Vegas, baby, Vegas

I am in Vegas for a couple of days, to give a talk. A few observations:
1. Some casinos have blackjack tables that pay 3:2 for a blackjack; others pay 6:5. As far as I could tell, there are no other differences in the rules at these casinos. Since blackjacks are not all that rare — about 5% of hands — one would think that players would just walk across the street to a casino that offers the better odds. Maybe some players do, but many do not.
2. Card counting would take considerable practice, even using the “high-low” method that just keeps a running count of the difference in the number of high versus low cards that have been dealt. In a few minutes of trying to keep track while watching a game — much less playing it — it was very easy to accidentally add rather than subtract, or miss a card, and thus mess up the count. Don’t count on paying for your Vegas vacation this way, no matter how good a statistician you are, at least unless you practice for a few hours first.
3. Actual quote from an article called “You can bet on it: How do you beat the casino?”, by Larry Grossman, in the magazine “What’s On, the Las Vegas Magazine”: “For a slot player the truly prime ingredient to winning is the luck factor. All you have to do is be in the right place at the right time. No other factor is as meaningful as luck when you play the slots.” Forsooth!
4. Also from the Grossman “article”: “Certain games played in the casino can be beaten, and not just in the short term. The winnable ones are these: blackjack, sports betting, race betting and live poker.” Seems reasonable and maybe correct.
5. The toilets in “my” hotel/casino (the oh-so-classy Excalibur) seem to waste water almost gratuitously. I can understand why they want swimming pools, and giant fountains that spray water into the desert air…but does having a really water-wasting _toilet_ convey some sort of feeling of luxury?

8 thoughts on “Vegas, baby, Vegas

  1. The 6-5 payouts use a single deck. Thus, while it improves your ability to count, the difference is more than overcome by the lousy payout on a blackjack. As the definitive gambling actuary on the web http://wizardofodds.com/blackjack puts it: "Many casinos in Las Vegas have prominent signs saying 'Single Deck' blackjack. However, on a much smaller sign it says 'Blackjack pays 6 to 5.' Aside from the 6-5 rule the house edge would be 0.05%. However, the 6-5 on blackjacks costs the player an additional 1.39%, for a total house edge of 1.44%. At some tables a player blackjack always wins, which lowers the house edge by 0.21% to 1.23%. Either way this is by far the worst blackjack game in the city and I urge you to avoid it." For a newspaper article criticizing the practice, see http://wizardofodds.com/articles/other/6to5bj.htm

  2. Have you read "Fortune's Formula"? I'm making my way through it and it's been a great read so far, explaining the Kelly criterion and the connection with information theory.

  3. In the spirit of Seth Roberts's self-experimentation, I will report that it took me about two weeks to learn to accurately count down a deck in 25 seconds (much faster than cards appear on the table). I counted 10 decks a day. At the start, it took me about 15 minutes a day; by the end, it was taking me 10 minutes (I was logging my times and the correctness of my counts).

  4. Update after returning from Las Vegas:

    (1) Nope, not there for Equifax.

    (2) Instead of counting cards, I decided just to try the "basic strategy" for blackjack: I copied the tables from Wikipedia that tell you what to do (stand, hit, split, or double) depending on (a) your hand, and (b) the card that the dealer shows. I could look stuff up in the tables just about as quickly as the hands were dealt, so this worked fine (and I won $140, playing the $10 minimum each hand, in about half an hour).

    (3) And now, a short story entitled "Gambler's Ruin; or a Shameful Episode."

    As I was walking back to the hotel elevator after dinner, I passed a roulette table just as someone outgrabe in despair, and said something like "well, that cleans me out." Roulette tables — at least the ones in Vegas, or at least some of the ones in Vegas — have an electronic board next to them that records the last dozen (or so) numbers that have come up, and whether they are black/red/other (i.e. 0 or 00). In this case, the entire board was full of reds, except for one 0 or 00 in there somewhere. I don't know if the bettor had been following a martingale strategy or not, but of course such a strategy immediately came to mind, along with the "gambler's ruin" problem.

    And now, the shameful part. I put $20 on red. Hey, man, Red was obviously "hot"! (But of course, black was "overdue.") I'm not ashamed of making a bet, but rather I'm ashamed of the fact that I was influenced by the string of past bets: if the past dozen plays had been a "random" mixture of blacks and reds, I would have just walked on through without a thought.

    (4) I saw Penn and Teller (the magicians). They did some pretty amazing stuff. It was a good show. And yet…I feel like I could give them a few helpful pointers about improving it. This seems like a ridiculous claim — they're extremely popular stars with a lot of experience and presumably as much professional help and advice as they could possibly want — but I still believe it to be true.

  5. Phil,

    I saw a Ricky Jay show in New York a few years ago, and many of the acts were pretty lame. One act, which took several minutes, was really really lame–I mean, I could've done it. The good acts were great, but still . . .

    Maybe these guys get bored with their "greatest hits" and don't have enough other material to fill the gaps.

  6. If you're looking to actually win money, forget roullete or any other game that doesn't allow players to interact with the game. Roulette, in the long term, is unbeatable, unless you can exploit a weakness in the wheel and/or find a crooked dealer who can spin the ball just right. There was a story about a Russian syndicate family that cleaned out casinos in England and Europe using this strategy, but for regular Joe's, I suggest blackjack, baccarat, or craps. The same stands if you're playing at an online casinos site, the odds in those games are probably stacked even MORE against the player, since most gaming sites don't indicate a shuffle point or even how many decks are in play.

    The WizardofOdds is the authority on such matters, and has analysis is dead on. You can win at blackjack in the short run (ie. quit while you're ahead), but in the long run, the numbers will probably not go in your favor.

    The only exception to this rule would be players like Ken Uston, or the MIT blackjack team that used the "big player" strategy to make bets when the shoe was rich in tens and aces.

  7. I visited Vegas last month and was staggered to find how many 6:5 blackjack tables they have there now. I was equally staggered to find people actually playing them.
    Clearly the typical Vegas gambler is not a mathematician…and the casinos are obviously aware of this!
    On returning and doing a little research ( http://www.livedealer.org/blog/2010/08/6-5-blackj… ) I have since found almost 25% of Vegas bj tables now pay 6-5

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