| Blackjack Blackjack is narrowly edged out by poker. Last year I might have put blackjack at the top of the list, but things are declining fast today. The professional card counter can still find games to win at in Las Vegas, but the picture is increasingly bleak in most of the rest of the world. Where once the norm was a single-deck game dealt to the last card, and a card counter could easily achieve a 2% advantage, now the norm is six decks with one and a half decks or more cut out of play. Only a 0.5% edge can generally be attained in such games. Unless you have a 20,000 unit bankroll and are prepared to suffer losing periods of over a year, you cannot count cards professionally. And, unlike poker, you have to outwit a casino that will bar you if they discover what you are doing. While blackjack conditions have always fluctuated wildly from one generation to the next, the current downturn does appear to be more serious. Moreover, a vast technological array of devices has appeared to thwart the card counter, such as continuous shuffle machines, facial recognition devices, auto-peek devices, and so on. High-stakes professionals have responded by developing powerful new techniques superior to card counting which the casinos have no protection against, many of which depend upon weaknesses in the shuffle procedure. You can read about some of them in my next book. However, the modern blackjack player undoubtedly has to be smarter than his antecedents to profit consistently from blackjack. 3) Video Poker Video Poker is the most straightforward game for an advantage player. Learn the optimal strategy for the various machine types and grind away. No pit bosses to stop you playing well as they do at blackjack. No fiendishly clever opponents to outfox as in poker. Easy. But boring. Way, way boring. And the ceiling on max profits is extremely low. You cannot make much more than $25 an hour this way. 4) Roulette It may come as a surprise to many of you that roulette ranks this high. The truth is that biased roulette wheels still exist. I am not sure if the myth that roulette wheels are nowadays completely unbiased was perpetuated by the casinos or not, but it has served them well. Several high stakes teams operate in this area. Such wheels are not easy to find, but you can find them if you know what to look for. The big drawback is the immense amount of "waiting" time required to find such a wheel and the huge fluctuations involved with betting on single numbers. But this is partially compensated for by the huge advantages that can occur as a number or octant becomes significantly biased. 5) Baccarat Consistently beating baccarat is tough. Conventional card-counting systems just don't work as well as they do at blackjack. You need to use more powerful non-linear count strategies or use a very advanced technique, such as sequencing, which I described in my Baccarat for the Clueless. Even then, the majority of baccarat games are not beatable. Nonetheless, the almost limitless table maximums mean that if you can find an edge, the potential profits can be spectacular. Baccarat is the only casino game where a player could enjoy an annual six-figure salary. 6) Gaming Tournaments Gaming tournaments can be conducted with any casino game, but they are really a unique type of gambling. Tournament strategies are very complex and professional play is virtually impossible because most of the time even a skilled player will finish nowhere. Few players have the bankroll to last through the majority of losing tournaments they play till they finally win one and their profit kicks in. Nonetheless, tournaments do have an advantage in that your opponents are frequently poor players and your expectation may often be 400-500% or more if you really know what you are doing. 7) Craps There are a couple of cunning techniques that can be used at craps, such as "backlining" (buying someone else's positive expectation bet). But you could not expect to make a living this way. |
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