Can I make money counting cards?

if you're in the casino playing roulette the odds are always stacked against you if i take all of my chips and place them on a random number let's say 25 pretty crazy bet there give the ball a spin even if this comes in the return i'll get will only be 35 to 1 despite the odds of this happening being 37-1 every spin of the roulette wheel is completely random and completely unpredictable wait it was 25 as i was saying [Music] every spin on her left wheel is completely random and totally unpredictable there is no way to gain an edge over the house at roulette but that is not so with blackjack usually of course it is in the house's favor but some people can beat the casinos by counting cards so how difficult is it to do it let's find out so the movies rainman and 21 make card counting seem like a way to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars if you have some superhuman level of intelligence and can do complex maths in your head but is this actually possible can you actually beat the house and if so how difficult is it to do this are there actually people out there who do this for a living like for real well let's meet one um my name is stephen bridges and i am a card counter [Music] in an hour [Music] [Music] out the door [Music] [Applause] so if you are a really good blackjack player but you're not counting if you're a perfect basic strategy player which just basically means you're playing the game like a computer you're making all of the mathematically correct plays the casino is still going to have about a 0.5 edge over you but it really does depend on the game so that's if you're playing perfectly you'll just lose money very slowly if you're counting all that you're doing is clawing back that edge and gaining about one percent edge over the house or maybe two percent it goes up as the count gets higher as the as the shoe is is more hot it's hotter but in general you're getting a tiny margin so it's not like people think that it's you walk in there with ten dollars and you walk out with 10 grand it's nothing like that at all card counters will lose just under half the time when they're playing and that could be thousands and thousands of dollars tens of thousands hundreds of thousands depending you can go through massive streaks of losing but overall you have the edge not the house so given enough hours played you are well in theory over an infinite amount of time guaranteed to win so here's the script i want to find out if a normal person can learn card counting how long does it take to learn and can we actually win some money with this i want to know i have four days with stephen to learn as much as i can from him and practice and on the fifth day working as a team with me counting we're going to try and beat the house in a simulated game of blackjack first let's start with the basics do i even know how to play blackjack to find out we started off with 500 pounds worth of chips and let me loose at the table [Music] give me a big number [Music] well you could have played it better [Music] that was a fast way to lose 500 quid it turns out i don't know how to play blackjack like at all which isn't surprising really because i don't gamble i obviously know the rules but as far as strategy well i have none i should stress that there is only one way to play blackjack there's no opinion or superstition involved basic strategy is just piles of cold hard data that you need to know and i know none of it this is not a good foundation atop which to build a card counting career but anyway onto cardkin i was concerned that this all seemed very complicated and above my intellect level i think it's easier to count cards than people think it is and it's also harder than people think it is in essence it's not that hard it's not that complicated you're just doing a few things at once which is where it gets tricky and then it's all of the extra stuff people haven't even considered that's where the difficulty of the job comes in with card counting you really have to get as close to perfection as possible there's not a massive amount of room for error because you have such a such a small edge over the house so if you're making a few mistakes every shoe you're going to get rid of your entire edge so yeah you don't have to be rain man i'm not great at math but i can still do it so you don't need to be a genius well that's great news so how does it work and why isn't everyone just doing this in principle card counting works by keeping track of the low cards and the high cards when the shoes got a lot of high cards you're more likely to win so you bet bigger people think that card accounting works is that you're memorizing all the cards that you see which is not what we're doing and way more difficult what we're actually doing is assigning each card a point score so in this case 236 are worth plus one point seven eight and nine we just ignore they're zero and ten jack queen king and eight are worth minus one point and all we're doing is as we see these cards come out of the shoe we're just keeping track of that running point score so for example if you saw a two that would be plus one and you keep track of that number in your head so i'll be going plus one plus one plus one if i then have a three that's another plus one so now we're on two as a total so i'll be saying two two two three three three four four four five five five then we have minus one so it'll be four four four three three three two two two i like that and all we're doing as we go through all of the cards in the shoe is every single card that we see we're keeping a mental track of that tally and that's what we're doing is focusing on that one number when the number is really high what it means is that there's a lot of tens and aces left in the shoe and there's a certain point when you hit this like tipping point if that number is high enough then you are more likely to win than the dealer in theory if you're playing like perfect blackjack so when it gets to a certain point where it's like quite dense with picture cards and aces then we bet much higher and then when it's a negative count like there's not many picture cards and aces we want to bet as little as we can get away with that sounds too easy well yeah that's it it's easy no it's yeah in essence in essence it's pretty straightforward it's one of those things that's simple in theory but to execute it is quite tricky so if you're keeping perfect track of the count you also need to be playing perfect blackjack and you're playing a game that involves numbers whilst thinking about a number whilst also how's your day going today sir and you know all this stuff too and so there's a lot that you're you're sort of having to juggle in your head and because we have such a small margin of like such a small edge if you make mistakes if you're off on the count by one okay maybe that's forgivable but if you're off by two now we're really in a we're getting in a bad spot seems easy right let's recap you watch each card that comes out of the shoe and if it's a two three four five or six you add one to the count you ignore seven eights and nines and pitcher cards and aces you take one away from the couch piece of cake let's try together starting at zero did you get it you can see how this could get pretty tricky right steven set about helping me to learn to be a card counter starting slowly and trying to get me to play decent blackjack along the way so let's start learning to count cards then so this is day one hour zero minus one the next card we see is this okay minus two now minus two the next one will be this we ignore it so seven eight nine minus two still we start on zero so that's one [Music] well done you're doing good when you get a situation like this with a minus one and a plus one you can just ignore it the things i have to do what's the count yeah very good all right just do your best yes but what's the count eight [Music] let's yeah two no am i getting a wrong again what's the count five what you got i'm on four what were you one two that's four yeah that's that's that's a definite fail yeah without with the margin affair where where where we're at right now is that this wouldn't work yeah um i still think we can get there yeah i think we can gather but jesus because there's times when you're really on it it's just that in this game i was understanding the basic concept of counting when the count is high there are proportionately more face cards and aces which favors us the player so that's when we bet big but how big how do we turn this tiny advantage into cold hard cash do we up our bet to 50 bucks a hand or a hundred bucks because the edge we get is so tiny to make any decent profit you got to go big and i mean big what i'm betting depends on a lot of factors it's not going to be the same every time if i'm working with a team and we've got a large bankroll then it's going to be a lot higher i think the most that i've bet per hand we're talking the potential you know the couple thousand dollars ish range but if you're doing that every single hand playing two hands at once then that you could lose a few hands in a row and that'd be a lot but i've had like a 30 000 loss in a session close to 100k usd on a bad run in a really short space of time and then the flip so losing money is a is a really it's like a it's like a really big part of it and that's the hardest thing because even if you're playing with an edge and you know i know i'm gonna win eventually you could have such a bad losing streak and the longer that you're playing over the course of your card counting career the more guaranteed you are to have longer losing streaks and longer winning streaks steven will regularly work in a team with half a million dollars in bankroll between them betting hundreds of thousands of dollars in a session that could last hours and hours this is a marathon not a sprint and to ensure you land on the right side of that tiny edge you have to play a lot of blackjack right this is day three day three and we're just doing uh more more characters that's very well summarized [Music] learning to count cards involves just brutal hours of non-stop blackjack i constantly found the game too fast to count and was regularly off by two three or four which is disastrous d1 yeah i was i was i was it was d1 yeah did you say one yeah i got it i i was exhausted after two hours of counting and my blackjack was just horrible but worse than all of that it was so obvious i was trying to count cards i would pause on like 20 trying to pretend as if i was considering taking a card when really i was just trying to update the count in my head before the cards disappear this doesn't seem like a big deal right well if you watch any of steven's videos you'll quickly learn that the difficulty for card counters isn't counting cards or streaks of bad luck it's the outrageous verging on criminal behavior of casinos towards advantaged players [Music] to pay taxes in our country is card count and illegal card counting is not illegal at all it's not even classified as cheating that's something that people say a lot to me is like oh you're cheating i'm like it's not cheating any more than the way that i say it is would it be considered cheating in any game in the world to think too much can you imagine if you put a cap on a chess player for thinking too much it would be ludicrous or a poker player for memorizing too many charts and stats so you can't call card counting cheating and you can't say that it's illegal because all you're doing is using your head and you're using the same information that all the other players at the table have you're not using a little computer none of that you're just using your head so not only is it not illegal it's very legal and it's not cheating despite what casinos would love people to think i'm not sure the number of casinos i'm banned from and it depends on what you call a ban but i think nearly every casino that i've played blackjack in has at the end asked me to leave or stop me playing because it's a private business they can they have the right to review service so they can kick you out for any reason they want really provided they're not discriminating i have lost count of the amount of times that i've been kicked out either kicked out from the casino escorted out of the casino or just told that i can't play blackjack or i'm not allowed to play blackjack can we just take a moment to consider how absurd it is that casinos will throw you out of their establishment if you think too much about the game how is that not illegal watching steven's videos i genuinely feel a sense of rage at this gross injustice as he gets removed sometimes they'll even call the police because he used his mind to beat a system that is in itself predatory anyway back to card counting one this has to be a picture or an ace and if so and you've had a perfect shoe yes come on you smashed it though yeah so what is it it's five o'clock and we've been going since like 12. so that's five straight hours of just counting cards i was really surprised at how difficult the seemingly straightforward task was i found it similar to sitting a five-hour exam i was dreaming of cards at night and counting in my sleep and needed a constant flow of caffeine to stay effective after four days of practice eventually we started seeing some results my camps were more accurate i was faster and i could actually talk and act somewhat normal finally i got through a six deck shoe with zero mistakes that was a milestone for me six running six if this gets to zero that'll be the first six deck shoe that i've covered and then had no errors and that's a really good sign two one zero seven eight or a nine that's what we want yeah yes we did it the whole six days no mistakes and i was chilled right you were chill you did great you smashed it i am ready [Laughter] that's a really good sign there yeah i feel like i'm counting cars now so it was time to try this out for real here's the setup we replicated a real game of blackjack that you could play in real life we have a real deal around this is james our dealer and i have 10 000 in chips here on this table the minimum bet is 50 and the maximum is 10 000. this is the high rollers table and in this scenario i'm going to act as the spotter so i just sit and play blackjack betting the table minimum keeping my cool quietly counting cards waiting for the opportune moment we do this for two reasons one it won't seem so suspicious as my bet will always remain the same and two i can't play blackjack anyway so i end up losing all our money when the shoe is hot i when the count is a true two and above i'll cue steven in using a sneaky subtle signal i'll also indicate the running cam using chips hopefully i've got the count right stephen rolls in with the big box and starts betting heavy whilst playing textbook perfect blackjack hello can i join you could i have some thousands please we each make millions of dollars and ride off into the sunset stephen starts with a hundred grand in chips with our total bankroll at half a million dollars and remember although this game is simulated all of these numbers and the table rules they are all real [Music] i'm in the strength time so the first shoe i actually felt like i counted the cards correctly but the count went to negative 13. in other words that's terrible for us it's too low to be salvageable so we just wait till the next shoe and this time the shoe goes hot my counting is on point i signal to stephen and hand over to the big dog time to make some money hello can i join you [Music] now the count's just dropped a point where it's not an advantage situation oh i don't think so no i think we're down quite a bit because i think i came with um did i come with a hundred grand or 50 grand it was 50 grand i sat down with you know 10 20 21 22 23 24 so after the first shoe we were down 12 and a half grand but this is like well within this is well within what we'd expect like this weirdly we wouldn't really be you know we wouldn't be concerned at this point but this could this is for one shoe if that can happen that way it can happen the other way and it can happen twice either way in the next 20 minutes and now we're up so remember what stephen said earlier the edge is like one or two percent so just under half the time card counters lose right onwards and upwards [Music] so i lost the camp there so just walk away and everything all that time was wasted twice i lost or forgot the count this is really hard each time i messed up we had to wait to reshuffle and start again which is incredibly inefficient after some coffee and lunch however my counting got better and we got a hot shoe i signaled steven in and thankfully things started going our way come on yes twenty [Music] yeah we're down about four grand that shoe got us up to even nearly straight after that we got another hot shoe this time the count was really high [Music] come on come on picture picture picture picture yes one two three four five six that's a 30 000 it's not even real money look how happy we are picture [Music] [Music] all right let's see where we're at [Music] 400. that last shoot everything seemed to go our way so what was our running total so i started with ten thousand dollars and amazingly without even really thinking about playing blackjack i made 115 dollars so i'm up 115. how did you get on steve yeah pretty well yeah overall when we take it all into account uh we start off with a half million dollar bankroll we now have winnings of forty six thousand six hundred and fifteen dollars which is good yeah that is a good thing i mean i'm very happy with that yes that would be about about 11 653 dollars per hour which is considerably above expected value yeah so we ran good yeah and it's more than i get paid now in terms of how you did you signaled me in when the count was high and you signaled me in and you communicated the correct count so you didn't make any errors there there were times when you made mistakes when you're off on the count but the vast majority of the time i think every time you were self-aware enough to know that you would leave the table and find another table in which case you weren't you weren't a risk to us yeah i wasn't destructive but i was it was just forgetting how much we actually ended up winning because it could have gone either way i think you did your job just about i don't think you're gonna get many emails from blackjack teams but i'm very impressed yeah it's hard this episode was supported by curiositystream right now curiosity stream are offering my viewers an annual subscription for just 14.79 that's 26 off and works out at 1.23 a month which is ludicrously low they've also partnered with the creator run streaming nominated streaming service nebula so you get that included in your subscription 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sign up for curiosity stream using the link below to get your discount and that also helps support the show thank you very much for watching i hope you enjoyed this one and i'll see you next time peace [Music]

Channel: Mike Boyd

Views: 2,860,772

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Id: rjfLuM-Pqr8

Length: 25min 40sec (1540 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022