Skip to main content

Blackjack (and baseball) update 10/21

After watching the Astros beat up on the Yankees last night (which netted me a nice $75) I decided to play a little blackjack at my favorite low limit tables. I had an interesting thing happen that I went to tell you about.

I was on spot 5, just to the right of the third base player, who appeared to be a novice player. At one point he tucked a busted hand. This is when you bust, but tuck the hand under your bet like you didn't bust.

The guy was a littler tipsy, but not really drunk, and he probably just counted wrong.  He had drawn a 3+3+7 while holding a 5 + 4 for a total of 22.

What I found unusual is not that he tucked the busted hand, it happens from time to time, but that the dealer did not notify the Pit Boss when it happened. She just said something to the player and then continued on with the take and pay.

This is the sign of a sloppy dealer. The reason that the Pit Boss gets notified about it is in case the player does the same thing with a different dealer. Having this happen once is probably an honest mistake, with most players. But if it happens more than once in the course of an evening, then it's probably the player trying to take a shot at getting a free payout.

Since the dealer changes at least once an hour, and the player can change tables at any time, the only person who can track this properly is the Pit Boss. It's definitely in the dealers' procedure manual that the Pit Boss should be notified whenever a player does such a thing. So the dealer is sloppy, and doesn't follow procedures, and apparently the Pit Bosses either don't pay attention or don't care.

I'm not saying that you should ever cheats or attempt to cheat at a blackjack table. This is just a piece of intelligence that you need to file away in the back of your mind, as it may someday help give you an advantage.

By the way, on the Yankees/ Astros game, I had the Astros on the run line giving up 1.5 runs and getting +150 for it. So for a $50 bet I won $75 plus my fifty back. I felt like the Astros were due to start hitting well, after not doing so for most of the series.

As for the Blackjack session, I ended up losing all of the $75 that I had one on baseball. I played for about an hour, mostly flat bedding at $5 although I did go up to $20 on a positive 7, which I won. It didn't matter in the long run however, as I don't remember the dealer busting once. At least I was playing with house money.

Good luck everybody.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's the surveillance room like? Repost

This is a repost of a post I made about a year ago, but I feel like it bares s repeating. Enjoy. I got another good question last week, from a reader wanting to know what a surveillance room is like, how it is laid out and how it is staffed and run.  So here goes. I have worked in surveillance departments at six different casinos in the last 25 years. Some very small (300 slots, 6 blackjack tables) and some very big (3000 slots, 60-70 table games of all kinds). When I started in the early 90's it was all VCRs and not all cameras were recorded all the time. We used a lot of "multi-plexers" and "quad screens". A multi-plexer used one VCR to display and record up to 16 screens on one monitor. Since the VCR still records at 30 frames per second, that meant that if you did a review on any one of those 16 screens you would be looking at a "freeze frame" effect, where you only got 1.8 frames per second of the shot you were looking at. A quad would record

Advantage play is not cheating. Repost

This is a reprint of a previous post on advantage play. Before I begin, I want to remind you about my Patreon page. If you enjoy my content, and would like to see more of it more often, please consider becoming a patron. Click here to go to my page. Whenever I meet people and tell them what my profession has been for the last 25 years, I always come away with the feeling that they equate card counting and advantage play as cheating. It is not, of course, as most of the readers of this blog undoubtedly know. It is just against the policy of most casinos to allow it. As a legally licensed, privately owned business located on private property, all casinos have the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason they choose. Most of the time, card counting, or ace/shuffle tracking, or anything else that casino management considers "advantage play" wont even get you thrown out, just politely asked to not play blackjack anymore. Management would love to have you go play slots

New poll posted on Twitter

Check out my latest Tweet and vote on your favorite casino gambling movie, here . Click here to become a Patron and help support my blogging. And  here is the link to my Amazon affiliate page and some  Good books about Casino gambling . And you can also get a free 30 day trial of Amazon Prime by clicking on this link here . I am also now selling advertising sponsorships on this blog. I can devote an entire blog post to your product, service or anything else gaming-related. Click on this link to go to my eBay listing here .