- 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.
