A Note On Negative Variance and Knowing When To Get Up

So yesterday I got one of my subscription e-mails from a Blackjack website. The contents really bothered me and I think it is something that needs to be discussed like my last post about budding addicts.

First thing:

I thought, no biggie, if I play and hit some neg variance, I can still pull money out of brokerage account as a short term margin loan and just liquidate stock to pay it off so I pay nothing on it.

Now I'm not one to tell anyone how to finance their bankroll, however personally, unless Blackjack is my full time job, I'm NOT taking out a loan of any sort (cash advance, credit card credit loans, etc). I'm not liquidating anything in my retirement funding. I would strongly suggest not even THINKING about this. Personally, unless again you are doing Blackjack for a living, your ONLY source of bankroll finance should be money earned from your 9-5. That's my opinion.

Two:

First shoe I play, TC goes high and I get KILLED. At the end of the shoe I had $800 left so I played some DD and got back up to around $1300.

My motto is:

Play what you can beat and what's paying you.

If I'm getting hammered at a certain table and move to another one where I get my money back (and then some), I'm not leaving the table that's paying me until I'm either bored or it stops paying me. I don't understand why this guy left a good (paying) game to play one that was negative. Which brings us to one major point:

I go back to the 6deck game and it was fresh shoe waiting for me with the same dealer who dealt when the first high count shoe got me. I sit down and was playing table minimum when the count shoots up like crazy. It was about 1.5 decks in and I’m already at a +22 so I’m doing my max bet. With the high count out, I somehow still ended up with neutral upcards and dealer always ended up getting a 10 upcard. I proceed to get cleaned out of all the money I brought with me.

This happened to me the first time I took my counting game to the casino and upped my bets. Of course I was counting incorrectly for the game I was playing (see posts about "this is not blackjack"). But the same thing happened. I've also encountered this in practice play. This is called negative variance. If you hit it, it can clean out your trip bankroll and do it quickly. A high count does not guarantee wins! Let me repeat this:

High counts, and odds in your favor do not guarantee wins

But this gets worse:

At this point there were still 3.5 decks left, so I do my best speed walk to the ATM hoping to get back before someone jumps into my high count. At this point, my card gets DECLINED!!!

Call me superstitious or whatever you want. This too was a bad omen. Negative variance at the table. Declined bank transaction. It's time to leave.

So the only option was to pull the $600 I had from my debit card, fortunately I don’t have to pay ATM fees from my bank. I got back to the table and nobody had sat down yet (asked first to make sure) and bought in to do more max bets. Get cleaned out again, now with no cash available to me and I was forced to leave a RC21 shoe with 3 decks left.

Why did he think he was going to recover? Because he was looking at the RC (~6-7TC) rather than the fact that he was experiencing very bad negative variance. Question: Why did he NOT stay at the table where he was winning? Question: Why did he ignore clear evidence that he was playing a losing game (High count or not, it was a losing game) and NOT LEAVE THE PREMISES?

Personally, I think this guy is headed down the road to gambling addiction. I don't care that he was "only mad that he had to leave a table with a R21". The fact is that the table was EXTREMELY negative. He left a profitable game to play one that was a drain on his bank.

I hope that the people at the website he wrote to discussed this with him. I hope his friends mentioned it to him.

Advice to Budding Gambling Addicts

So the other event that I need to speak upon that happened this weekend.

As I was cashing out my last EV for the evening a young man who was shabbily dressed in an oversize jacket (I know it's cool in casinos but still), shorts, socks and sandals was hanging about looking a bit agitated. I'm always aware of who is around me due to the fact that you have people exiting with rather large sums of cash and I don't want to be the victim of some lookout boy. So if someone looks kinda shifty I change my exit behavior. Trust me, people have been stuck for their bankroll. Anyway, as I cashed out the young man asked me for a buck fifty. I wasn't sure I heard him correctly so I gave him a quizzical look.

I need bus fare. I lost a lot of money.

I told him no and thankfully he didn't press the issue.

Don't let this be you.

There's two things here. 1. Anyone who is under control, knows to separate their gambling money from their "life money". Secondly, you come with what you can spend and you leave if it goes up in smoke. Re-up and come back. Why would one spend one's way home?

I won't say that I've never gone on tilt after a major loss and thrown 20 bucks into a slot machine before exiting. But that was $20 bucks I had to spend and in no way affected my life. Going on tilt (getting emotional) happens. It is imperative that you learn to smooth out the emotions if anything to make sure you don't stress yourself ill.

But the main reason I didn't give him the buck 50 is because there was a large chance that since he saw no problem in spending his get home money that he would spend the buck 50 I gave him on yet another grasp at a losing game. a buck fifty represents 4 slot spins. I knew that, he knew that and I wasn't going to feed his habit.

Gambling addicts are like any other addicts. You don't help them by feeding their problem. Don't give them money. Tough love is the only way out. He's lucky it was warm out and if he was in fact one bus ride away from home, he had a nice long walk to think about his problem. Maybe next time he'll get a metro card that doesn't work in the Casino and he'll have a way home on those [many] losing days.

Don't let this be you. The house has an edge over the vast majority of people. All those bells and lights are there to distract you from this fact. Don't get distracted. Know your limits. Stay in your limits and know when to go home!

Don't Be A Loser. Take Advice

So I need to share an experience I had this weekend. Previously I've discussed my issues with certain electronic Blackjack systems. Not one to be deterred, I've been studying the game and it's quirks. So I was playing over the weekend.

One of the things I do is wait for a "shuffle" which for this game I assume happens when the avatar changes. This way I'm not jumping into a game that may be losing (50-50%). So this guy comes up to play while I'm waiting. After 2 losses he wants to raise his bet to $100. The avatar changed before he could make this bet. Here I started to play, minimum bet. This guy gets mad that I jumped in on "his" game. He actually said:

I was gonna play a hundred but you jumped in

*sigh* So I informed him that my play has no affect on his play and asked him if he read the rules.

I don't need to read no rules

Why would you not be interested in the rules. Rules affect your edge and therefore your expected value? So I bring up the rules, specifically the part about separate decks for each station and told him to read that.

I ain't gotta read no rules

So he took his $100 and went to another station, where from the looks of it, he lost it. I made my EV and cashed out.

Look. There are very few advantaged players out there. Among them, there are very few who are willing to share advice. Now, I don't walk around announcing I'm an AP for obvious reasons, but on occasion I'll give basic advice, and since these particular tables are designed to distract the DP (Disadvantaged Player) I tend to at least get them to look at the rules. So look if someone is giving you advice, it's likely you're doing something that is costing you money. You should listen. Don't be a loser