situation!

I am asking if you understood my above post because it is addressed to you too? Do you not realize that unless you did independant discoveries you benefited from BJA--not publishing was my own damn fault! SOTSOG's comment should be considered as well.