Casino Surveillance Pro

Before I begin, I'd like to remind everyone that I have a Patreon page now. 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. Okay, on with the show. I was playing Blackjack the other day. I lost about 40 bucks, no big deal. But I got to talking with the Pit Boss and that's what this week's blog is about. Our conversation, that is. I asked the Pit Boss if there were any 6 to 5 games in town, here in Reno. (For those of you that don't know, 6 to 5 games refer to Blackjack games that don't pay out 3 to 2 if a player gets a blackjack, but only payout 6 to 5. These are horrible games, and you should avoid them like the plague.) She didn't really snswer, but said  that 6 to 5 games were a reaction by some casinos to the fact that they felt like they were losing money on their Royal Match games. Well, I know better. 6 to 5 games are just another attempt by the corporate casinos t...

II have a Patron page. Click here to become a Patron. What will you get, you might ask, for making a donation?  I'd ask the same thing if I were you. Well I guess the word would be access. Access to me in my base of knowledge floating around in my noggin . Become a patron and I will give you my direct cell phone number, am I promise to answer anytime, day or night, whenever you have a question that you want answered. Also, I want to expand my content into podcasts, video podcasts and getting my live radio talk show back on the air in Reno Nevada. So..... Do me a solid and visit my Patreon page.

Ok ay, here is a link to a video I just watched from Blackjack Apprenticeship on YouTube. go watch it quickly, it's only about 5 minutes long, then come back here and look at my comments. Click here to watch First of all, I want to say that Colin makes some very good points, and he really nails it as far as what type of player should not be counting cards professionally. I would even go a little further than he does and saying that the vast majority of all gamblers should not be doing this professionally. They just don't have the required bankroll, attitude, and ability to do so. in the world of almost 7 billion people, I would estimate that there are fewer than 100, 000 people who play cards for a living, as their only income. And the vast majority of those are Asians. So that's a statistically insignificant number of people. And I'm not talking about the whales, both in this country and abroad, who have multi million dollars or even billions of dollars of net wor...

There. I said it. I'm sure I'll get a lot of angry response or emails, but there really is only one advantage that the house has over the player in blackjack. Do you know what it is? The house plays last. In a full Blackjack game with seven players at the table and one dealer the cards are dealt in the play moves clockwise from first base to third base. To be correct, I should say that it's clockwise from the Dealer's perspective. At any rate, once every player receives there two cards and the dealer has his two cards, with one of them face-up, then every player in turn makes his hit or stand decisions. It will start with the player on the dealers left and proceed clockwise to the player on the dealers right. Then the dealer plays last. If he busts, it only makes a winner out of  everyone left with bets on the layout. Prior to that, as play went around the table, if a player had busted he lost immediately (and the dealer immediately took his money). If the dealer go...

Well , it had to happen sooner or later. I finally lost at a craps session.  For those of you just joining in,I started playing craps again after about a 20-year layoff.  I either broke even or won the first five sessions that I played. I won as much as $150, and as little as $20, plus the one time I left the table dead even, for a total  win of about $270.  So when I lost 50 bucks on Monday, it didn't really hurt very much. I basically just played the way I described in a previous blog post. Pass line bet with full odds, then place the 6 and the 8. Then make a come bet and take full odds on it. Stay away from the props and the field. It's not rocket science, it's just making bets on numbers that have a good chance of coming in and don't have a massive house advantage against you. I lost because four shooters in a row, including myself, all sevened out Within just a couple of rolls of establishing their first point. Nobody at the table wins any money doing that, u...

I played craps this week for the first time in probably 20 years. I left Reno in late 1997 to work for a tribal casino, then another casino , in the Pacific Northwest. Once I was working for the tribes, I felt like it was improper for me to gamble at those facilities, even the ones I wasn't working at. Not all of them offered craps anyways, so I just didn't play. So earlier this week, I found myself in the Cal Neva Casino in downtown Reno, with an extra hundred bucks in my pocket and an empty craps table staring me in the face. It worked out pretty good too, with me playing for about half an hour and walking away dead even. Having been bitten by the bug, I returned to the Cal Neva a couple days later and this time left about a hundred fifty ahead. So, let me tell you how I play craps. Rule number one: stay away from the goddamn proposition bets, including the field bet. Rule number two: reread rule number one. Hard ways, horn bets, C & E, they all have terrible payoffs ...