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| Advantage Play | |
When most people hear the words ‘advantage play’ they think of blackjack and card counting. Card-counting costs casinos money every day of the week. Casinos are losing money to card-counting even when there aren't any card counters at the casino. Why is this? The answer is simple - card-counting countermeasures are time consuming and costly. It's easy to make life hard for card-counters by short shoeing, burning cards, implementing restrictions and performing convoluted and lengthy shuffles, but how smart is it to spend more money on countermeasures than what the card-counters are actually costing you? You can't afford to get personal about card-counters - either they are costing you money or they aren't. Casinos are very aware that not all punters should be treated the same way, which is why you have premium player incentives. A player is assessed and has to meet certain criteria to qualify for the different levels of incentives. Why then are all card counters treated the same? Most countermeasures applied are the same regardless of the player's potential to affect the bottom line. I believe a card counter's potential for damage should be assessed in exactly the same way that a premium player's turnover is assessed for profitability. Card-counting countermeasures should be about informed decisions not knee-jerk reactions. So how do we go about making these informed decisions? The first thing we can do is take a leaf out of the professional players' book. Bank to Bet Ratio Most of you would be aware that to be successful as a card-counter many formulae and indices must be learnt and put into practice. Without doubt one of the most important principles to learn and understand is the bank to bet ratio. The most famous bank to bet formula is called the Kelly Criterion. It requires that you bet 'that portion of your bankroll equal to your advantage'. For example you would bet: -
Unfortunately the Kelly Criterion is not ideally suited to blackjack because it does not allow you to bet on the dealer when the dealer has the advantage. A more common method is to use a risk analyzer that allows you to select your 'element of ruin.' In other words you calculate a percentage chance of going broke versus the chance of doubling your bankroll. A professional gambler
would not accept much worse than a 5% chance of going broke versus a 95%
chance of doubling his money. If you think this is very conservative,
look at it another way: - Armed with this knowledge
we can use the blackjack professional's own tools to our advantage. Professional
gamblers use blackjack engines or simulators to formulate playing and
betting strategies. Stanford Wong's Blackjack Analyzer is probably the
most used and respected engine available. These engines allow you to input
house rules including - number of decks and penetration, counting system,
betting system, number of boxes played and much more. They then generate
a playing strategy and simulate the game at the rate of many millions
of hands per hour. From these results the player can accurately predict
his expectation. If you were to use one of these engines in reverse, i.e.
key in the amount that the player bets at each increase in advantage,
true 1, true 2, true 3 etc. you would then know how much per hour this
player would cost you, given perfect play.
Sounds pretty reasonable doesn't it? The bankroll requirement to play this game is over $55,000 and the hourly return is around $8. How many of your local counters do you think are working off a $55,000 bankroll and playing perfectly? If I were a gambling man I'd be willing to bet not many! If they're betting more than this amount or betting the same amount off a smaller bankroll they're not professional gamblers, just punters playing a reasonably intelligent game with a very high chance of tapping out. Play this game off a $20,000 bankroll and you are now playing Russian Roulette with two bullets in a gun with six chambers - you'll blow your brains out every third pull of the trigger. A card-counter playing perfectly to a 5% element of ruin, off a bankroll around ten to twenty grand, has an earning capacity slightly less than the chap selling newspapers at the front door. The practice of passing the buck by phoning surveillance whenever a punter ups his bet from $5 to $50 or short shoeing him just to be sure, is a huge waste of resources when a simple analysis of the player's game would confirm that he is not a threat. So we've got a handle on 99% of the world's advantage players, now let's take a look at the other 1%. Before I tell you where the real money is going, I'd like to discuss camouflage. Professional players use camouflage to deceive the pit. Camouflage always costs a player money otherwise it would be called expectation. A smart professional knows that the best and cheapest form of camouflage is to keep moving so that the pit staff or surveillance's software can't get a fix. He has also taken a leaf out of the supermarkets' strategy book. Supermarkets use 'loss leaders' to get customers into their store - they're prepared to lose money on some items just to get you through the doors. This professional knows how the casino system works. He'll make plays that bring heat and then proceed to play a losing game until the card counter catcher or tracking software convinces you that he is a mug punter. The player only has to play a losing game for as long as is absolutely necessary because the casino staff usually let him know when he can stop. It's pretty obvious really; when he first jumps his bet he feels the tension and hostility in the pit but as soon as you get the "all clear" from surveillance the casino host is fawning all over him with offers he can't refuse. It basically comes down to this - the fish you're catching aren't big enough to eat and the ones that are, are not taking your bait. The other one percent All this information is kindergarten stuff to the professional player. He knows all about bank-to-bet ratios, fluctuation, the long run and all that stuff. He knows that a casino evens out its fluctuations and gets into the long run by having lots of tables, guaranteeing a large turnover. How does the professional increase turnover? The first thing he does is make sure that he doesn't park himself at a table and play through all the negatives. He wanders around the pit counting down shoes and only bets when the count is at true two or higher. Things are now looking a bit better for our card-counter, but they get better! Our card-counter recruits nine of his friends who each kick in $25,000. Now you might think that these ten players will now each play off a $25 000 bankroll. This would be the case, more or less, if they were all playing at the same table. By having ten players playing on different tables, it is exactly the same as one player getting ten times the hands per hour. They are simply compressing time just like the casinos do by having squillions of tables. This situation means that each player can play off the total bankroll of $250,000. Allowing for the 5% element of ruin and by playing only advantage hands, our BJ team is now costing you a cool $3000 per hour or over $5,000 000 per year. So that was the bad news, now for the really bad news. At about the same time that casinos wised up about card-counting, professional teams stopped using it - or rather they stopped using card-counting techniques that could be recognized by casino staff or their tracking software. Let's face it, you don't or shouldn't need a computer to tell you that a player has a few clues about basic strategy or that the layout gets covered in paint every time he puts a big bet out. It would be a pretty naïve card-counter who thought he could get away with that kind of play in the nineties. Professional teams are like commandos operating behind enemy lines and like any covert operation they rely heavily on spies, intelligence and treachery to a certain extent. Teams send their advance guard into a casino weeks and sometimes months before the action is due to go down. These people are sent in to gather information on shuffles and procedures, to befriend the dealers and generally get themselves known to the staff. Before sending the big players into the casino they would have already analyzed and mapped all the shuffles and would know the makeup of every shoe - pre and post shuffle. So now they are in possession of shuffle data and procedural information they can put into practice their alternative techniques and make some real money. Profiling Instead of keeping an ongoing running count and converting it to a true count for playing and betting decisions, a separate count is kept for each deck. With knowledge gained from the shuffle analyses, the deck can be reconstructed post shuffle and a profile of the next shoe obtained. When the profiled deck is played, the canny pit boss or software may tell you that the player on box three has just increased his bet at the two-deck level by a factor of twenty on a count of negative 9. This is great, you upgrade his air ticket to first class and put him in the presidential suite. Surveillance takes the cameras off him and the pit leaves him in peace to play his losing game. So the pit boss or software might well have been holding negative nine but this player knew that during the previous shuffle, deck 5 came together with deck 8 and would result in the count falling by two points over the next 50 or so cards. In other words - at the two-deck level he knew he was playing into a true two and at his bankroll size this warranted a table maximum bet. Bear in mind that your software or canny pit boss will still be holding heavy negative after the target deck has been played. It gets worse! Sequencing (ace locating) The professionals' analyses have also shown that this two-pass shuffle separates the original sequence of cards by three. By remembering the two or three cards placed on top of the ace as the cards are put into the discard tray, the sequence can be reconstructed in the next shoe. This is how it works: - Let's take this two-pass shuffle and say the cards on top of the ace were 8h-3d-Qd. In the next shoe when the 8h is dealt, the 3d is expected four cards later, the Qd four cards after that followed by the ace another four cards later. Of course the science is not exact so the player would normally play three boxes when he was expecting the ace. When you consider that an ace as your first card gives you a 52% advantage, this is a very profitable play. To illustrate the effectiveness of this technique, let's assume a worst case scenario with a true negative five (or 3% disadvantage to the player). The player wagers three boxes of $5000. Two of the boxes at a disadvantage of 3% have an expectation of negative $150 per box. The box with the ace has an expectation of $2600 (52% of $5000). The net result of that play is an expectation of $2300. Not bad for one ace is it? It should be noted that ace 'sequencing' is not the same as ace 'counting'. The player may well bet high even though your software is telling you that the ace distribution is normal or does not favour the player. Ace sequencing can be done manually where aces are identified or 'keyed' using two or three 'key girls' accompanying the big player. Key girls are usually paid on the number of aces keyed so they become very good at remembering several sequences. Alternatively a computer can be used. Huge money has been taken out of casinos by manual shuffle mapping and sequencing teams but it is getting harder and harder as casinos become more aware of their techniques and modus operandi. Concealed Electronics Professional teams have been using electronics and microcomputers since the seventies. Even straight counting teams use sophisticated communications equipment to direct and organize staff within a casino. No self-respecting team would operate within a casino without first obtaining the frequencies of security and surveillance two-ways along with wireless pit phones. In many cases detection has been avoided by the elementary precaution of monitoring the casino's communications. Most of the communication equipment used within a casino is of such low power that there is virtually no chance of it being detected by a broadband frequency detector or 'bug detector' as it is more commonly known. Many teams possess communications and surveillance equipment that would be the envy of many law enforcement agencies. As good as this equipment is, it is elementary compared to current concealable microcomputers and their associated programs. These devices are initially taken into a casino to record shuffle information. Shuffles are then analyzed off-site and strategies determined. The programs used in these computers are so sophisticated that they are not only able to reconstruct a shoe of cards post-shuffle, they also take into account the riffle ratio, pick size and consistency of each individual dealer's shuffle. The data inputter simply keys in an individual dealer ID number at shuffle time. This enables the program to build a profile on every dealer encountered and reject any dealer that it cannot track to a pre-set degree of accuracy. Gaming computers take many forms. They can be fairly simple units consisting of a body worn microcomputer with keypad input and vibrator output, through to single toe operated units with voice output to an earpeice concealed in the ear canal. The range of these devices is enormous; in nearly all cases the person inputting the information is not the person placing the bets so many are fitted with transmitters. In some cases, such as in the state of Nevada where possession of these devices is a felony, the computer is off-site. The data inputter sends the data to another location via a transmitter, which may be a bug type device, two-way radio or cell phone. This other location could be a briefcase in guest services, a hotel room or, if a cell phone is being used, anywhere in the world. The following scenario demonstrates the feasibility of playing big game baccarat in London while having all the processing done on a computer in Australia: - We have a data inputter, who is in possession of all the concealed electronics (radio receiver, cell phone, inductive loop etc.) sending the information from the casino to the off-site computer. The results are then transmitted back to the big player's earpiece via an inductive loop, which picks up the signals from the data inputter's radio receiver. As data inputters are usually not overtly associated with the person or persons placing the bets they rarely get caught. So what about the big player?
He's not going to get caught! Even if you pounce before he swallows his earpiece he'll just claim he's a tad hard of hearing. Advanced Data Input Methods Data input is not limited to keypads or toe buttons. Voice input is now a practical option in concealable computers with the introduction of a single-chip voice-recognition device capable of recognizing sixty words. The recognized words are speaker dependent so they can be in any language or no language at all - a series of sounds would be sufficient. The microphone is even sensitive enough to pick up a whisper. Video transmission is also becoming a practical and viable solution using fiber optic cameras and miniature video transmitters. A complete video transmission system comprising power pack and video transmitter can be as small as a packet of cigarettes. Add to this a miniature colour video camera and a fiber optic image bundle and you have a state of the art system that can be comfortably concealed on any part of the body. Other Games Blackjack is not the only game targeted by professional computer equipped teams. Baccarat and it's derivatives has been a target for many years and is becoming more so as technology improves. If conditions and procedures meet requirements and your casino is selected as a target, a well financed and electronically equipped team has the ability to put wings on your annual bonus. If conditions and procedures do not meet their requirements a little bit of inside help is becoming easier and easier to obtain. I believe the future will see a marked rise in the use of electronics and inside help. Coupled with the game of baccarat, which is where the real money is, you have a cocktail too attractive to pass up. |