6 Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming A Card Counter

hey i'm colin from blackjack apprenticeship and in today's video i'm going to try to spare you from some of the mistakes i made and give some advice that i wish i would have received when i started out as a card counter [Music] hey guys i'm paul from blackjack apprenticeship and i started out as a card counter over 18 years ago and i started out with a small bankroll was able to grow it during my professional career i averaged about 400 an hour winning over 600 000 during the couple of years that i was playing and then i went on to run teams our teams won close to four million dollars over my involvement with them and for over a decade i've been running blackjack apprenticeship to teach other people to do what myself and my teams did and look when you've played when you've run teams and been involved as long as i have you've made a lot of mistakes and you think about the things that you wish you could do over so i'm going to share that with you starting with number six the first thing i wish i would have known when i started out is that a 99 card counter is not a winning card counter like i said i probably made every mistake in the book one of which was playing before i could play perfectly secondly was massively over betting my bankroll i mean it's a miracle i didn't go bust it's simply because i was able to team up with others very quickly to have a larger bank roll than i initially started with because like i said i was massively over betting my bankroll i also didn't understand how rules deck penetration and rounds per hour affected things as a card counter so i played all casinos all tables the same way regardless of all sorts of things only to find out later some of the tables i was playing were not even a winning game with my bankroll and bet spread and this is kind of an embarrassing story but when i first started i read a book by samford wong and in it he talked about that with the dealer you could read their face when they had to peek at the bottom card well guess what the casinos i was playing had these little prism systems so the dealers weren't even checking the cards but i was trying to read the dealer's face to see if they had a tenor and ace underneath but of all those mistakes the one that kills me the most was all the hundreds of hours i spent at the tables playing without a perfect game i mean i literally lost my first couple hundred hours and it was only when i convinced my first teammate ben to test me out that i realized i didn't have a perfect game and i was just treading water at best at the casinos when i found those mistakes i was able to fix them and the rest is i went on like i said to win over six hundred thousand dollars over the next 1500 hours basically of my playing career before i transition into running teams but don't be like me don't go to the casinos before your game is perfect by playing before you're perfect you are risking your bankroll wasting time when you could be perfecting your game generating positive eevee and giving yourself the best start you need as a card counter and it's not just me this is probably the most common mistake i see with new card counters is that they go to the casinos before they're ready but then you're just risking your bankroll and wasting your time when you could be perfecting your game so you generate a positive ev game at the casinos and have the best chance as you start out as a card counter the number five thing i wish i would have known before starting out as a card counter is knowing how to maximize ev like i said before i didn't really understand how all the different variables rules deck penetration rounds per hour effect ev and so when i got some betting software i realized some of the games i was playing were break even at best like i was gambling at the casino trying to count cards but the rules the deck penetration something made them not even worth playing while other games were super valuable and i didn't realize there was such a difference as i got to understand the betting software and learning from other experts i understood how the different variables actually work together to increase your ev and it's it's kind of like with rounds per hour the right rules deck penetration you put those together and it's kind of like getting the superstar in mario kart or mario brothers where you're actually going faster you're nearly invincible as far as your risk of ruin goes down and you're going to generate far more eevee at the tables with all the right criteria what kills me about this is that as i look back at my career if i would have known this stuff sooner i would have generated far more ev and my 600 dollar career profits might have been eight hundred thousand maybe a million dollars in that same span when i was playing professionally the number four thing i wish i would have known when i started out is that variance is a four letter word when i started out at card kang i had no idea how variants worked i go and i'd have a great winning day and i think oh this card counting thing is so easy i'd have a terrible losing day and i'd think oh i should have just not gone to the casinos today i remember the first trip i went on with two teammates we drove a full day somewhere we played for an entire day drove back and at the end of all of it we broke even and i thought this is so dumb we broke even well that's all part of the variance of the game you have winning days losing days break even days what you need to focus on is generating ev and being able to withstand the variance over my playing career i've had two streaks of over 200 hours without a new all-time high that means 200 hours of not winning that is miserable but now i understand one that is part of the game but two how to minimize that simply by avoiding poor deck penetration poor rules avoiding those really negative counts and small bet spreads if you avoid those things you will get through the variance a lot faster so if you're new to card counting first off be aware of what you're getting yourself into this game it takes hundreds and hundreds of hours for any sort of guarantee that the math is going to work out secondly arm yourself best to counteract the variance monster by understanding what things increase variance as a card counter and what things will decrease it the number three thing i wish i would have known is that as a card counter as a winning player you are likely going to be data based but don't let it come from your own stupidity like i've said before casinos do not want winning players if they figure out that you are playing with the advantage they may ask you to leave and never come back and they may put you in a database of known advantage players i got entered into a database very early into my career less than a year into it and it was total stupidity on my part i knew that i was getting backed off from a casino and at the cashiers cage when they said they needed to see id rather than just leaving i gave them my id they took pictures of it the rest is history so the first thing you need to consider is determine how important it is to you to protect your name if you want to protect your name then don't be like me and just refuse giving id at the casino you have a right to not give id you have to leave but hey when they say we need your id you can just leave if you're young looking like i was and you have to kind of balance that but especially when you're getting backed off there's no reason to ever just hand them your id they're saying they don't want you to play there great just leave you can always come back another time and cash out your chips it's almost every week that i talk to someone they're a newer card counter and they say call in i went i played at a casino i got backed off they asked for my id i gave it to them and now what do i do and i say well it's a little late you should have just left when they backed you off you didn't need to give them id but you know learn from our mistakes and be smarter otherwise if you want to play with id it's okay i've won most of the money i've won since being in databases probably over 500 000 of my profits came after being put in databases so don't let that scare you the number two thing i wish i would have known is that there is more than one way to skin a casino richard munskin talks about how card counters tend to have this tunnel vision where they just walk straight to the blackjack table without ever looking around at anything else and i was the worst culprit of this i overlooked all sorts of ap opportunities from bonuses with edges right off the top to other ap plays and if i had to do over i would have learned continued to learn more read more books networked with people more knowledgeable and added more tools to my tool belt in any profession the people that are the most successful are the ones that continue to learn continue to refine their skills add to it and learn from others i think advantage play tends to attract kind of a lone wolf type at times but in my 18 years of being around advanced players the ones i know that have had the most success are well rounded well-networked continual learners and the number one thing i wish i would have known before i got started as an advanced player is how advantage play fits into the bigger picture look i honestly don't care if you become an advanced player or not but if you do i hope you figure out if and how it fits into those larger life goals that you have advanced play is not for everyone and my honest advice is to figure out if it's a good fit for you and if it is how there are probably a thousand youtube comments that say something like hey if you're so great at card counting why aren't you just doing that or you won 600 000 over 18 years that's not much more than minimum wage and the reality is i wasn't playing for the last 18 years i played for a couple years like i said i averaged about 400 an hour but then it started to not feel very fun anymore and i had this opportunity to run this team train other people and send them out and it was so much fun for that season i did that for five or six years and then that started to feel like a grind and blackjack apprenticeship felt like new uncharted territory for me it's kind of my personality i get tired of things once i feel like i've figured them out on top of that i remember doing blackjack trips with my wife and four kids and we'd be driving in our minivan and i'd be playing high stakes blackjack up and down the coast and thinking okay this is working but this isn't really my goal i have no regrets for shifting my focus to blackjack apprenticeship because it's a better fit for me and my family whether that makes me a poser or not you can decide but here's my advice for you figure out if advantage play fits for you if so how and what are those bigger goals that it's going to help you reach and how it's going to serve those goals if it's not serving those goals find a better way to reach those larger goals in your life i hope that helps you out if you enjoyed it you could check out our video five regrets from my card can career or check out blackjackapprenticeship.com

Channel: Blackjack Apprenticeship

Views: 217,828

Keywords: Blackjack, blackjack apprenticeship, blackjack apprentice, colin jones, how to count cards, blackjack strategy, beat blackjack, card counting in casino, card counting online blackjack, counting cards, blackjack card counting explained, counting cards blackjack, card counting strategy, blackjack tips

Id: XM7fPwjJKuk

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021