All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 10, 2025 - Adventures in HellwQrld
42:24
Aventures in HellwQrld Presents: Rains Explains Blackjack

The crew got busy this week so Mike's here to talk about Blackjack, the famous casino game and how it works, if the casino is cheating at it, how card counting works, and all that fun stuff. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Prime Video leverer den beste underholdningen, inkludert i Prime-medlemskapet.
Romantikken når kokepunktet i siste sesong av The Summer I Turned Pretty.
First loves are important, but not as important as last.
Når solen går ned, er det ingen grenser for humoren i den nye serien Rose on the Coast Norge.
Ja, da blir det hett, for da er det Rose!
Uansett hva du liker, Prime har det.
Prime abonnement kreves 79 kroner per måned.
Ja, Torstein, kanskje du kan break the news?
Men du og jeg hadde jo et ledemøte, og der sa jo du noe smart.
Ja, det var jo kommet litt et spareforslag fra deg, Torstein.
Ja, at du sa det var noen bekymring om at frukten har blitt så dyrt.
Jeg hørte at det har gått opp med 15%, det var det du som sa, Torstein.
Ja, men du sa jo at...
Hallo, vent litt, får vi ikke mer frukt?
Oi, det...
Ja, kanskje ikke noe dum i det, altså.
Nei, men da har Lise bestemt at frukten forsvinner.
Dessverre.
Redd frukten.
Bytt til Ice Bedrift.
Abonnementet som gir dere mer for pengene.
Heis!
Jeg hørte at det.
Thank you.
Hello, everybody.
This is Mike Raines, aka Poker in Politics, and I'm by myself.
Scheduling is always a tricky thing with four people.
I told everyone, look, I'd take a week off.
I got this.
And this is going to be a bit off-the-beaten path.
I might do another podcast tomorrow or so that's more political and that kind of stuff.
But today, someone made a mention about how they'd love to hear me just talk about casino games and how they work.
And I said, Well, I can do that because that's what my life is.
I work at Casino.
I've been in casinos for like 20 years now.
So, I'm gonna do a series on the games so you can understand them.
And if you know them, I mean, you can listen to me and see if you agree with my take.
But they're pretty obvious.
I think it's pretty simple how these games work.
So, we're gonna start with the big one: Blackjack.
Blackjack is probably the most popular game in casinos.
People know it very well.
It's uh been in movies and media all the time.
We got Rainman, definitely a lot of queens talking about card counting.
We'll get into card counting towards the end, but um, Blackjack is a very simple game, it's a very quick game, and that's why people like it.
It's action, it's fast.
And Blackjack is simply your goal is to get to 21 without going over.
It's uh, price is right rules.
And at the hands of conclusion, you and the dealer compare your hands, and whoever has a higher score without going over 21 is the winner.
So that's it.
And you might think to yourself, Well, that sounds really easy.
Why do I hear all these stories about people getting mad at other people at the blackjack table?
Why can such a simple game lead to so much anger and vitriol?
And the answer is that blackjack is a mathematically solved game.
Blackjack, the decisions are not really decisions, they've all been pre-baked in.
We've calculated what you should do in every situation, and thus, the people that play the game and know these decisions want you to make the right decision.
And if you don't make the right decision, they get upset about it.
And the thing is, is that this is very silly because if you're making wrong decisions, the only person you really hurt is yourself.
Because what people don't want to accept is that the next card is random.
Whatever the current card was that you were supposed to take that you didn't or you did, blah, blah, blah.
The next card that comes out to make the dealer's hand is random.
It has no impact on the previous card or the card after it.
You never know.
You never know what that card is going to be.
But when you see somebody take a card they were not supposed to and that card would have broken the dealer and made the table win gets very upsetting for people.
But people forget that, oh, when the guy took the wrong card and then the dealer, that card would have made the dealer's hand.
And then the next card, the card the dealer wasn't supposed to get, broke the dealer.
That's just as likely to happen.
But people don't remember that.
They want to remember the bad outcomes that happened because people played wrong.
Bad players only hurt themselves because they're making a mathematically incorrect play.
And in the long run, they're going to lose faster than if you play all the plays correctly.
The thing is, if you play Blackjack exactly right, the house edge is half a percent, which is basically nothing.
So the house is supposed to win 50.25% of all hands.
And you as the player are supposed to win 49.75% of all hands.
So the real house edge in Blackjack is what we call gambler's ruin.
And by that, I mean, if you run out of money, you can't play anymore.
Whereas the house will always have money.
If you buy in for 100 and run that 100 up to 5,000, the house is just going to keep paying and keep paying and keep paying because the house wants you to keep playing because we are just flipping coins.
We're just flipping coins in a very theatrical way.
And eventually the coin is going to come back my way.
And when you give that 5,000 back and then go into your wallet for another 1000, and then you lose that, now you're broke and you can't get it back.
That's the thing is if you put a player with infinite money against a bank against the house with infinite money and you had them play for like 72 hours, the house would probably come up a winner for, I don't know, like maybe 10, 20, 30 units, whatever you want to say.
But the game would be a slow, slow, slow grind between the two sides.
And at some point in their early going, the player could definitely be winning.
The player could definitely have an uptick where things go their way and they have the advantage and they make money.
And that's the important thing about all casino games is that when you win, you got to leave.
And casinos get you because the game itself is entertaining.
The winning and losing is secondary to the entertainment of the game.
So when you're winning and you're up, you don't think to yourself, oh, I need to leave and lock up my winnings.
You think if I leave, the entertainment will end.
And that's the science of gambling.
That's the way the casinos beat you is because they know that you're having fun playing the game.
So the fun becomes the primary reason why you're playing.
The winning becomes secondary.
You got to reverse that in your brain if you want to actually not lose your money.
So all that being said, how do you play Blackjack?
So you start the game, you put up your bet, and you're going to get two cards.
And the dealer is going to get two cards.
The dealer is only going to show you one of those two cards.
So mathematically, you have to assume the whole card, the down card the dealer has is a 10 because there's more 10s in the deck than anything else.
So the absolute basic strategy for blackjack is if you hit and it could bust you.
So if you have like a 14 and you take a card, if you get an eight or higher, it will knock you out of the game.
If you have a 14 and the dealer is showing a six or less, you should not hit because you can be eliminated.
And the dealer now has to make a hand.
The dealer has to draw because the dealer is a robot.
The dealer doesn't care what your cards are.
The dealer has under strict orders to make a hand between 17 and 21.
So if the dealer has 16, even if the whole table, every player at the table has less than 16 in front of them, the dealer must draw.
The dealer must pull a card.
And if it's a six or higher, the dealer busts and they're knocked out of the game and everyone at the table wins.
So because the dealer is a robot and the dealer has rules they have to abide by, you use those rules against the dealer and you know what you're supposed to do to give yourself the best possible advantage to win against the dealer.
So now if the dealer has a seven through ace showing and you've got a 14, you have to hit because if you stay on 14.
If the dealer has 17 or higher, they stop and the game's over and you lose because 14 is smaller than 17 through 21.
So you have to draw and you have to try to make a hand.
And basically the math works out that once you get to 17, there's not enough cards in the deck that will help you improve.
Beyond that, you're way more likely to bust than you are to make a better hand.
So you have to stop at 17.
And so everyone at the table should know this and they should play that way.
But do they?
No.
15s and 16s are obviously very bad spots to be in because there's very few cards that can improve your hand and there's a lot of cards that can break you.
And a lot of people will just not hit in those spots when they're faced against the dealer having a big card because they're just going to hope that the dealer actually has a whole card that's low and the dealer will break and they'll win.
And this is one of the big edges that the dealer has over the players is positional advantage.
Players have to go first.
Basically, it's a game of Russian roulette and you have to use the gun first.
And that's the thing is that if you decide not to risk using the gun and you just give the gun back to the dealer, then the dealer can also not use the gun if they have a good hand.
They just win.
So basically, it's one of these things where not quite exactly a rush roulette because the gun could kill you, but the gun could also give you money.
The gun could benefit you.
It's the risk you take of pulling the trigger.
And so you have to have the nerve to do that because it's mathematically right to pull the trigger.
But people only think of the death.
They only think of, oh, if I get knocked out of the game, I can't possibly win.
I'm going to not get knocked out of the game.
And I'm going to hope the dealer does have to draw.
The dealer does have to pick up the gun.
But if the dealer's got a 10 showing, it's incredibly unlikely that they're going to have, they're going to get a bad card.
I mean, it's 50-50.
I'm a little overexaggerating.
But the thing is, is that, let's say the dealer is showing a 10, and when they flip their card over, now they've got a 2 for 12.
Now they've got a lot of cards they can draw to make a hand and not so many cards that can bust them.
And that's the thing, is that when the dealer has a good card for them showing, you're in trouble and you have to, you have to go out.
You have to try to make a hand.
You have to try to beat them because if you don't, you're just resigning yourself to defeat, slow, painful defeat.
And also, you're going to make the table upset because the table expects you to play correctly and to take those cards.
Now, there are bonus events that happen in Blackjack.
And this is where your hand can get big for you.
And these bonus hands are called splits and double downs.
A split is when you have a pair of cards and you decide to turn the pair into two separate hands.
And you can do this with two twos, two threes, up through any two face cards or a 10 and a face card.
Splitting 20, which is something you should never do.
Splitting 20 is a very bad idea.
You have the second best hand in blackjack.
You are very likely to win on 20.
And if the dealer has an up a 10 up card, you're likely to push, which is a win in this situation because when the dealer has 20, they're supposed to beat you.
So when you've got 20 and you fend off that loss, that's good.
But the other twos through nines, there's times to split all of them, except for fives.
You never split fives.
Because fives are a 10.
And you wouldn't turning one 10 into two fives is a terrible idea.
Because again, the most Common card you're going to draw is a 10.
So, if you've got two fives and you hit and you get a 10, boom, 20, you're in really good shape.
Whereas, if you split them and now you've got a five and you get a 10, now you have 15, 15 sucks.
So, some people will say you don't split fours, that's not true.
You split fours against fives and sixes.
Again, we've done the math.
This is the thing that people don't understand, or if they do understand it, they don't do it nearly enough.
Is that we, as a casino, do not care if you play the game correctly because we're hoping that you will drink and start doing dumb stuff, or you'll get bored of blackjack and go hit a slot machine.
We're here to just let you have fun playing blackjack.
And if you want to put the chart in front of you that tells you every play you're supposed to make, do so.
You can get that chart off Amazon.
Go to Amazon, type in blackjack strategy card, cost like I don't know, three to five bucks.
Arrives at your door, you walk to the casino, you put the little chart in front of you, and you read it, and it shows you all the plays you're supposed to make.
And that's it.
It's real simple.
And so you make the right plays and you make the right splits.
And a split requires you to put up your, let's say, you bet 50 bucks.
Now you got a split, you gotta put up another 50.
And this is the thing: you can split up to four times.
You could have a hand that was supposed to be a $50 hand turn into a $200 hand.
And then on top of that, you could potentially have to double down.
Well, double down is when you make a 9, 10, or an 11, or you have a soft hand of some kind involving an ace, which we'll get into in a minute.
But basically, a double down means you double your current bet and then you receive only one card.
And the reason why I mentioned 9, 10, 11 is that because on a 9, 10, or an 11, you're supposed to draw a 10, and that will give you 19, 20, or 21, which are really good.
So you double on 9s against dealer-bust cards.
I believe it's 3-6, might be 4-6.
I'm not looking at the chart from Amazon.com right now.
On a 10, you double against everything but a 10 or an ace from the dealer showing, and you double all your 11s because you're very likely to make 21, which is the best possible outcome in the game.
So I've seen it happen where a person has four splits, two doubles, and suddenly their bet, which was 50 bucks, has now turned into $300 because they just got so much action on this one given hand.
But that's the thing that you're hearing from this is that even with all of this stuff going on, your payouts are still one-to-one.
Blackjack is a grindy game.
You're pushing the same money back and forth all the time because there's no big win.
There's no jackpot.
There's no mega bonus in the game of blackjack.
The main thing you can do to win extra money is to get a blackjack, which is that your first two cards equal 21, which ace is one or 11.
So if you get an ace and a face card, that's 21.
That's blackjack.
And on a blackjack, you get paid 3 to 2.
So your $50 bet would be a $75 payout, which is nice, but it's still not massive.
So casinos know you're looking for a big score, so they will put side bets on the blackjack tables.
These side bets are always bad.
They always have a big house edge.
But because you're just pushing the same two, $300 back and forth over and over again until you go broke or you eventually leave, people play the side bets because the side bets offer 50 to 1, 200 to 1, 100 to 1, whatever to one big payout.
So it's just you put up 10 bucks, you hit the magic cards you need to hit to win the jackpot, boom, you get $1,000.
And that's exciting.
That's a lot of fun.
But they're there for that reason.
They're there because the fun and excitement of Blackjack can wear off after a half hour or an hour or so.
And now you're stuck $200 and you're trying to get it back and you're just fighting, fighting, fighting.
You get back to even.
You play a little more.
You get up 100.
You don't leave because now you're on a roll.
Next thing you know, you're back down 100.
And that's just the cycle.
That's just the way it goes with blackjack.
That's just the way it goes with blackjack.
I don't know if I thought about murder because I had dårlig samvittighet.
Or if it was for me to make sure that this was something I was in stand for.
There you got to be a song of the King of Os of Jon Espe.
Fortsettelsen can you show when you want, only with Fabel.
Come on on Fabel.no and listen gratis in 30 days.
Fabel.
Listen to us.
So that is kind of like the nuts and bolts of the whole game.
But you've probably heard people talk about card counting.
You've probably heard people talk about how you can beat Blackjack.
It was a, I posted a thing about how I can't believe how people are just learning now that they kick card counters out of casinos.
And I've received replies, and like there was someone replied about how it's really unfair that they kick out card counters.
And it's not because if the casinos allowed the card counters to play, they would just lose money on them.
And no business is in the business of just giving people money.
And what's funny about card counting is people will think, oh, this is this mysterious, scary, crazy thing that like you have to be 170 IQ genius to do.
It's like it's mythologized on television and in movies that the card counter is some sort of genius, the MIT card counting team in that movie.
But card counting is really very simple.
It's a very basic thing.
Card counting 101 is you assign a plus one value to every card between two and six, a zero value to sevens, eights, and nines, and a negative one value to all face cards and aces.
And hand a blackjack goes out.
There's three players at the table.
And on the table, there are all small cards.
It's just one guy gets a five and a six, one guy gets a three and a four.
You get a two and a six.
And the dealer's up card is a three.
The shoe is now plus seven.
That's it.
And as everyone's hitting, you're just keeping track.
Guy got a ten.
Now the shoe's plus six.
Guy stays.
Next guy hits, gets a ten.
Now the shoe's plus five.
And on and on and on.
And that's it.
It's all you're just calculating the math, calculating the math kind of quickly, but it's not that hard.
If you want to do it, you can do it.
You can count cards.
We had card counters at my casino recently.
And I recently, you know, a couple of years ago, really, and someone in management was like, you need to count with them.
So I did.
And I had never counted cards before, but it wasn't really that hard, especially when you're a manager and it's my job to just look at the table.
I don't have to track my bets.
I don't have to do anything.
I'm not ordering drinks from the waitresses.
I'm just sitting there standing there counting.
And it wasn't hard.
My counts were pretty solid.
So card counting is a very basic thing to do.
And the main thing about card counting is that when the shoe gets to plus 10 or even plus 15, now the shoe is considered hot.
Now the shoe is considered a winning shoe.
The reason why is because, as a blackjack player, you want predictability, which is to say that when the dealer has a bad up card, they're going to bust.
Because nothing is more frustrating for blackjack players than when the dealer is showing a five or a six as the up card, which is likely to break them.
And when the dealer is showing a five or a six, blackjack strategy dictates that you try to get more money down on the table.
If you've got a pair, most pairs anyways, you split against fives and sixes because you want to get more money down.
If you have a nine, 10 or an 11, you want to double down against it.
A lot of soft aces want to double down, like a soft 17, soft 16, yin and a yin and a soft to explain real quickly.
If you are currently in a situation where your ace can equal 11 without breaking you, it does equal 11.
So if you have a ace and a 7, you have 18.
It's a soft 18, but that's your hand.
If you stop right now, your hand freezes at 18.
But if you elect to draw, then the next card you get, let's say you get a 10, now you just have a hard 18.
The ace turns from an 11 to a 1.
And now your hand is hard.
That's all the difference.
But when, as you just probably would notice, when you're soft, you cannot break because you can just turn the ace into a 1.
You basically just like activate its Pokemon evolution power and make it the smaller number so that you don't lose the game.
So when the dealer is showing a 5 or a 6 and you've got a mid soft hand, you double down because A, you might hit a lucky card that gives you a 20 or a 21.
But B, because the dealer is showing a five or a six, they're very likely to break because their whole card's a 10.
Now they've got 15 or 16.
They've got a draw.
That draw will probably be higher than that card.
That'll probably take them over 21.
They'll knock them out of the game.
Everyone wins.
So if the dealer is showing a five or a six, you expect them to lose.
That is the outcome that should happen.
And then when they suddenly flip their whole card and it's another, they got a six is up.
They flip their whole card.
It's a five.
And then they draw and they pull a 10 for 21.
That's infuriating.
That sucks because you were invested heavily in that hand.
You expected to win a lot of money and then wham, you lose.
But when the shoe is heavy on the plus side, like again, like a plus 10, plus 15, now that whole card is way more likely to be a 10.
And then when they draw, they're way more likely to pull another 10 because eventually the shoe should get back to equilibrium.
The shoe should get back to neutral and zero.
And as the shoe is bleeding down that positive count, it's going to see more face cards and more aces, which on the dealer side means they're more likely to break when they get a small card.
And also for you on the player side, it means you're more likely to get 20s and blackjacks.
So that's why you want a shoe that's drained all the small cards out of it because with less small cards means more big cards for everybody.
And big cards benefit the players and big cards hurt the dealer.
And now you might be wondering, how do they catch card counters?
How does someone know that someone is doing this?
And the answer is, is that the person who's doing it is upping their bets when the shoe gets hot.
And that's the giveaway.
So you start by betting like 20 bucks and then you're counting, you're counting, you're counting.
Shoe gets up to plus 10 plus 15.
And then suddenly you go from $20 bets to $100 bets or $200 bets or even bigger.
You start putting lots of money on the table.
And that's a red flag.
That's a sign that you're doing something when you suddenly turn your bet from one size to 10 times its current size.
Now it's like, wait a minute, this guy, this guy's doing a thing.
We got to look into this.
We got to see what this guy's up to.
And so that's the problem is that, is when you're a card counter, you've got to be subtle about these things.
You can't just jump on the hot shoe because now people are going to notice.
Phone calls are going to be made.
And this is the thing is that that whole thing about me standing there and counting and counter counting the counter to see what they're doing, that's all fun in games.
And it's a thing that we can do to monitor people.
But if we see your betting patterns are crazy and you're doing stuff like that, we'll just call surveillance.
And surveillance has programs that will monitor a shoe and run the count.
And so, if we see a guy betting small and now he's betting huge, we'll just call surveillance and say, Hey, on Blackjack 7, the guy in the second seat, he just turned his bets from $25 to $500.
Let's see what that's all about.
And then, when we get the phone call back, they'll probably tell us, Yeah, that guy's counting.
You need to back him off.
At which point, we then talk to management, and then management goes and talks to the guy.
They tell him, Look, sir, your blackjack's a little too strong for us.
You can play any other game, but you can't play blackjack anymore.
And if that's not good enough for you, then you can leave.
And the whole excuse for that is that casinos are private property.
We can choose to host whoever we want to, and we can choose to kick out whoever we want to.
So, yeah, like hit the bricks, pound sand.
So, that's that's card counting.
And so, you when you're a card counter, you want to make big bets when the shoe isn't in your favor.
You want to try to portray yourself to the casino and to the people tracking your play is that you're just an intuition player, that you're playing vibes, that you're doing silly stuff.
You're doing things that are not mathematically beneficial because that way you can present yourself as someone who is just a recreational blackjack player, who's just having fun and just happened to catch a little wave of cards at the end there and made a few hundred bucks.
That's all.
And that's really the main science to card counting: not getting caught.
And when you're not being caught, you want to change your appearance a lot.
So, you go into a casino one day and you're wearing a football jersey and a ball cap and you've got a mustache and you win like two or three thousand dollars.
You leave the next guy, the next time you come back, you don't have the hat on, you grew your hair out, you shaved your mustache, you're wearing a nice button-up shirt, maybe you have a tie on.
You present yourself differently.
And then, after you've gone through your disguises for like two or three, four sessions at that casino, you leave that casino, you go to the next casino, and you repeat the process, and you keep doing that, and you keep hitting them and you do what you can to avoid being detected.
And that's that's the real science of card counting.
I had a friend, uh, she was moving to Vegas, and she had talked to me about how she had done some counting in like the local casinos, like Foxwoods, Mohegan, stuff like that.
And she was like, like, pretty happy about like her abilities.
And I was like, cool, good luck.
And about six weeks into her life in Vegas, she got caught, she got caught counting.
And it was just like, man, that is, that's how that works.
You can't be doing that.
You got to be more subtle.
You got to be more slick because they will notice.
They will notice.
And the big problem is that if you get caught in Vegas, if you're on the strip, the strip is half Caesars and half MGM.
So if you get caught in one casino, you're now basically blacklisted from half the casinos on the strip from being able to play Blackjack.
So then you have to go to, so you get blacklisted at MGM.
Now you got to go to Caesars.
And if they catch you, now it's over.
Now you can't play Blackjack on the strip.
Now you got to go other places.
So that's really it.
Turi?
Turi?
Turi gjør det ikke seg noe.
Nei.
Turi?
Jeg trenger hjelp nå, Turi.
Turi?
Har du blitt jobbens ufrivillige tekspert?
Ingen grunn til å hjemme seg.
Hos Elkjøp Bedrift får du nemlig telefoner og abonnementer til alle bedrifter.
Så snakk med oss.
Hils Elkjøp Bedrift.
Fiken er et superenkelt regnskapsprogram for bedrifter.
Men visste du at du også kan starte din egen bedrift med fiken?
Gjør som tusenvis av andre og registrer AS og enkelpersonforetak trygt og enkelt ved å fylle ut skjema på fiken.no.
Vi hjelper deg hele veien til ferdig registrert bedrift.
Du trenger ikke være kunde av fiken fra før og velger helt selv om du vil bruke regnskapsprogrammet vårt etterpå.
Tjenesten koster heller ingenting ekstra.
Fiken.
Start din egen bedrift.
Super inkit.
That's basically the nuts and bolts of blackjack.
It's a kind of grindy game with very minimal house edge.
And if you want to play it properly, again, just buy the chart.
Just buy the chart online, put the chart in front of you as you're playing.
And the thing is, is that the other players at the table and the dealer usually will tell you what the right plays are.
Everyone knows the game.
Everyone who's around the game knows it.
Now, some people will tell you the wrong thing because they don't know any better.
Or they'll say things like, well, if you're going to stay on 16 once, you should stay on 16 your whole session, which is just wrong.
You should not stay on 16 against 10.
You need to draw on your 16s unless the house offers surrender.
If you want to surrender your 16s, that's a fine thing to do.
Surrender is a secret option that casinos will not tell you about.
But what a surrender is, you have to ask.
You have to ask the dealer, do you guys allow surrender here?
And then the dealer will tell you yes or no.
And if the dealer says yes, we do allow surrender.
When you're at a casino, you can't say hit or stay when you're taking your cards.
You have to tap the table to indicate hit, and you have to wave your hand side to side, like palm down, when you want to stay.
And the reason why that is is because all the tables are being recorded visually, not audio.
So they have to have a visual record of your decisions.
So let's say you were playing and you had a 16 against the 10 and you hit, and the dealer gave you a card and busted you, and then they took your money.
And you said, Hey, AA, I didn't want that card.
You gave me that card in error.
Because we can't hear you, because we cannot hear the action of the table.
We have to check the camera to see if you made the tapping motion on the table or if you made the hand-waving motion to say no to the card.
That's how we check with surveillance to verify what your decision was.
But surrender is you take your pointer finger and you draw a line on the table behind your chips.
And then once you've done that little line draw, the dealer will take your chips and take half of them and then give you half back.
So if you had a $50 bet up and you surrendered, you'd get $25 back.
And when you've got a 15 or a 16 and you're facing a 10 or an ace, that's generally the right decision mathematically.
Again, you can look at the chart and see that.
And if the house doesn't offer surrender, you hit because staying is just resigning yourself to defeat.
And some people just don't surrender, which is fine.
Again, it's very mathematically small, the decision between hitting and surrendering.
But you want to make the right plays.
And the thing is that some people at the table get mad at surrenders because surrender, in a way, is like staying where you're supposed to take that card.
Ah, why didn't you take that card?
Oh, we all would have won if you had taken that card.
Next card's random.
It has nothing to do with anything.
But people remember the, they remember the bad times.
They remember when that card would have won them the money.
They don't remember the times when that card lost that card you took ended up breaking the dealer and then everyone was a winner and happy.
They just remember when you cost everyone all their money by screwing it up.
And that is one of the important things about where you sit at a blackjack table, especially if you're nervous and you're a new player.
Blackjack is dealt left to right.
So the rightmost seat at the table is known as third base.
And third base is important because you are the last person to take cards before the dealer.
And if you're the guy that's quote-unquote playing wrong, people see that a lot more because it's instantaneous.
Like you got the 16 against the 10 or I've seen people make every mistake in the world.
It's incredible that this is a mathematically solved game.
You can buy the card that tells you what to do for the right plays and people just still screw it up.
They just still refuse to do the right thing.
And that's the thing is if you're on that seat and you do the wrong thing, the dealer is the next person to act.
So you've got like a 14 against 10.
You stay.
The dealer flips their whole card.
Oh, my God, it's a six.
The dealer has 16.
Please, dealer, break.
And then the dealer pulls a four and they make 20.
And then they take everybody's money.
And now everyone's super mad at you because if you had hit, you would have gotten that four.
You would have had 18.
And then what everyone's going to say is let's see what the dealer's next card is.
And then when the next hand of blackjack is dealt, the first card comes out.
Boom, it's a 10.
And now everyone's mad because if you had done the right thing and taken that four, the dealer was 16.
Boom, they would have smashed that 10.
They would have broke.
Everyone would have won.
So that's what happens.
The last thing I want to bring up is people like to talk about cheating.
They like to talk about the casino cheating players.
And the main thing that people point to when they point to the house cheating players is shuffling machines.
People distrust the shuffle machines and they want a hand shuffle.
Now, this is very silly because, A, we have the house edge.
And, B, if we actually were cheating, we are regulated.
All casinos are regulated by their state gaming commissions.
And if a casino company has a license in Nevada and then they branch out to other states in America, if the rules of the non-Nevada state are more lax than Nevada's, the company is still held to Nevada standards outside of Nevada.
And if the new state is more strict, they're held to the more strict standards.
But basically, the Nevada standard is the minimum standard.
So if you, and since everyone's got a casino in Nevada, basically their rules are nationwide.
And, oh, they just buy off the gaming commission, blah, blah, blah.
No, they don't.
It's very silly to think that.
Because a cheating scandal that was exposed would devastate the company and it would ruin them publicly and destroy their brand.
It's a huge gamble for no reward because all the games I'm going to talk about in this series make way less money for the casinos than the slot machines.
The slot machines are where the money's at.
So any of these table games, they don't matter.
But this is the main thing, is that people think that these shufflers can do stuff to these blackjack shoes to rig them.
The shuffle machine has no idea how many people are playing at a table.
Let's say that there were four people at a table when the shuffle was concluded.
And then two more people jumped in.
Now, how could the shuffler have prepared for that?
How could those extra hands have been accounted for?
They couldn't be.
And the other thing is, is that the deck is always cut.
Most blackjack games are played with a six-deck shoe.
And a player at the table cuts that shoe.
And then the dealer follows the cut and then puts the deck in the physical shoe and then starts dealing out of it.
A cut always breaks a rigged deck.
A rigged deck cannot survive a cut.
And that is why cutting the deck is something that is always done in card games.
It's why the last thing a dealer does after shuffling a deck in a poker game is to cut the deck.
Because that is your verification that the deck is fair.
Because no matter how you've loaded the deck, no matter how you've set the deck up, once you've cut it, you've broken the rig.
You've broken whatever you were trying to do.
So, the only way that a machine could possibly cheat...
is a continuous shuffle machine.
And even then, the continuous shuffle machine doesn't know how many people are playing and who's getting in, who's getting up, who's moving, all that kind of stuff.
And continuous shuffle is just done to beat card counters.
And they're really not omnipresent.
I haven't been in many joints that have continuous shuffle because those machines are pretty expensive and they exist only for the purpose of defeating card counting.
And you can defeat card counting a million different ways.
So that's Blackjack.
I hope this was interesting or informative.
If you have any questions, DM me.
Hit me up on Patreon.
Send me a message there.
However, you want to do it.
I'm always glad to talk about this stuff.
I'm going to cover craps, roulette, and then I'll do a quick overview of all the other kind of pokery games that are in the pit.
And then I'll talk about poker because poker is a big one.
And I mean, I'm going to very much do like an overview because to talk about poker actually would be a lifetime of work because there's endless stuff to talk about when it comes to poker.
So, anyways, hope you enjoyed this.
Talk to your friends.
Tell them I'm great.
Tell them that the podcast is usually excellent when it's talking about QAnon and politics and all that kind of stuff.
But today, poker wanted to talk about gambling because that's a thing that's in my life.
And this is my podcast.
I get to do these things.
Look at me.
I'm the captain now.
Give us a five-star review, patreon.com/slash pokerpolitics.
Give me money.
Help me out.
Beyond all that, donate to love146.org to fight human trafficking because they're good people.
Thanks to DJ Minimal Effort for the intro music at the start of this thing that I remixed by accident.
Thanks to all of you for listening.
And Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination of President Kennedy.
▲
Export Selection