A few tips for a casino player

Distractions

When you're walking upon the casino's floor to start your gambling session, holding your perspective is significant. All the miscellaneous things in casino kind of hypnotize a lot of gamblers. Casinos want it. So, you have to stay cool and keep an unclouded mind.

Walk around for five or ten minutes before you sit down to play. Survey in mind your purposes for this session while you perceive the gamblers and the games.

Selecting a table

This is a makeshift decision for gamblers in general. They are choosing the first table they approach, that has a free seat and offers a minimal bet suitable for them. But the decision in selecting the table is an essential element in your chances of becoming a winner in this session.

A good sign is if a players' majority bets more than the minimum bet. Most players enlarge their bet when they continue to win.

This activity of winning might be produced by a non-random shift. It begets cycles of winning for both sides - the dealer and the players.

Tables you should avoid

Same as you are brought to tables where "the lights of Christmas Tree are blazing", you should pay attention to avoid the evident losing table at which players are showing few chips, making single-chip bets, and filter a sullen attitude.

Basic Strategy

So, now you're in the game. Now you've got to make a settlement on each of blackjack hands: split pairs, hit, double down, stand, or take insurance if the dealer demonstrates an ace.

These settlements are making online blackjack one of the most popular and thrilling table games in online casinos. They also give the players a certain control over what comes out of heir hands.

There exists a mathematically accurate way of making each of these settlements. Its name is Basic Strategy.

With this strategy you can become a serious player. It's actually a card counter's strategy. You'll have to pay attention to the cards on the table and their low and high quantity.

So, in general, before starting to play in casino, don't get distracted by such things as lights or beautiful women. Pay attention to everything, especially to your game session.

Online blackjack playing culture

Some games are known for their spirit of union and excitement of acting as a team and it's quite common in team sports such as football, baseball and basketball. However, some individual games are known for the same level of adrenaline rush and for many it will be a real surprise to learn that some online casino players describe their excitement just like football players would do.

One of the games that is known for its excitement and exquisite tension that makes the player as involved as with a physical sport is of course blackjack. And no big surprise that some many online casino players choose this particular game when entering numerous online casino sites all over the world.

The cultures of online and real world blackjack playing are quite different despite the fact that it's pretty much the same game being played. The main difference is of course that when playing online you're playing alone, usually in the comfort of your home without the typical distractions and tension you get in brick-and-mortar casinos. Of course, there's a downside to it - you don't get the thrill and excitement that make blackjack games so exciting.

People who play blackjack form close communities because they are very passionate about the game, And taking the fact that it's all in all a gambling game where the stakes can go sky high and earn the winners a fortune, sometimes the communication between blackjack players can seem to be a bit esoteric to those who are not in the game.

That's what online blackjack is famous for - there are numerous specialized forums that form communities of players all over the world. The Internet lets many players communicate regardless of their location, and when there are many people sharing the same passion for such thing as playing blackjack online you can definitely say that there's a real culture behind it.

Just with any other game-specific forums and communities you can get lost and confused the first time you enter such an online community. They are quite often based around online casinos where you can play blackjack anytime, and discuss the game after you had your fun at the online table. Of course, some forums are more open to newbies than the others and with some communities you will find it hard to communicate with other players if they haven't seen you in the casino.

Still, without a doubt, the Internet has revolutionized the culture of blackjack, turning it into a global phenomenon rather than a local community-based game, revolving around clubs and real casinos. Regardless of your location, you can play blackjack online, take part in tournaments with large prizes, win real money and discuss the strategies and experience with other players who enjoy playing blackjack just like you do. And you don't need to pack your bags and go to a city where playing blackjack is legal. All you need is a good Internet connection and plenty of time to enjoy this exciting game.

Lawrence Revere

Lawrence Revere was both an author and a serious player. He died in 1977. His only book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, initially published in 1969, is still in print. If you look at the "true count" methods being employed pre-Revere, you will see why Revere was inducted into the hall of fame. The earlier methods were cumbersome and mentally fatiguing to use. In the second edition of Beat the Dealer, in which Thorp first proposed the Hi-Lo Count, he mentioned a simplified method of using the count, though he failed to develop it as a full system. Revere had a leap of brilliance that led him to come to the conclusion that the simplified method of obtaining a "true count" that Thorp had mentioned could be fully developed and employed with the most powerful of point count systems. Revere's method was so simple compared to the alternatives, it has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Stanford Wong, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, Bryce Carlson, Arnold Snyder, and others. As a serious player, Revere's knowledge of blackjack included such esoteric techniques as shuffle tracking and hole card play.

Max Rubin

Max is the author of Comp City, first published in 1994, with an expanded second edition published in 2002. In this groundbreaking book, Max exposed techniques even non-counting players could use to get an advantage over the casinos by exploiting weaknesses in the casinos' comp systems. Max's inside information came from his years of experience in the industry as a dealer, pit boss, and casino manager. Max still does consulting work for the Barona Casino in California.

The initial manuscript for Comp City included advanced comp-hustling techniques that could be used by professional card counters, but the editors at Huntington Press decided to delete this section from the book in order to appeal to the wider market of recreational players. These excluded portions were published in Blackjack Forum in June 1994, and can be found now in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

In the mid-1990s, he started hosting the Blackjack Ball, a secret annual event for professional players, where he serves as Game Master as many of the top pros compete for the Blackjack Cup and the title of World's Best Blackjack Player.

Now, as a host of the Game Show Network's World Series of Blackjack, Max Rubin has become one of the most visible public advocates of professional players.

Tommy Hyland

Tommy started playing blackjack professionally in 1978 while still in college. That was also the year he started his first informal "team." He's never looked back. For more than twenty-five years, he has been running the longest-lasting and most successful blackjack team in the history of the game. He and his teammates have played in casinos all over the U.S., Canada, and the world. He has used big player techniques, concealed computers (when they were legal), and had one of the most successful "ace location" teams ever. He has personally been barred, back-roomed, hand-cuffed, arrested, and even threatened with murder at gun-point by a casino owner he had beaten at the tables. Every year, the Hyland team players take millions of dollars out of the casinos. And even though Tommy has had his name and photo published in the notorious Griffin books more times than any other player in history, he continues to play and beat the games wherever legal blackjack games are offered. He has also fought for players' rights by battling the casinos in the courts.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Tommy is polite, soft-spoken, and always a gentleman. He is as loved by players as he is feared by the casinos. In an interview conducted by Richard Munchkin in 2001, Tommy said, "If someone told me I could make $10 million a year working for a casino, I wouldn't even consider it. It wouldn't take me five minutes to turn it down ... I don't like casinos. I don't like how they ruin people's lives. I don't think the employment they provide is a worthwhile thing for those people. They're taking people that could be contributing to society and making them do a job that has no redeeming social value."

Keith Taft

Keith is not well known to the general public, but among professional players he is revered as an electronics genius who has spent more than thirty years devising high-tech equipment-computers, video cameras, and communication devices-to beat the casinos. Blackjack was his initial target, and always remained his prime target. His first blackjack computer, which he completed in 1972, weighed fifteen pounds. Over the years, as computer chip technology developed, his computers became smaller, faster, and lighter. By the mid-1970s, he had a device that weighed only a few ounces that could play perfect strategy based on the exact cards remaining to be dealt. If it were up to Keith, his son Marty's name would be right along his in the Blackjack Hall of Fame, as the two have worked as partners since Marty was a teenager. For thirty years they have jointly created ever-more-clever hidden devices to beat the casinos, trained teams of players in their use, and have personally gone into the casinos to get the money. Keith and Marty may, in fact, have literally invented the concept of computer "networking," as they were wiring computer-equipped players together at casino blackjack tables thirty years ago in their efforts to beat the games. When Nevada outlawed devices in 1985, it was specifically as a result of a Taft device found on Keith's brother, Ted-a miniature video camera built into Ted's belt buckle that could relay an image of the dealer's hole card as it was being dealt to a satellite receiving dish mounted in a pickup truck in the parking lot, where an accomplice read the video image, then signaled Ted at the table with the information he needed to play his hand. An in-depth interview with Keith and Marty Taft was published in the Winter 2003-04 Blackjack Forum, and is available in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

Edward O. Thorp [editable]

Edward Oakley Thorp is widely regarded, by professional players as well as the general public, as the Father of Card Counting. It was in his book, Beat the Dealer, first published in 1962, that he presented his Ten-Count system, the first powerful winning blackjack system ever made available to the public. All card-counting systems in use today are variations of Thorp's Ten-Count.

When Thorp's book became a best seller, the Las Vegas casinos attempted to change the standard rules of blackjack, but their customers would not accept the changes and refused to play the new version of the game. So, the Vegas casinos went back to the old rules, but switched from dealing hand-held one-deck games to four-deck shoe games, a change that the players would accept. Unfortunately for the casinos, in 1966 Thorp's revised second edition of Beat the Dealer was published. This edition presented the High-Low Count, as developed by Julian Braun, a more powerful and practical counting system for attacking these new shoe games.

In 1961, Thorp and C. Shannon jointly invented the first wearable computer, a device that successfully predicted results in roulette. Thorp has an M.A. in Physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics, and has taught mathematics at UCLA, MIT, NMSU, and U.C. Irvine, where he also taught quantitative finance. For many years Ed Thorp wrote a column for the now-defunct Gambling Times magazine. Many of these columns were collected in a book titled The Mathematics of Gambling, published in 1984 by Lyle Stuart.