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.
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