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"Win a Few Hundred Bucks a Day" Blackjack Strategy: Does It Work? - YouTube
Channel: Blackjack Apprenticeship
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- Is it possible to go
into a casino each day
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and just quit while you're
ahead, a few hundred bucks?
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How does this strategy play out over time
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either as a gambler or as a card counter?
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I'm gonna answer that question
in this video with graphs.
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(upbeat music)
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I'm Colin from Blackjack Apprenticeship,
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and over my career
playing and running teams,
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myself and my teams have won
hundreds of dollars per hour
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resulting in roughly
$4 million in profits.
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But that came with huge
losses and huge wins.
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Personally, I've lost $40,000
in a day playing blackjack
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and I've won roughly $50,000
in a day playing blackjack,
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and for myself, the wins
outweighed the losses,
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but there were a lot of both.
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Well, what if you're not looking
to bet that kind of limits?
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What if you just want to win
a few hundred bucks every day
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you go to the casino, does that work?
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Well, I get some version
of that question asked
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through email or through the
YouTube channel every week,
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and I thought I would
answer that in this video.
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Let's first talk about a gambler.
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Let's say you want to just
go into a casino each day
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and win $300.
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The moment you're up $300, you walk out
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and you come back the
next day with the goal
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of doing the same thing day after day.
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Well, to explain this, let
me use an illustration.
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Let's say, instead of gambling,
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I offer you a coin flip and
I say, hey, flip this coin.
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If it lands on tails,
you lose a hundred bucks.
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If it lands on heads,
you win a hundred bucks.
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Well, that's a 50-50
proposition that's better
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than any game straight up in
a casino because it's 50-50.
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And so you say, okay,
I'll take that offer,
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and the moment you're ahead,
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three heads, or $300, can you leave?
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The odds of actually being up three heads
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in any one given day is over 75%.
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And at that point you say, great.
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I'm gonna walk out, I'll
come back the next day
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and do it again.
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Well, does it work that way?
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Well, step back for a
minute and think about this.
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At the end of one day,
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you're asking to be up
three heads versus tails,
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and there's over 75%
chance of that working out.
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But by day two, you're actually wanting
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to be up six heads versus
tails between the two days.
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By day three, you're asking to be up
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nine heads versus tails.
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By the end of that week,
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you're asking to be up 21 heads
over the course of a week.
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And over the course of a month,
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you're expecting or wanting to
have 90 more heads than tails
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in that one month stretch.
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You see, the coin doesn't
care that it's a new day.
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The coin isn't saying to itself, you know,
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normally I'm 50-50, but if you stop today,
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let me reset my probability
on this new day,
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and you get to start over.
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Every flip of the coin
is an independent event,
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but those independent events add up
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whether it's a hundred flips in one day
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or one flip for a hundred days,
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every flip of the coin is
building up towards this long run
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that's gonna result in 50-50 probability.
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So in this example, being
able to be up three heads
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in one day is about 76% chance.
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Being up three heads for a week,
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it drops to a 15% chance of working out,
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and trying to be up three
heads for a month stretch
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drops to a one in 3000 possibility.
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To try to give you a visual
to explain what I'm saying,
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here's a really hokey graph that I made
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with my terrible Photoshop skills.
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But what you can see in it
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is that after only a thousand flips,
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the odds are getting
closer and closer to 50-50.
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Now this red line I added to the graph
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is what you're trying to do over time,
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and you're trying to continue to stay
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on the heads side of 50-50
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as the probability gets closer
and closer to the 50-50 line.
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It's just not going to work.
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It doesn't matter if you quit for one day
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and try to start over the next day.
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Every flip of the coin is
getting you closer and closer
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to 50-50 over the long haul.
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Now that example was
for a 50-50 proposition,
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but if you're gambling in a casino,
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you're not playing 50-50.
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If you're using basic
strategy at blackjack,
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the casino has half a percent edge.
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If you're playing anything
worse than basic strategy,
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God forbid you're playing poor blackjack,
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or you're playing a game
with a larger house edge.
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Every time you gamble,
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even if you quit while you're ahead
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and come back the next day,
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you're just working
towards the inevitable,
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which is the math working out.
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Now, what does this
mean for a card counter?
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Well, the beauty and the
curse of card counting
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is that you cannot trick the math.
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If you leave while you're
up a few hundred dollars,
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you're not resetting the probability
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and avoiding losing streaks.
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All you're doing is prolonging
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how long it's gonna take
you to get to the long run.
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If you're counting cards,
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you're playing a positive
EV game every shoe.
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Every shoe you play, independent
of what day you play it,
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is building towards that long run.
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I gotta tell you a story here
to help illustrate this point.
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There was a guy that I trained.
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He actually played on the church team,
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which was a large
blackjack team that I ran.
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He played for it for a while.
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He left the team and then he
started playing on his own
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and he calls me and says, Colin,
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I figured out a brilliant
way to avoid losses.
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He said, what I do is I go into the casino
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and I play at the blackjack tables,
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and once I'm up a bit, I go out to my car
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and I play on the Blackjack
Apprenticeship iPhone app
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until I hit a losing streak.
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Then I go back into the casino
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for my inevitable winning streak,
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which is sad and hilarious
because that's not how it works.
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The cards don't know where you're playing.
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Every hand of blackjack is
building towards this long run,
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and you can't trick the
math into the losses
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being on a phone and the
wins being in a live casino.
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It will not work that way.
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While you cannot avoid the losses
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with all the randomness of the game,
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everything will play out at the table.
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The beauty of card counting
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is that the math will work out over time.
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Any loss is just a short
term bump in the road
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until you get to the long run
and you end up with profits.
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I promised you some graphs,
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so to help illustrate this point,
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let me show you some charts from a newer
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Blackjack Apprenticeship card counter.
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This is someone that came to
a bootcamp back in August,
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perfected his game,
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and he's been hitting
the tables pretty hard.
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I'm really proud of him.
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And he gave me permission
to use these charts
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to help illustrate this point.
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In this first chart, we could
see graphs for hours played
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and next to it, expected
value and AV or actual value.
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That's his actual results.
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And each one of these bar
graphs is for a separate month.
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So you can see that November
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is when he played the most hours
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and also generated the most expected value
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and actually happened
to win the most money.
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It would be nice if every
month worked out that way
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that you generate more
EV, you win more money.
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But then look at December.
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He put in pretty good hours and generated
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a pretty strong amount of expected value,
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but he actually lost money.
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Was he playing poorly that month?
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No, he actually just experienced
the inevitable losses
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that happen to any card counter.
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You cannot just avoid those losses.
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He played perfectly, he lost that month.
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Then look at January.
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He didn't play much or
generate a whole lot
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of expected value,
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but he had some of the
strongest positive variance
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or just positive luck and won quite a bit.
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So looking at this, what
was within his control?
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All he could actually control
is putting in the hours
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and generating positive EV,
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and then he had to wait for
the randomness, the variance,
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the luck of the game to work out.
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In the end, you can actually see,
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here is his six month graph.
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what it looks like when you
put all of this together.
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So you see wins, you see losses,
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you see stretches of maybe a hundred hours
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where he was below his
previous all-time high,
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but then what happens as he continues
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to generate EV and put in hours?
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Well, he ends up at a new all-time high.
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That's how card counting works.
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Let me show you one more graph.
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This is in my book, "The
21st Century Card Counter",
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and the goal was to show
how this works out over time
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for a card counter.
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So in this first graph,
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you can see it's a hundred hours
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of five different card counters' careers,
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and you can see that most
people are in the positive.
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There's one person in the negative,
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one guy is basically even,
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oh, I'm basically even
after a hundred hours.
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And you know, there's some
randomness in a hundred hours
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of five different players.
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In the second graph, it's 500 hours
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of these same five card counters careers.
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And when you get to 500 hours,
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you can see everyone
is up in the positive.
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There has been some crazy winning
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and losing streaks
between the five players,
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but everyone is up in the positive.
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This third graph is after a thousand hours
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of these same five card counters careers,
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and you can see that the five
people are all converging
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in the same area of up and to the right,
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all in the positive as they generate EV,
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all the wins and losses rule out.
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What's left is the math,
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which is that card counters
end up with the casino's money.
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So whether you're a gambler
or an advantage player,
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you cannot trick math.
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You cannot overcome odds through trying
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to get ahead of the curve each day.
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The math will work out over time.
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All you can do is learn
how to play a winning game
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and generate positive EV.
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If you don't know what I'm talking about
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when I say, what is EV,
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check out this video right
here on what is expected value
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is the foundation of how card counters
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and advantage players think.
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It's also how casinos think,
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and you need to empower yourself to know
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how to generate positive EV.
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