Handling Heat as a Card Counter

I've said this before but casinos do not like winners that being the case having to handle and navigate heat and backups in a casino is one of the toughest jobs we have as card counters in this video I'm going to talk about what heat is how to handle it and what to do when you experience those inevitable back offs in a casino to start out let's just define what heat is heat is when a casino is giving you extra attention because they're trying to decide if you're an advantage player that they're going to counter measure or back off now of course we don't want Heat but the reality is playing a winning game means that at some point casinos might decide they don't want our action and to be honest one of the toughest parts about dealing with heat in a casino is trying to decide if it's real or not I think the classic example is when you're playing at a table and the phone in the pit rings and the pit boss picks it up and your palms start sweating and a few minutes later someone comes and taps on your shoulder and you're like all right here it goes I'm getting backed off you turn and it's a host offering you a free room or seeing if they can provide any comps for you there had been plenty of times in my career where I was absolutely certain I was going to get backed off only to have nothing happen then again there's been roughly a hundred times where I have him backed off from casinos so let's talk about what to do when you're experiencing heat in a casino the first thing you need to do when you think you're having heat in a casino is decide do I even care or not there are times where it's maybe your local casino or a place that you've been playing for a long time and you don't want to lose this casino if you're getting some heat maybe you just call it a session leave and give that casino some time to cool down or come back on a different shift there's nothing wrong with that but there are other times where you think about it and you have nothing to lose if you get backed off in those situations my advice play through the heat and see what happens the most dramatic example of this that I ever experienced was me and an early team that I was on we traveled to this casino across the country this was like a six hour flight somewhere you know we were paying for rental car flights all this stuff we're playing at this casino we're having a great session playing they're doing spotters and I was the big player we were on our second day of this and all of a sudden we start getting heat the pit-boss is coming over and thumbing through the cards in the discard tray like this and it's like oh no he's counting it down we panicked we left only to sit in our hotel rooms for the rest of the night and think well maybe we'll come back another time but were we actually ever gonna come back to this casino a six-hour flight away some other time to see if they're gonna let us last another trip we essentially did what I call backing yourself off we backed ourselves off from this casino rather than making them back us off in doing that we wasted an opportunity to generate evie and then we found out years later this casino would let you count cards there till you'd won a hundred thousand dollars so we could have kept playing through the heat continue to generate UV and seen if they were actually gonna do anything about it we ended up doing the same thing to ourselves another time another casino until we finally realized this is so dumb we're driving away from or flying away from casinos that we're never gonna come back to just hoping we get another session in so why don't we just play and see what they do if the casino doesn't back you off that's great you played through the heat and generated more evie if the casino does back you off at least you can check it off your list rather than wondering for the rest of eternity should I go back there should I've kept playing at least you know how it ended you might be saying but if I do get backed off then they might know who I am and put me in a database well the reality is they might already know who you are and if they're gonna put you in a database it's not gonna be because of the back off or not it's just gonna be because they determined sometimes the next day that you're an advantage player other times if they back you off you don't have to give them ID if you don't want them to know who you are and then maybe they you know want to put you in a database as an unknown but that's really not that daunting of a thing even if you are put in a database it's gonna happen to all of us advantage players at some point if you're afraid of back offs and you find yourself kind of panicking even thinking about this idea I strongly recommend reading Josh Axelrod's book repeat until Rich the first half of the book is incredibly interesting it's about his experience playing on a high limit team I know Josh he's a brilliant advantage player and he's had a lot success as a card counter an advantage player and their team was fearless and they said we're not gonna back ourselves off we're gonna make the casinos do it and that's how they had so much success and honestly every professional I know has to learn how to have that fearlessness in a casino the last thing I'll say about navigating heat in a casino is that you're gonna have to learn how to determine if it's real or not if you're trying to avoid it back off you're going to have to develop this sixth sense of are they really talking about me in a hey we think he's an advantage player or not or are they just talking about you and saying hey this guy's bought in for this amount of money he's been playing at this table because they do have to keep track of chips of the casino stuff like that there's no secret answer but what I want to do now is get into some kind of pre back-off ceremonies that'll help you learn how to navigate is this heat real or not the first pre back-off ceremony is people in the pit congregating and talking about you so again this one it's really difficult are they just talking about you because you're betting lots of money or are they talking about you in a hey we think this guy might be up to something you have to follow your gut with this but you know they might be kind of trying to not look at you but they can't help but look at you if if they are talking about you in a more in a ferris if they're just talking about oh yeah that guy over there then they'll look over they have nothing to hide they don't feel like they're you know doing anything subversive you just got to kind of gauge what's going on with these people talking about me in the pit the second kind of pre backup ceremony is when the phone's ringing the person picks up the phone and then they look at you and look away when this is happening the phone call is probably coming from surveillance in if that's the case they're saying hey we're analyzing this player or you know it could be that there was a dealer miss pay and they're just calling to say hey there was a Miss pay and you need to talk to the dealer about it at that point you need to decide what you want to do if the deal if the pit boss walks over and says to the dealer hey you've got to clean up your rack then you know it's not about you if he walks over and starts standing over the table or if he walks over and whispers to the dealer cut the shoe in half you know he's talking about you or if he then starts talking other pit bosses and pointing at you it might be time to get out of there the third pre back off ceremony is what's called Hawking so imagine the phone rings and then he gets off the phone the pit-boss walks over and he stands over the table like this kind of staring at you and watching the game this is usually a way of him saying hey I see you I see what you're doing and seeing if that's gonna be good enough to get you to leave if a pit boss comes over and you know I can tell my temperature's rising my palms are sweating and I'm wondering am I about to get backed off what I like to do is just ask something friendly to the pit-boss say someone like hey what's your favorite place to eat around here and then see how he responds if all of a sudden he goes from a frown into a smile he's like oh yeah I love the ramen place off of third Street then you know like the phone call had nothing to do with heat maybe it had to do with hey there's a guy betting larger and just make sure that the dealer is doing things right maybe the dealer isn't following the proper procedure with the cards if instead he stays grumpy and he says you know something like oh you know what you're doing maybe it's time for you to get it go get a meal okay you've got real heat and you gotta decide do you want to play through it or get out of there the fourth form of a pre backup ceremony is the preferential shuffle or the flatbed this is where you know you raise your bet and the pit boss says hey shuffle or the pit boss says hey whatever you bet you got to stay at that bet if you've seen my back off video what you haven't it's kind of hilarious we'll put the link below but in that the guy keeps saying hey whatever you want bet that's what you're gonna have to bet the whole shoe what they're trying to do is without having to actually back you off they're trying to you know handle the fact that you're a winning player and take away your advantage if this happens you guys decide how to deal with it but you're probably not gonna talk them out of it and it's actually time to get out of there you can come back on another shift or another day another month another year but it's probably better than an actual back off at that casino the final form of pre backup ceremonies is when you get half shoed so after the cut card comes out the pit boss says something to the dealer and says hey cut it in half and you know in a 6x you they're only dealing three decks but where they shuffle again this happened to be plenty of times and what you can do in this situation is you can actually play through a shoe or two and see what happens myself other ApS we've had it where if you play through ashore to the casino might back off and say oh I guess they're not really a card counter or else they would have left I remember dusty aka pink chip was playing in a casino and he called me up and he said hey I'm getting heat they're half showing me is it okay if I just flap that for a little bit and see if the heat goes away and I said yeah if you pay the cost of the evie of what you're doing then that's fine he did that he played through a couple shoes everything went back to normal and they continued to play multiple more hours after that I remember one casino they were trying to hash shoo me but the dealer's didn't really like it so they were you know cutting off not really half a shoe and I ran to my car figured out that I could still beat this game because the rules were so good even with them cutting off two-and-a-half decks and then what I would do is every time the dealer would be shuffling I'd get them talking I start asking them questions and when they went to put that cut card they were distracted by our conversation and they would forget and put the cut card back in the original you know cutting off a deck or a deck and a half and then it would be too late and they you know probably be a little bit embarrassed but they just start dealing it out and try to remember the next shoe to cut off two-and-a-half decks but by doing that not only could I beat the game with two and a half decks cut off which is rare it has to be really good rules but by distracting them about half the time I made it you know a very beatable game again and I played quite a few hours with that and they never ended up backing me off you can also decide if you're getting half you do you know what why don't I just get out of here I can always come back another trip another shift and try this place again but why don't I get out of here before the real back-off comes speaking of the real back off let's talk about what happens and how to handle it when a real back off arrives the first thing they're almost certainly going to do is ask you to step away from the table for whatever reason they don't want all the gamblers there to know that they back off winning players so they ask you to step away you know you can decide if you want to go with them or if you say oh no I'm right here you know let's have this conversation right here you can also ask hey can I finish this shoe they're almost certainly gonna say no you can't finish the shoe but you know you can ask if you want but if they try to back you off in the middle of a hand you do have a right to play out that hand it is you know at least if in a non-tribal casino by law they have to let you finish out the hand and you can decide if you've got a 12 against a 10 or 16 against a 10 to just pull your bet back but if you've got a 20 against a dealer six then you can say hey let me finish out this hand and they are you know supposed to let you do that so how do we actually respond to the back off when it comes when they say we're sorry mr. Jones your game is just too good for us no more blackjack or if they say hey we don't want your action here how do we respond well the first thing I would say is it never helps to burn bridges I know you want to feign you know just horror and self-righteousness and defensiveness that they would back off any player from their game but they know what you're doing you know what you're doing and if you argue with them it's not gonna make things better I've tried it all in a casino I've tried arguing with them I've tried pleading I've tried saying well can I just use a smaller bedspread none of that stuff if my experience has worked so what I actually learned to do you can try this if you want is I apologize it seems to completely throw them off and take away their kind of aggressiveness I say oh I'm sorry I wasn't trying to do anything wrong here I was just enjoying playing and of course I'm gonna try to play to win but I hope I didn't do anything wrong here when I do that it seems to de-escalate the situation they're probably fairly emotionally charged when they're coming here to back you off and just by de-escalating the situation it seems to go better they might still be jerks about it but I would say more often than not they say well you know you're playing a winning game and we just can't handle that here it seems to be better than kind of ramping up and escalating things where they're much more likely to demand ID want to refuse to cash you out or any of the you know kind of just punk moves that casinos might try to pull if they really have a problem with you I talked about in detail in the video the truth Hynde casino back offs but there's really three kinds of back offs you'll experience there's hey no more blackjack then there's your backed off from all casino games and then the most daunting is trespass where they say we have a right to arrest you for trespassing if you come back to this casino so let me talk about how to handle each of these if you're only backed off from blackjack there still might be opportunities to generate a V in that casino in other ways maybe you have comps you can still use maybe there are other exploitable games or machines and those casinos so you know be thankful that you can still use your comps there or whatever else it might be and whether you're backed off from just blackjack or even all table games it's really up to you if you want to come back and try blackjack there again I know some people like Tommy Highland he says he's been backed off from some casinos dozens of times I've been backed off from some casinos not dozens but several times and you know it's gonna be ok it's a different story if you've been trespassed now if you've been trespassed atticus you know it is up to you if you want to push that or not some card counters just laugh at it when a casino trespasses them and they continue to go back to those casinos over and over again but I also know some ApS that have had some bad situations where they actually get arrested from returning to casinos they have trespassed them so you're gonna have to make that decision on your own here are some other thoughts on back off first off don't make it a bigger deal than it is so I was thinking about an analogy and you know grocery stores might have the no shirt no shoes no service thing where they say you know they don't have to serve you or you might have to leave their grocery store if you show up with no shirt no shoes on well imagine a friend says hey I'll pay you five hundred bucks to go shop in there with no shoes on and it could be that eighty percent of the time you're able to get away with it because nobody's paying attention to your shoes I mean I would do that all day if they then say hey you have no shoes on we're not gonna you know check you out here at this grocery store I'd be like oh sorry ok not a problem and I would leave but I'm not gonna act like you know this horrible thing has happened to me I knew that they have a right to refuse service me if they want to and I also know that it's a free country I can go in there and try to shop with no shoes on look I know that's not a perfect analogy but my point is if this were to happen to me if I were to try to shop with no shoes on and they you know said hey no no business to people with no shoes I would say I would take it in stride I wouldn't freak out about it's the same in a casino they might want to treat you like you're a criminal because you're playing a winning game but don't don't let them treat you that way just take it in stride move on to the next place generate more Eevee somewhere else and don't you know let it seem like this awful thing that happened to you that you have to do everything in your power to avoid happening again for myself all my friends who've made six or seven figures at card counting the reality is you got to deal with back offs and to have a high level of success it means handling lots of back offs and not worrying about it it's really not that big of a deal they're just saying they don't want you to play there because you're too good for them it's their business decision and hopefully this video will help you know how to navigate that how to overcome it how to deal with it when it happens for more on this topic you can check out our video the truth about back offs in casinos or actually watch the video of me getting backed off from a casino and we'll put those links below

Channel: Blackjack Apprenticeship

Views: 1,118,134

Keywords: Blackjack, blackjack apprenticeship, blackjack apprentice, colin jones, how to count cards, blackjack strategy, beat blackjack, card counting, blackjack backoff, casino backoff for card counting, casino surveillance, card counting blackjack, card counting back off

Id: 5qhvi6slNdc

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 08 2020