Made famous in books and movies, card counting is considered cheating, at least by casinos. In most states (but not New Jersey), known practitioners are banned. The wagering of card counters assumes a clearly recognizable pattern over time, and Johnson was being watched very carefully. The verdict: card counting was not Don Johnson’s game. He had beaten the casinos fair and square.
Card counting is not cheating, at least if you can do it without an external device. That's like saying that you can play this game but only if you don't think about it really hard. Even with card counting the casinos have a slight edge against you. They swap the shoe out frequently so that you have to reset your count.
The reason it's not illegal in NJ is because someone sued them and won. It should be legal everywhere.
As of January 2012, there are no federal, state or local laws which prohibit card counting in the United States as long as no external card counting device or person assists the player in counting cards.
BUT:
In all parts of the United States, with Atlantic City being the sole exception, casinos may ban any player for any reason including card counting as long as the Federal laws against discrimination based on race, creed, sex, national origin, age, or physical disability are not violated.
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I think that a casino should be able to kick out anyone that they want for any reason, including card counting, being extremely lucky, being a jerk, etc...
Allowing casinos to kick out anybody who shows winning potential is pretty much guaranteeing that the odds are always in their favor. It eliminates the 'jackpot' style story like present here.
Also of note though, is that while Atlantic City casinos can't eject people for winning, they can hamstring them in a variety of other ways. Usually they just change the table stakes from "$100,000 max bet" to "$0.25 max bet" on whatever table the winner is on, severely limiting his winning potential.
Yes I think you're right, it is legal but it can hardly be used anymore because most casino's use an automatic shuffling machine where they refill the cards after every deal and that continually shuffles.
Yeah this article is awfully written. Its portrayal of counting as even possibly unfair ("he had beaten the casinos fair and square [by not counting]") is ridiculous, and it does a horrendous job explaining his method. His method isn't even addressed until half-way through the article, the article is littered with totally unnecessary comments like "He plays perfect cards" (if you're not counting, every hand's decision should be set in stone), and the actual method they describe isn't logically consistent. At first they make it sound like he won by bargaining down special rules to give himself a substantially greater discount than the house's edge, but then they go on to say that he won $2 million later on without the discount (despite the house having a fractional edge), without further explanation. They've already made it clear that this guy plays to win rather than to gamble, so he obviously didn't win it by pure luck. So we're clearly missing something here...
You couldn't have written it any better. Mark Bowden, the writer of the article, is superficially looking at the situation and not telling us Don's methods of success. I'm more interested in what tactics Don is doing rather then the romanticized story behind it all. That's just me though.
if the balance is 50/50 (or close enough to), but your losses are 20% less than your wins, then over the long game (which is repeated several times in the article) you will come out ahead. You will have some winning streaks and some losing streaks. But in the long run, that 20% difference at 50/50 win/loss will give you an overall win. He did not just walk into each casino and win those millions in one sitting apiece.
which can happen on a winning streak - stats works that way. $2M is only a part of the $15M he took the casinos for. If he's playing on 'their money' - that is, he's already ahead, he can keep playing until the streak turns.
He wouldn't do that. He's playing to win, not to gamble. Streaks aren't a statistical phenomenon in the sense that once you start a streak, you'd be more likely to keep winning. As far as non-card counters are concerned, and as far as all players are concerned if a continuous shuffle machine is in use, each hand of blackjack is an independent event. Once this player wins the casino's money, it becomes "his money," not "their money." By "their money" the article meant if he's up during a game and the odds are still in his favor, he'll continue as long as he feels like it. If the odds are no longer favorable, there's no way an advantage player like him would start gambling $2M for kicks.
Note that I am not calling it a lucky streak, it is a winning streak, where a series of hands has left him with more money won than lost - he keeps on going because he's up on the day. The statistics of probability quite happily support this - all I am saying is that a winning streak is feasible, not that it is probable.
You might be right. Apparently he "would not divulge his betting strategy" (http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/breaking/meet-the-bl...), which means we won't be able to even know if he is an advantage player or just got really, really lucky. Nevertheless, the article I just linked to says that $100,000 per hand is the highest maximum Johnson has ever heard of, so assuming he is in fact the only person betting this much, and since he claims to have bet that much only because he's using a mathematical strategy that puts the odds in his favor, a liberally applied combination of Occam's Razor and Bayes' Theorem suggests that the positive outcome is likely more than just luck but that the odds really are in his favor.
It's not illegal, but how do you define cheating - is it by laws, or by rules set by the game runner?
For example, in football (soccer) it's cheating to punch the ball into the goal... but the associations that decide on the rules could make this perfectly fair play next year, just by deciding that they no longer define it as cheating.
There are rules set by the gaming commissions in each state that the casinos are fairly well bound to upholding. In Vegas, the legislation is more in favor of the casinos than in New Jersey, but both are pretty broadly pro-casino.
In Vegas, it's worth noting that a casino can eject any player for any reason, whether they are 'cheating' or not. If they are deemed to be actually cheating, they have the potential to sue for recompense, as well as blackball the gambler from that (and other) casinos. Nevada also has state laws that define what cheating is[1] and what recourse the casinos have.
Card counting is considered 'illegal' by the casinos, but most legislation only applies to physical tampering, such as marking cards or using illicit devices. That won't stop the casinos from ejecting or blackballing you for counting.
In Atlantic City though, they can't eject you for card counting, but they are allowed to change the table stakes on you. If you're at a $10,000 a hand table, and wiping out the casino in a way they don't like, they're perfectly allowed to change the table stakes to 25 cents at any table you sit down at.
It's crappy, but you're still welcome to enjoy the gambling experience, just without the potential to win anything significant.
Because of the recession casinos are desperate for high-rollers. To lure them in they offer perks. Some of those perks include slight modifications to the rules and a "loss discount" -- for example: losing $500k only costs you $400k.
This guy negotiated rules that changed his odds to 50/50. Then he negotiated an 80% loss discount, which meant for each $1 of upside, his downside was $0.80.
So to pull this off, you need $1m to put down, great negotiation skills, even better blackjack skills, good luck, and a very sophisticated understanding of stats.
No, that still doesn't make sense. The loss discount was on a per-trip basis, not per hand, so basically if at the end of the week you were down $100k, you only owed $80k.
The rules were generous but NOT totally even. The house still had around 0.25%, which is low, but not unheard of. Even on the Vegas strip you can find Blackjack games open to the general public under 0.50% house edge. Of course, that's
with optimum general strategy, not "playing your hunches", which could easily open the house edge to 10% or more depending on how dumb you're playing.
My guess is that he was card counting, but not with a traditional system, and he wasn't using it to size his bets, just to make strategy decisions, which would be harder to detect.
The odds of beating 3 separate casinos, over a reasonable number of hands, even against a very low house edge, are quite small.
I agree, but it appears that while he doesn't "count", He plays a more general "averages" game. Per the article: "More useful, for his purposes, is running a smaller number of hands and paying attention to variation. The way averages work, the larger the sample, the narrower the range of variation. "
Edit: I would guess he's developed some algorithm for keeping track of swings and general variation, so he plays not hand by hand the way counting goes, but rather "batch" or "streak" While will also have wild swings of him making and losing lots of money, but if he keeps tabs on these variations, he can swing them in his favor over time.
Probably the best evidence for your argument is the fact that he apparently negotiated a hand-shuffled shoe. I'm amazed anyone would agree to it, since it's pretty much a giant warning sign that the guy is planning to exploit poor shuffles.
The shuffles needn't be poor. The existence of the hand-shuffled shoe just means he has the opportunity to count or shuffle track. The former is impossible if they use a continuous shuffle machine and I imagine the latter is either impossible or too difficult to use effectively. I agree it makes no sense for the casino to agree to that if that's outside their normal rules. I guess they want high rollers to think they've got an edge, but the casinos realize that most high rollers don't actually know how to count fast enough to realize that edge. And until this guy, they've always been able to identify the successful advantage players (not counting group players a la the MIT blackjack team) before losing millions of dollars...
another factor: as an inside guy, he probably knew their precise algorithm for catching counters. I suspect he does count, but knows exactly how to vary his play to keep just south of the model targeting him as a counter.
What I'm saying is, they have mathematical models that they follow to decide whether someone is counting. I suspect this guy was in fact using information about cards played to vary his future bets -- in effect counting, but he was doing it in a way that did not fit the house's models for what card counters normally do.
He clearly knew more than the people who were watching him, so the fact that all the 'experts' were paying attention doesn't mean he wasn't following a winning strategy.
This is correct. If the variation is high enough, the per-trip discount starts to approach the value of a per-hand discount, which of course is tremendously favorable. If he's a real whiz with the numbers, he could even have altered his play to slightly less absolute advantage but greater variation, and therefore greater advantage in the model given per-trip discount vs probable # of hands played per trip.
What struck me as very odd was the description of the 800k play: He had two tens and two elevens, and decided to stand. That makes no sense to me, as he would have lost nothing by getting four more cards.
Also, the article made some reference to variation, without explaining the edge. I'm guessing there was a real point lost there.
When you double down, you have to stand, and you can only double down on your first hit. The article makes it seem that he doubled after getting the card, when reality he made that decision before he got the 2's and 3's.
He split his 8's to 4 $100k hands, and then doubled down on each, for 4 $200k hands. He just got really unlucky on each hand, that the point value was so low.
The odds of beating 3 separate casinos, over a reasonable number of hands, even against a very low house edge, are quite small.
No one is writing stories about the millions of other high rollers who lost. It's entirely possible his outcome was driven entirely by chance alone. No card counting, no special expertise other than knowing the odds of the game. Just sheer luck. Unfortunately, that doesn't make for a very interesting read.
It depends on the number of hands he played. As it mentions in the article, the house edge is based on billions of simulated hands. If he played nonstop for 1 week, that is at most 14,000 hands (100 hands/hr x 20 hrs/day x 7 days). Card counting or not, this is a statistically insignificant number of hands.
This article describes someone with a lot of money playing blackjack with bad bankroll management who quit while he was ahead.
The std. deviation of blackjack is quite low. 14,000 hands would be a fairly large sample for blackjack, for live hands.
Now if we were talking about something like video poker, then yea, 14k hands would be nothing.
Then you probably shouldn't click through to anything published by The Atlantic. (Or for that matter, the New Yorker, the New York Times, etc).
This isn't a blog post or a new article. This is a short story. I thought it was interesting and I thought it was well written.
HN has a strong bias against anything artfully written (read: more than the bare minimum of words). I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering the crowd (mostly engineers, myself included) but it is sad to me when people do the 'TL;DR' thing.
> "it is sad to me when people do the 'TL;DR' thing"
HN has a strong bias toward allowing people to allocate their time based on their preferences. The tl;dr convention is tremendously useful because it allows people to make an informed decision as to whether or not to read the article, based on a summary which is (typically) more accurate than the headline.
In particular, if someone thought the article might have something new to say about the math of blackjack, the original comment would have dispelled them of that notion and therefore saved them some aggravation.
On the other hand, if someone was looking for a short story about the personality behind a famous gambler and didn't want to get bogged down in math, your comment may have enticed them to read. Thus, both comments are of value.
The premise of "tl" - "too long" - is a negative. While a convention, it's also dismissive, and that's what makes me sad. It reminds me of Emperor Joseph II telling Mozart there are "too many notes" in The Marriage of Figaro.
I would prefer people said "summary" or "precis" instead of "tl;dr".
In any case, it's only one of many conventions. Another convention is that "The Atlantic", "New Yorker", etc. write high-quality short stories and don't dive into technical details. It's sad that people feel that other readers here are ignorant enough of history to need additional clues about a 150+ year old magazine.
Sadly, I think this is an increasingly recent phenomenon (get off my lawn). It's kind of funny given the style and length of HN favorites like pg and Steve Yegge.
Why is it sad? I too am curious about what happened but I'm not interested in reading a long, drawn-out abridged biography of the characters right now. A TL;DR saves me from that pain, and everybody who WANTS to read the full glorious article is more than welcome to. I don't usually find this style of writing to be artful (instead I frequently find it tedious and boring), but neither raldi nor I are asking for the authors to change their style. We both simply appreciate that there's a way to skip the drama and get to the crux of the matter. Thanks OP. (For what it's worth, I really enjoyed "The Eudaemonic Pie", dealing with the same topic of beating the house. That was well written.)
The problem is these articles are low signal to noise.
You get the info on the subjects childhood, house, car, wife/husband, children, upbringing, college, style of dress, appearance, office, eccentricities, pets, etc, etc.
There's a lot of human interest element in these stories.
And of course the are paginated to increase page views for advertising.
Not that there aren't good articles occasionally in the publications you cited, but there is way too much "Sunday paper" in it.
“They began offering deals that nobody’s ever seen in New Jersey history,” he told me. “I’d never heard of anything like it in the world, not even for a player like [the late Australian media tycoon] Kerry Packer, who came in with a $20 million bank and was worth billions and billions.”
Kerry Packer's gambling is pretty legendary.
There's a story about how he was in a high-roller room in Los Vegas and there was a Texan (oil?) millionaire boasting about how big his ranch was.
Packer was annoyed at how noisy he was, so he walked over.
Packer: "So how much is this property worth then?"
Texan: "'bout $20 million"
Packer (pulls out a coin): "toss you for it"
Apparently the Texan didn't like that idea much...
Packer successfully invested a lot in building casinos in Australia and Macau. His son has taken over his empire and invested even more, though not as successfully.
There's a lot in this article that doesn't add up. For example this quote:
"So my philosophy at that point was that I can afford to take an additional risk here, because I’m battling with their money, using their discount against them."
If he's already up significantly (battling with their money) the discount isn't likely to come into play. And he's still playing a negative expectation game so every hand he plays he should expect to give back a little of his gain.
“You’d never lose the million. If you got to [$500,000 in losses], you would stop and take your 20 percent discount. You’d owe them only $400,000.” ... So when Johnson got far enough ahead in his winning sprees, he reasoned that he might as well keep playing.
I don't quite see how this makes any sense - if you get far ahead in a winning spree, the value of your discounted loss diminishes significantly... doesn't it? For instance, if you won $2 million, the discount is now $100k on a $2.5 million loss, which is only 4% (much smaller than the initial 20% discount of $100k on a $500k loss)
He went in with $1M, odds of 50/50 and a 20% discount once the losses are over $0.5M. Lets assume for simplicity that all hands he plays are equal ($0.1M according to the article)
Because the discount kicks in at $0.5M of losses, he should plan to lose bets for $0.5M first. This is a setup.
Now he needs play to win the bets for remaining $0.5M he has.
Because the odds are 50/50, after a few rounds of playing with the $0.5M he has, he's going to have lost half the hands, and won half of them. While he gets 2x for his wins, he gives up only 0.8x for his losses.
Net = 2x - 0.8x = 1.2x. He just had to rinse and repeat with the $0.5M he was left with. Though I'm sure he brought in a lot more money once the $0.5M loss kicked in the discount.
Just note that this explanation is a simplification. 50/50 odds (technically 49.75/50.25 according to Johnson) have to be accompanied by an even performance on double-downs and splits.
The article is a bit confusing. If I take it correctly, a few casinos offered him nearly 50:50 odds, and a discount on his losses if he lost more than ~500k. In other words, a great deal, worth ~$50k. And then he proceeded to have amazing games, winning millions by sheer luck. The article doesn't talk much about the luck this requires, and one wonders if he does have something else going on.
As far as the "luck" goes nothing is recounted of the nights when he didn't win big. This all took place over 4 months and while he didn't gamble every night he didn't just gamble once at each place.
Probably his nights while he had the discount followed a normal distribution with most of them break evenish but as explained losses were cut off around 400K and winning streaks were allowed to spiral.
I don't really see luck being a major factor. In the long run he's going to have a blockbuster night and then get kicked out of each place just like he did.
The article makes it clear that he's very good at the odds of Blackjack. It was a bit confusing when it described the difference between the odds-sheets given by the casino and his method. But, basically, he follows optimal betting technique for every card played.
The negotiation on the rules of the game is key. For example the difference between a 'soft 17' and a 'hard 17' is worth a few percentage points, and those points are valuable.
hey guys, i actually think he might have positive expectation:
he negotiated a .25% houe edge (roughly half of normal perfect play) and if he loses 500k he gets 20% back, each session independent.
check this analysis. he is +EV by martingaling his wins - 7/8 times he loses 400k with a 20% discount (400k x 7 x .80 = 2 240 000), 1/8 times he wins 400k x 8 with no reverse-discount = 3 200 000, so that's a mil in EV. if he pushes his martingale as far as he can his expectation grows superlinearly, which is why he martingales his wins until they cut him off.
is this math right? if he was -EV, the house would let him keep playing, hence telling him he can continue to play under normal rules. note he refused.
update: an easy way to see this (gross oversimplification) is if he plays only one hand/session he stands to win 100% of the money 49% of the time and loses 80% of the money 51% of the time.
This explanation seems most consistent with the limited information in the article.
We don't know whether he had several -$400K sessions before his big run. Gamblers and non-gamblers talk more about upswings than downswings.
There could be some other unmentioned factors that aided him a little, but the capped downside, a lucky run, and selective reporting are probably a sufficient explanation.
That's funny, I much prefer the story of mybiggest loss in an hour of blackjack than any of my winning stories, just seems more entertaining and less boastful perhaps.
It depends on how he expects to be taxed. If this is his only session during the year, he actually wins 60-70% of the money vs losing 80%. So he needs to either be way ahead or way behind from other gambling activity for this to work out the way you described (assuming he's a US citizen).
that's interesting, but i'm not sure i follow or agree - i can't put numbers on it, but intuitively his variance feels a bit like, but less than, poker's variance. Poker graphs look like a sawtooth of small losses and big wins. This means he would have to get spectacularly unlucky to be down after 50 sessions, given his positive pre-tax expectation[1].
so it depends how he structures his taxes. if he can get his taxes calculated yearly instead of per session, taxes make him a bit less of a winner. if his taxes are calculated per session, he is -EV. this is the same problem that poker players face, IIRC the precedent there is that if you file as a small business you can sum your wins and deduct your losses annually.
(/me used to be a small-time poker player)
[1] expectation in blackjack is computable because perfect play is deterministic, expectation in poker is harder because it depends on human factors like your mood and your opponent's skill level and his mood. you can only measure past expectation. A lot of players think they are winners but are really breakeven or losers, but blame it on bad luck.
His rebate is cumulative with the casino according to the article, except that they allowed him to reset it when he started this streak. He effectively only has one session per casino for rebate purposes.
Taxes are always computed on net winnings annually. Filing as a pro can affect the rate and allow deductions for expenses, but even amateurs can deduct losing sessions against winners if they have documentation.
It seems that every once in a while an enticing story comes out about a person (or team) who beats the house and wins big.
I spent a short time in the 'gaming' industry building electronic slots and other types of games. The word on the street was that the industry encouraged these types of stories. And, while maybe they didn't directly sponsor them, they looked favorably on them. These types of stories perpetuate ideas of the little guy beating the house.
The profit of the gaming industry comes from the average person thinking that they can beat the house, when, the fact they can't. When the average person begins to believe that they can't win, casino profits go down. As such, casinos put billions of dollars into R&D and marketing to give the average person the illusion that they can win.
I wasn't involved long enough in the gaming industry to be an expert, and I'm sure there are some exceptions. But, generally, to average people, of which I would classify 99.9% of the population, even those of us terribly smart people, the house advantage always wins.
The description of his odds system did not make a lot of sense to me; especially in light of the statement that he does not count cards. Can anyone elaborate?
"Many casinos sell laminated charts in their guest shops that reveal the optimal strategy for any situation the game presents. But these odds are calculated by simulating millions of hands, and as Johnson says, “I will never see 400 million hands.”
More useful, for his purposes, is running a smaller number of hands and paying attention to variation. The way averages work, the larger the sample, the narrower the range of variation. A session of, say, 600 hands will display wider swings, with steeper winning and losing streaks, than the standard casino charts."
Here's the simplest example I can think of. Basic strategy says to split 8s, even if the dealer is showing a face card or an ace. Statistically, you are most likely to lose this hand whether you stand, hit or split it.
By splitting them (following strategy) you give yourself the best odds of your choices, and according to probability, this makes it a better option in the long run. However, by splitting them, you are doubling the money you have risked on them, and therefor if you are only playing a single hand and then never touching blackjack again, you are basically risking twice as much money on a hand that, more often than not, you will lose.
The charts are maximizing EV without taking into account the discount he negotiated. With the loss discount, it becomes more profitable to increase short term variance beyond what the chart strategies would lead to.
The article is clear on only one point, but it's not an explanation for his winning. That point is that if he loses $500K, he only has to pay $400K of it. I'm pretty sure that if you bet $100K a hand, and stop whenever you hit the first of +$500K or -$500K, and get a $100K rebate if you hit the lower number ... well, the whole plan would seem to have a positive expected value. And perhaps the same would be true even with a bet increment of $10K or less,
Second, it is strongly implied (without details being given) that he has negotiated rules giving him an unusually favorable expected value per hand -- either a very slightly negative one (which would explain why Tropicana is willing to keep playing with him), or perhaps even a positive one that they keep overlooking. The only rule I saw in there that sounds odd to me is "calling the hand" -- is that a recent twist to blackjack or something?
> It was the dealer’s turn. He drew a 10, so the two cards he was showing totaled 15. Johnson called the game—in essence, betting that the dealer’s down card was a seven or higher, which would push his hand over 21. This was a good bet: since all face cards are worth 10, the deck holds more high cards than low. When the dealer turned over the house’s down card, it was a 10, busting him. Johnson won all four hands.
Pretty sure that by "betting that the dealer’s down card" it means that this was the logic behind his betting on the four hands, not that there was a seperate bet on it.
"Calling the hand" most likely refers to the kind-of-tradition of cheering on what you want ("come on facecard... COME ON FACECARD!!")
The line that annoyed me most in this was about card counting, saying
> "The tactic requires both great memory and superior math skills."
Not honestly true, at least about the maths skills. Memory... isn't how I'd describe it, though I suppose it's sort of right.
In my opinion, the most difficult thing is concentrating on multiple things at the same time (1. Keeping the running count 2. Counting how many cards have been played 3. Following the game itself and deciding what to do 4. Chatting with dealer / other players) - so this can perhaps be called "memory" as you have to remember these things all at the same time.
But for each thing you need to remember, it's a very simple thing on its own. Counting isn't about remembering the order of every card that's come out, it's not even about remembering what card has come out.
If you were to watch a video of a Blackjack game, i.e. you were left in peace and not doing anything yourself, few people would be incapable of counting the cards.
There's also remembering your strategy index tables. True, that's not a lot of numbers - some might use as few as 18 indices - but still: You're keeping in mind at the same time (a) the count, (b) a set of basic strategy rules appropriate for your specific game (c) a table of strategy variance index numbers appropriate for your specific game, (d) a deck depth estimate. And probably a few other relevant numbers.
As far as I'm concerned they're the best dealers for players too - I don't try and count cards in the casino, and find that both winning and losing sessions are much more enjoyable with a friendly dealer.
I skimmed over the comments, and I'm surprised to see no mention of it here. Maybe I missed it.
The house always wins, and they still won. This is, for each of them at just a few million, very cheap advertising. Consider how poker/holdem was hyped during the last decade, this is just the same in a different setting.
They will easily win those few millions each back and more. For every smart person such as this guy, there are thousands of idiots out there. The article itself mentions they're trying to lure in high-rollers. This looks rather obvious.
Thus, the title, how Atlantic City supposedly "got broke" by a man, seems very misleading in this context.
Even taking into account his negotiated edge, which is impressive, it isn't enough mathematically to account for such substantial winnings over such a short period of time. I agree with what others have said and think he must either have had a counting system or had a terrific run of luck.
Great runs are rare of course, but not unheard of. The reason people don't hear about them often is that very few players play at such a sophisticated level to minimize the house advantage to a paper-thin margin, and even fewer do so at a high-stakes table where this would make big news.
Classic ringer's game: they underestimated his ability, including the meta-ability to calculate odds and stay unemotional. Most players, even high rollers, get into the game and start to make hunch bets as play goes on. He was disciplined enough to trust the math and not waver his strategy.
I thought casinos were mostly fronts for money laundering, but since this has a story to it, there is credibility that a growth industry like gambling has real credibility in the startup scene. Therefore, there should be more gaming startups in YCombinator.
Calling card counters cheaters is like calling people who get good grades on tests cheaters because they discovered the solution to the problem during the test with their mind by eliminating the wrong answers using statistics and probabilities.
Card counting is a code phrase that translates to "if you don't let the house win, we won't let you play".
What is surprising is how easy it is to compute the odds..its just permutations and combinations..not that hard its a 100 level math course in most colleges.
What makes it different is that we needed two things to leverage the $1 million he put up per Casino and the Casino management being fool-hardy enough to believe that they computed the odds on the change in rules and discounts correctly.
It would be like say oh stacking the deck in that the founders get one class of stock and everyone else another class which allows the founders to retain ownership control of a start-up.
You do not need to card count as he changed the rules to only have hand shuffled six decks in the shoe..I can with a certain memory system compute the odds on cards dealt from that shoe and so can you..its not hard..its simple math..
There is some debate about this (to say the least) but the theory is that "hot sections" of the deck are propagated between shuffles of the decks when hand-shuffled. So if you run into a streak of good cards at the beginning of one shoe of cards, then that means you'll have another streak of good cards mid-way through the next shoe (or whatever). Then you can plan your bets accordingly by placing small bets to minimize your losses during the cold sections and then upping your bets during the period of hot cards.
Made famous in books and movies, card counting is considered cheating, at least by casinos. In most states (but not New Jersey), known practitioners are banned. The wagering of card counters assumes a clearly recognizable pattern over time, and Johnson was being watched very carefully. The verdict: card counting was not Don Johnson’s game. He had beaten the casinos fair and square.
Card counting is not cheating, at least if you can do it without an external device. That's like saying that you can play this game but only if you don't think about it really hard. Even with card counting the casinos have a slight edge against you. They swap the shoe out frequently so that you have to reset your count.
The reason it's not illegal in NJ is because someone sued them and won. It should be legal everywhere.