- Is it possible to go into a casino each day
and just quit while you're ahead, a few hundred bucks?
How does this strategy play out over time
either as a gambler or as a card counter?
I'm gonna answer that question in this video with graphs.
(upbeat music)
I'm Colin from Blackjack Apprenticeship,
and over my career playing and running teams,
myself and my teams have won hundreds of dollars per hour
resulting in roughly $4 million in profits.
But that came with huge losses and huge wins.
Personally, I've lost $40,000 in a day playing blackjack
and I've won roughly $50,000 in a day playing blackjack,
and for myself, the wins outweighed the losses,
but there were a lot of both.
Well, what if you're not looking to bet that kind of limits?
What if you just want to win a few hundred bucks every day
you go to the casino, does that work?
Well, I get some version of that question asked
through email or through the YouTube channel every week,
and I thought I would answer that in this video.
Let's first talk about a gambler.
Let's say you want to just go into a casino each day
and win $300.
The moment you're up $300, you walk out
and you come back the next day with the goal
of doing the same thing day after day.
Well, to explain this, let me use an illustration.
Let's say, instead of gambling,
I offer you a coin flip and I say, hey, flip this coin.
If it lands on tails, you lose a hundred bucks.
If it lands on heads, you win a hundred bucks.
Well, that's a 50-50 proposition that's better
than any game straight up in a casino because it's 50-50.
And so you say, okay, I'll take that offer,
and the moment you're ahead,
three heads, or $300, can you leave?
The odds of actually being up three heads
in any one given day is over 75%.
And at that point you say, great.
I'm gonna walk out, I'll come back the next day
and do it again.
Well, does it work that way?
Well, step back for a minute and think about this.
At the end of one day,
you're asking to be up three heads versus tails,
and there's over 75% chance of that working out.
But by day two, you're actually wanting
to be up six heads versus tails between the two days.
By day three, you're asking to be up
nine heads versus tails.
By the end of that week,
you're asking to be up 21 heads over the course of a week.
And over the course of a month,
you're expecting or wanting to have 90 more heads than tails
in that one month stretch.
You see, the coin doesn't care that it's a new day.
The coin isn't saying to itself, you know,
normally I'm 50-50, but if you stop today,
let me reset my probability on this new day,
and you get to start over.
Every flip of the coin is an independent event,
but those independent events add up
whether it's a hundred flips in one day
or one flip for a hundred days,
every flip of the coin is building up towards this long run
that's gonna result in 50-50 probability.
So in this example, being able to be up three heads
in one day is about 76% chance.
Being up three heads for a week,
it drops to a 15% chance of working out,
and trying to be up three heads for a month stretch
drops to a one in 3000 possibility.
To try to give you a visual to explain what I'm saying,
here's a really hokey graph that I made
with my terrible Photoshop skills.
But what you can see in it
is that after only a thousand flips,
the odds are getting closer and closer to 50-50.
Now this red line I added to the graph
is what you're trying to do over time,
and you're trying to continue to stay
on the heads side of 50-50
as the probability gets closer and closer to the 50-50 line.
It's just not going to work.
It doesn't matter if you quit for one day
and try to start over the next day.
Every flip of the coin is getting you closer and closer
to 50-50 over the long haul.
Now that example was for a 50-50 proposition,
but if you're gambling in a casino,
you're not playing 50-50.
If you're using basic strategy at blackjack,
the casino has half a percent edge.
If you're playing anything worse than basic strategy,
God forbid you're playing poor blackjack,
or you're playing a game with a larger house edge.
Every time you gamble,
even if you quit while you're ahead
and come back the next day,
you're just working towards the inevitable,
which is the math working out.
Now, what does this mean for a card counter?
Well, the beauty and the curse of card counting
is that you cannot trick the math.
If you leave while you're up a few hundred dollars,
you're not resetting the probability
and avoiding losing streaks.
All you're doing is prolonging
how long it's gonna take you to get to the long run.
If you're counting cards,
you're playing a positive EV game every shoe.
Every shoe you play, independent of what day you play it,
is building towards that long run.
I gotta tell you a story here to help illustrate this point.
There was a guy that I trained.
He actually played on the church team,
which was a large blackjack team that I ran.
He played for it for a while.
He left the team and then he started playing on his own
and he calls me and says, Colin,
I figured out a brilliant way to avoid losses.
He said, what I do is I go into the casino
and I play at the blackjack tables,
and once I'm up a bit, I go out to my car
and I play on the Blackjack Apprenticeship iPhone app
until I hit a losing streak.
Then I go back into the casino
for my inevitable winning streak,
which is sad and hilarious because that's not how it works.
The cards don't know where you're playing.
Every hand of blackjack is building towards this long run,
and you can't trick the math into the losses
being on a phone and the wins being in a live casino.
It will not work that way.
While you cannot avoid the losses
with all the randomness of the game,
everything will play out at the table.
The beauty of card counting
is that the math will work out over time.
Any loss is just a short term bump in the road
until you get to the long run and you end up with profits.
I promised you some graphs,
so to help illustrate this point,
let me show you some charts from a newer
Blackjack Apprenticeship card counter.
This is someone that came to a bootcamp back in August,
perfected his game,
and he's been hitting the tables pretty hard.
I'm really proud of him.
And he gave me permission to use these charts
to help illustrate this point.
In this first chart, we could see graphs for hours played
and next to it, expected value and AV or actual value.
That's his actual results.
And each one of these bar graphs is for a separate month.
So you can see that November
is when he played the most hours
and also generated the most expected value
and actually happened to win the most money.
It would be nice if every month worked out that way
that you generate more EV, you win more money.
But then look at December.
He put in pretty good hours and generated
a pretty strong amount of expected value,
but he actually lost money.
Was he playing poorly that month?
No, he actually just experienced the inevitable losses
that happen to any card counter.
You cannot just avoid those losses.
He played perfectly, he lost that month.
Then look at January.
He didn't play much or generate a whole lot
of expected value,
but he had some of the strongest positive variance
or just positive luck and won quite a bit.
So looking at this, what was within his control?
All he could actually control is putting in the hours
and generating positive EV,
and then he had to wait for the randomness, the variance,
the luck of the game to work out.
In the end, you can actually see,
here is his six month graph.
what it looks like when you put all of this together.
So you see wins, you see losses,
you see stretches of maybe a hundred hours
where he was below his previous all-time high,
but then what happens as he continues
to generate EV and put in hours?
Well, he ends up at a new all-time high.
That's how card counting works.
Let me show you one more graph.
This is in my book, "The 21st Century Card Counter",
and the goal was to show how this works out over time
for a card counter.
So in this first graph,
you can see it's a hundred hours
of five different card counters' careers,
and you can see that most people are in the positive.
There's one person in the negative,
one guy is basically even,
oh, I'm basically even after a hundred hours.
And you know, there's some randomness in a hundred hours
of five different players.
In the second graph, it's 500 hours
of these same five card counters careers.
And when you get to 500 hours,
you can see everyone is up in the positive.
There has been some crazy winning
and losing streaks between the five players,
but everyone is up in the positive.
This third graph is after a thousand hours
of these same five card counters careers,
and you can see that the five people are all converging
in the same area of up and to the right,
all in the positive as they generate EV,
all the wins and losses rule out.
What's left is the math,
which is that card counters end up with the casino's money.
So whether you're a gambler or an advantage player,
you cannot trick math.
You cannot overcome odds through trying
to get ahead of the curve each day.
The math will work out over time.
All you can do is learn how to play a winning game
and generate positive EV.
If you don't know what I'm talking about
when I say, what is EV,
check out this video right here on what is expected value
is the foundation of how card counters
and advantage players think.
It's also how casinos think,
and you need to empower yourself to know
how to generate positive EV.