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Glad you're back, jase! Sorry to hear about the medical issues, but it sounds like you'll make it out alright. Catheters suck.IronClaymore posted:In its own way, a casino is worse. If they catch you using a system, ANY sort of system, don't they bar you from the establishment for life? Not just that particular casino, but all casinos around the world (using facial recognition software)? For sports betting, you're not playing against the house, you're playing against the other players. Ideally, casinos like to try to balance their bets in sports betting, e.g. make sure there are as many bets for a team winning as there are for that team losing. Then, the house just has to take a small transaction fee and they're guaranteed to come out ahead. There are some very, very rare, exceptional sports gamblers who have studied teams, ideal betting lines, and betting strategies very carefully, and have a positive edge over the other players, even when you take the casino's cut into account. The casino doesn't care about those players because they casino still makes money. Also, they give something for the bad players to aspire to; knowing there are professional gamblers out there makes it easier for people to think that they've figured it out and could also be a professional gambler. Of course, the vast vast majority of these sports betters are delusional and will lose money over time. This is even more true in poker: players play against each other, and the house just takes a small piece of every pot. As long as games are running, the house is making money. There are tons of examples of players who have made careers out of this, and proven they can be winners even over hundreds of thousands or millions of hands. Casinos typically like the good regulars, because they come in a lot and keep the tables full. Full tables attract more players and keep making the casino money. Becoming a winning player at casinos typically takes years of practice, thousands of hours at the table, and a lot of intense study. Most players don't do this, and are losing money. Most other casino games aren't beatable. You can't beat Roulette, for example. Many casinos actively encourage players to come up with "systems" to try and beat the house, because the house knows the player can't win, but convincing them they can is what makes the house money. You'll often see big boards of numbers by Roulette tables, where they show the last 25 numbers and the distribution of red and black spins for that day. They want to encourage folks to look for patterns and think they've got it figured out. Of course, this is all random noise: the previous spin of a Roulette wheel does not influence the next one. Random distributions dictate that sometimes you'll flip a coin and get 5 heads in a row. Just by random chance, any five rolls in a row will have a 1 in 16 chance of being all red or all black. Bad gamblers see this and think it means the wheel isn't truly random, but again, you'd actually expect this pretty regularly in a random wheel. I was playing craps last week, and there was a player holding a booklet where he would write down every roll that happened. Whenever the next number came out, he'd nod knowingly, note it down in his book, say something like "of course... of course..." He'd then throw out a couple very specific bets based on what he believed was coming next, based on his calculations. It was obvious to the floor and everyone around him that he'd though he figured it out, and the floor was more than happy to take this dudes money. He lost $2k in about 20 minutes and left. Finally, there's the one beatable holy grail of beatable games: blackjack. Most casinos will let you sit at a table instructions on the ideal strategy for playing blackjack in any given situation. Hell, they'll even sell cards with this information to you in the gift shop! Why? The rules of blackjack are such that you cannot win at blackjack if you only play the game focusing on one hand at a time. At the right table, with the right rules, and the right deck, you can make money by "card counting," which is using the information about what cards are left in a deck to help predict when favorable cards for the player are likely to come out. Contrary to popular belief, "card counting" is not illegal. However, casinos can ban you if they think you're card counting in a way that gives you a huge advantage against them. These strategies are fairly obvious, because they require that the player makes bets that vary wildly in size; you might bet $10 in one hand, and then bet $1000 in the next hand. Card counters often employ teams to try and hide this activity from casinos. Casinos have done a number of things to mitigate player edge in blackjack and also their ability to effectively count cards. They've increased the number of decks to minimize the edge from counting. Sometimes they'll use random continuous shufflers for every hand, which mitigate the ability to card count completely. Sometimes the tables allow only a small range of bets: instead of being able to vary your bet from $10 to $1000, you might be able to bet only $10 to $100. This hurts card counters. Casinos have also altered the rules of the game itself: traditionally, players get paid 3:2 (more than even money) when they make a blackjack. However, it's increasingly common to see tables paying 6:5 (still more than even money, but significantly less so) for blackjack now. This seems like a small change since blackjacks are relatively rare, but it gives the house an additional 1.5% in edge. You'll also see differing rules about "surrendering," splitting aces, and what actions the dealers take. Many of these have less to do with card counting, and more to do with just making more money from players that don't know better. Each of these rule changes gives the house a percent or two more of an edge. Nowadays, it's very hard to find a low limit blackjack table on the Las Vegas strip that pays out 3:2 for blackjack. That all being said, for every successful card counter out there, there are hundreds of bad players that think they've "figured it out," but really have no clue about what they're doing. The casinos enjoy the legendary stories of card counting at this point, because just knowing the game can be beat makes players feel more at ease when they're playing it. It even gives them something to strive for, even though they'll never actually spend the time to learn how to card count correctly. All this to say that yeah, while casinos will ban folks sometimes for being "advantage" players, this is pretty darn rare. They know that most players are terrible, even the ones with "systems," and if they let a few winning players slip through the cracks, it's probably not the end of the world. In order to win at card counting, you usually need to spend a lot of time at the tables, and your betting patterns will be very obvious, so if you're making substantial money from the casino, they'll catch you eventually. As another poster mentioned, you also need to start with a fairly sizable bankroll, or you'll go broke most of the time. Sure, if a player is out there winning big every week, they'll ban them, and the fear of being banned is usually enough to keep most folks from even trying. I don't know how prevalent the facial recognition stuff really is. The casinos like to play this up, but pretty much every player I've seen pulled from a casino has been spotted by a dealer or floor person, not by a camera.
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Nov 30, 2017 18:12
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Glad to hear you're doing alright, jase! Keep posting cool stories  .jase1 posted:Since I sold my company and retired early I was looking to either invest in a small business or purchase one outright. I even thought about making a bid for SA when I read the rumors about the potential demise of this place but decided not too after chatting with a few other posters here. So I bought a boat instead
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Jan 20, 2018 22:18
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