Smeggy Smurf: Marcus Aurelius: Betting against the house guarantees you will lose over the long run.  If you do not lose over the long run, the casino will accuse you of cheating and sue you.  So there really is no point whatsoever in visiting a casino, unless you just enjoy watching desperate people take losses they can't afford.

What you do is count cards (but not too well) for a little bit at each casino.  The point is to make just enough at each place to wind up with a killing yet still fly under the radar.

/do pretty well just remembering how many big and little cards have been played

That's all you need to do. Hell, that's all the MIT team did- they were just organized enough to have one person making low bets and keeping a running count on the table, with another coming to the tables with favorable odds and throwing big bets. You don't need to track every card, just the trends.

Ishkur: INeedAName: Every time you lose, double your previous bet on the next round.

Not feasible, for the sane fact that losing streaks can be exponentially catastrophic.

Not if you have the reserves to handle them. The strategy is explicitly designed to completely negate losing streaks while giving you small but steady returns on winning streaks. If you double every time you lose, you get all the money you lost on the losing streak back when you get your next win. It might take a while to get there, but when you do win, you get the whole pile you lost back. Because you will win again eventually. When you get on a winning streak, you're not doubling, so with a series of small, positive outcomes you get a decent return. Of course, you'll lose on 0 and 00 regardless, so that will take a toll. Basically something like 53% of losing and 47% of winning, so over the long term, you've just got to make enough to cover the 5.5% House take. Whether you do that or not depends on the length of the streaks you get, but streaks are real, and you'll probably get enough longish ones that beating the House take is doable. Mathematically it works, but we have a psychological bias toward risk aversion (we remember losses MUCH more intensely than victories), so it's actually very hard for humans to be willing to continuously bet more during a losing streak. There's also a ridiculous amount of volatility during those losing streaks, so you really have to have huge reserves and a lot of faith. The strategy usually fails when people run out of reserves during a losing streak and then lose faith, and wind up quitting on a loss. People also want to keep going if they're on a winning streak- that whole reinforcement thing- where they really need to be quitting immediately after a win. The main problem with it is psychological. There are strong cognitive biases at play, and alcohol makes it very hard to overcome them. Which is why casinos give you lots of it- when you give into your cognitive biases at any game, they make lots of money. And when the rational part of your brain is busy belting Eye of the Tiger...

SafetyThird: My brother works behind the scenes at Caesar's LV and is a semi-professional gambler. He told me that he was heavily influenced by 3 statistical books ages ago that greatly bumped his percentages. I wish I could remember those titles right now. Anyways according to him poker is really the only game with any skill to it and the more skilled you are the more you will win. He loves when the rodeo comes to town. And absolutely hates it when a clueless newbie screws up hand after hand in tournaments. Dumb asses are the bane to a pros game.

One night we were sitting a casino bar, I'm playing video poker and getting free drinks, he pays for his drinks citing something about statistics again. Since I'm not much of a gambler and more of a drinker I asked which table games I should play. He mention black jack and ma jong as having a nice slow losing of your money if you bet reasonably well. A little later he pays his bar tab and I cash out the $80 I had just won at video poker while talking.

You'll probably enjoy this article.

Ishkur: cptjeff: Not if you have the reserves to handle them

That requires infinite wealth which no one has.

Martingale will eventually bankrupt you. It is inevitable.

That would only be the case if streaks went on forever. They don't. If I remember my professor's asides in stats correctly, the longest they usually go in a 50/50 game is about 7. It's stunningly rare for them to go more. At a $5 minimum, you're topping off at around $320. Hit a 0 or 00 in a streak and you may have to go 8, which caps you at $640. The max at a $5 table is usually something like $1000, so if you go more than 8 losses, you're farked. But that's exceedingly rare.

That means you're bringing $2000 or so and starting your bets at $5. The trouble is that most people bring $300 to the table. If you're most people and doing that, you absolutely will get cleaned out.