I used advantage gambling to help put myself through grad school during the first online casino boom. There were so many casinos vying for players, that many offered a bonus -- say $500 extra to play with if you deposit $500. Of course that $500 had a playthrough requirement -- you may have to wager a total of 20x that to withdraw -- so $10,000. Now you simply find a casino that has a game with odds that beat the playthough. So, for example, if a game has a 1% house edge, you're expected to lose about $100 wagering that $10000, leaving you a theoretical $400 in profit.
Eventually, the casinos wised up and changed it so the wagering had to be done on slots, which have terrible odds. However, we figured out early on (I was in an advantage gambler forum) that there were "double or nothing" games in the slot machine, that let you go double-or-nothing between 5 and 10 times. These counted towards wagering, and were essentially perfect 50/50 odds (no house edge) - so by always going double or nothing until the end, you could rack up most of your wagers at 50/50 even though the initial slot roll was at a much higher house edge.
I think I started with $100 deposit into a casino and probably made > $50k in the two years after that. About $40k of that went to bills and $10k became my initial poker bankroll while I taught myself to play poker professionally, which I did for the rest of grad school after the casino bonus gambling winded down (they eventually wised up to the slot machine thing too) -- and if you player poker at a high enough level and you use judicious table selection, you can always advantage gamble (because you are gambling with each other, not the house, though the house gets their cut with the rake -- so you have to win at a high enough level that you know you are beating the rake)
I was a "small time" person, just doing it on the side to earn spending money -- there were certainly other people who had many many computers, VPNs, shill addresses, etc who took those casinos for hundreds of thousands a year for those couple years.
I learned a lot about probability theory, estimated value, and the mathematics of gambling in general, gained the emotional strength to deal with high variance (the best description of playing poker professionally that I ever heard was that it was like playing a game of chess for $1, then flipping a coin for $100. In the long run that chess game is the only thing that matters, but in the short run those coin flips can be brutal). Good times.
I also started playing poker a lot in college for "fun money", and was looking to step up my game.
I went a different route, though. I did the math and realized that even at a very good hourly take, I would never make very much money, and that by going up to higher stakes tables if anything I would do worse. I didn't have much hope for tournaments either.
A few years before this I had worked at a day trading firm. I don't recommend technical trading (I never could find an edge there), but then it finally "clicked" and I realized the obvious connection between the stock market and poker: you are trying to find mismatched bets where the odds are tilted in your favor.
Once I made this connection I promptly switched to the stock market and never looked back (this was over 12 years ago). It took me a while to figure out a "system" (what kind of bets to look for, how do you figure "odds" with stocks, etc.) but it has been quite profitable, even counting the Great Recession, and now I do it full-time.
So anyways, if you think you really "get" poker and are willing to put in the time it takes to get good, you may be better off switching to a game that pays much better, assuming you have an interest in business.
> the best description of playing poker professionally that I ever heard was that it was like playing a game of chess for $1, then flipping a coin for $100. In the long run that chess game is the only thing that matters, but in the short run those coin flips can be brutal
Great quote! What books or online resources would you recommend for getting better at poker? Not looking to play professional but do enjoy the game and always looking to improve.
There were also plenty of shady operations in those days. I seem to remember some online gaming authorities were particularly bad about not vetting their casino operators. One time we found a casino that had a game (I forget what it was, maybe a video poker variant?) that had a HUGE (5% or so?) player edge when played optimally because of an incorrect payout structure. That casino was blasted with players betting huge amounts of money -- they must have figured something was going on but they couldn't figure out what. They were probably bankrupted within a day or so. Not only did they lock everyone's winnings that had played the game, but they kept their initial deposits as well and shut down the site...
This sounds a lot like my story, only with less money involved. I casino whored about a 4k bankroll, and then started playing poker with it. I played recreationally until I quit my job for other reasonse--by then I had a 5-digit bankroll and then I played professionally for a few years, specializing in HUSNGs.
I should have done more casino whoring in the beginning, it was just free money.
I too did this during college. I remember specifically deciding to go for a SUPER HIGH VARIANCE playthrough and just did 3 max bets in a row, won all 3 and then Autobet a dollar at a time while i went to the beach to finish the rest. Made about $2k for laying on the beach. Gosh I miss those days.
For those of you that don't know, the primary character in this piece, James Grosjean, isn't just any advantage player, he is the advantage player. He wrote what is often referred to as the Bible of advantage play - Beyond Counting - and its sequel, Exhibit CAA: Beyond Counting. Both of these books are incredibly hard to find, and when they do come up for sale, often sell for thousands of dollars. Here's a current listing for the original book, at the low price of $1600:
I know it might be judgmental and possibly hypocritical, but I can't help but think that kind of intellect and education is wasted on trying to beat a casino.
If money is the end goal, wouldn't there be a bigger opportunity in pursuing investment strategy ideas (i.e. market inefficiencies), or working on making some process more efficient that could disrupt some industry (i.e. spam/phishing detection, or deep learning) and have better chance of long term gains. I'd think casino strategies once discovered can be mitigated over time so all that hard work will payoff temporarily?
I used to think my sister-in-law was impervious to the law probability because she plays the slots.
Then one day she noticed there was a scratch ticket where you could put the losing tickets into a raffle being held at the local casino and win a prize but you had to be present at the drawing. Well, she looked in the jar a few days before the drawing and estimated there were only about 50 tickets in the jar so she bought 80 tickets and put the losers in the jar and got her mother to put 20 in... And her mother won a trip to Las Vegas worth around $2000.
Which is the rub because people who look for this kind of thing are people who are serious about gambling and often they lose it back some other way.
I think of the many WSOP winners who immediately lose the money playing craps.
Casino (and gambling in general) benefit from the perception that they can be beaten. It's why they sell card counting books in the gift shops. While they'll shut down anything like card based craps that advantage players can just clean up on, they're generally perfectly fine with professional gamblers who work their asses off to get a slight advantage.
This is not true. They will back you off if they detect you are playing with an advantage and betting any reasonable amount. It won't take long and they are good at figuring it out, if you as a player are maximizing the edge.
Years ago I worked on gaming software, and the inside word was that casinos loved when this kind of stuff was publicized. A popular book, a movie, an article in the NYT - pure gold for the casinos. And, many guessed that they actually paid for these types of stories to get out.
Under Nevada law, "markers" - the instrument one signs to draw against a casino credit line - are considered checks. They even imprint your checking account information on them. About a month after your trip, the casino will send you a bill for all outstanding markers. If you fail to pay it, they simply deposit the markers you signed into their bank (remember, they have your checking account information imprinted on them). If they bounce, they are treated and prosecuted as if you had simply written a bad check.
Unsurprisingly, this is fraught with conflicts of interest, made worse by the fact that Nevada law entitles the DA's office to a percentage of anything it collects on behalf of the casinos. They are effectively a debt collector that can throw you in jail.
One of the reasons why I always eye roll when some sports nerd is passionately arguing about how allowing sports books is some sort of expression of freedom.
He has a great story of how gamblers would get casinos to increase betting limits and allow them to successfully use a martingale system. To this day, casino owners still fall for this and lose substantially.
Martingale systems definitely do not cause casino owners to "lose substantially" - the bettor cannot match the casino's bankroll and any amount of money won back after the first bet increase is actually the bettor's. The casino can afford to let you double because they are only ever putting the original amount bet at risk.
I can expand a bit on how advantage play can work for the hold'em games against the house. I'm sure Grosjean and other professionals at this sort of thing have more sophisticated tactics. Fun fact - last I looked maybe 6-7 years ago, his book was selling for low 4 figures on the secondary market. That's how much advantage players can value an unknown tactic.
About 10 years ago casinos started offering various hold'em variants played against the house, presumably to cash in on the poker boom that was going on. Most of them try to mimic the flow of a hold'em hand as much as possible. You'll always have to ante something (somewhat analogous to posting a blind, but also just required as a way to force action in a table game), and then generally there's a decision point after getting your hole cards where you can bet more or fold. The more complicated games include additional decision points after seeing the flop and sometimes the turn. There's a lot more details I'm glossing over here about how it works (dealer hand must qualify by being a minimum strength, different payouts for various final hand strengths, different allowable bet sizes, bonus bets, etc.), but that's the basic structure. I recall seeing 3 major variants at the time - from least complicated to most, WPT All-in Hold'em, Texas Hold'em Bonus (I think, whatever the WSOP branded one was that Harrah's had), and Ultimate Texas Hold'em. WPT seems dead, UTH I still see around a bit. Not sure if Harrah's and other places still run Bonus.
The basic strategy for all these games generally involves a simple lookup table for the preflop action - for WPT, the correct play is to max bet for 90+% of your hands [1]- it's a very easy game to play perfectly. For UTH, it's probably closer to 25% [2]. (Aside - ignoring bankroll considerations, it's almost always correct to bet the max on any game that allows a range of bets. Either the bet is +EV or it isn't.)
The easiest advantage you can take is to simply know more cards at the table. Most dealers in my experience will allow you to show cards to your friends, ask for advice, whatever. Knowing more cards lets you make better decisions. Simple example - in WPT 83 offsuit is a very borderline playable hand. If you see another 8 in a player's hand, that may make it unplayable (since you're less likely to make a pair of 8s). Alternatively, if you have a borderline unplayable hand, seeing a pair of high cards in another hand may make the dealer less likely to qualify, which is an advantage for you when you have any bad hand.
In WPT at least, this is an extremely minor advantage - the "strategic frontier" where your decisions may be changed by this knowledge is extremely small. It's theoretically a much larger advantage in UTH, but there the strategy changes you can make with this knowledge encompass such a huge state space that you'll not be able to apply it consistently.
A second advantage is touched on in the article, viewing the dealer's hole cards. This is much harder to do and usually involves finding a dealer with bad form - I believe they're trained to slide the cards right out of the machine along the felt to avoid this, but some dealers lift slightly, so you can catch glimpses if you're in the right seat. Hopefully the playing advantages of knowing the dealer's cards are obvious.
I wouldn't be surprised if shuffle tracking is employed as well, but I'm not really sure what the state of the shuffle machines is these days.
Surprisingly, the biggest advantage I ever saw was to simply understand how to evaluate a hold'em hand. I've played hundreds of thousands of hands (former pro), and I still get it wrong occasionally when I'm not paying attention. When all these games first came out, casinos had to train dealers to do this, many of whom had never played poker. I think I calculated that I'd need to see a mistake rate of something like 1/600 to make the game profitable right out of the gate, ignoring any other advantages, and I was seeing 2-3 mistakes/hr (out of maybe 30-100 hands/hr). Admittedly only about half of the mistakes will be in your favor. It's not quite as easy these days, but for the first year or so it was an absolute gold mine.
Orthogonal to all this, some of these games are pretty easy to play at 98+%. Watching how people play these games, I wouldn't be surprised if the average table hold is upwards of 10%. I don't have any particular proof, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten grossly overcomped for play at these games.
[1] Everything but 82o, 73o-, 63o-, 52o, 43o, 32o. I'm not sure why 53o is playable.
[2] Something like Ax+, K5o+, K2s+, Q5s+, Q7o+, J8s+, JTo, 33+. You can find the full table at wizardofodds or similar sites.
> When all these games first came out, casinos had to train dealers to do this, many of whom had never played poker. I think I calculated that I'd need to see a mistake rate of something like 1/600 to make the game profitable right out of the gate, ignoring any other advantages, and I was seeing 2-3 mistakes/hr (out of maybe 30-100 hands/hr).
What kind of mistakes are you talking about here? Like, the dealer has a full house but mistakenly thinks he has two pair?
It has to do with some quirks in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, and its interaction with state law. Card Craps is sometimes referred to as "California Craps" because it was invented to sidestep restrictions on the use of dice to determine the outcome of any wager in California tribal casinos. The situation is similar in other states with Indian casinos, which is why this game has spread.
Personally I love the fact that people try to beat the house. And to play devil's advocate for a second, the fact that consistently winning is even possible should just drive more business.
Well, 'consistently winning' may be a stretch. In these cases, advantage players have a small edge, but the chances of winning or losing any given hand in blackjack is still pretty close to a coin flip. You may win or lose big in any given session/day/week, etc. Given enough time and effort, they will eventually win, if they don't run out of money first. It is possible to do this, but not without gambling a lot more than almost anyone is willing to do. It's hard work.
Having said that, the perception that it's possible probably helps to drive more business.
I feel that the idea, that consistently winning is possible, is partially a myth, but it persists among casino regulars. I know people who do this or have in the past, and the big problem is eventually getting banned from various casinos. It seems rather one-sided to me, but legally they're allowed to ban people for consistently winning.
[+] [-] llamataboot|9 years ago|reply
Eventually, the casinos wised up and changed it so the wagering had to be done on slots, which have terrible odds. However, we figured out early on (I was in an advantage gambler forum) that there were "double or nothing" games in the slot machine, that let you go double-or-nothing between 5 and 10 times. These counted towards wagering, and were essentially perfect 50/50 odds (no house edge) - so by always going double or nothing until the end, you could rack up most of your wagers at 50/50 even though the initial slot roll was at a much higher house edge.
I think I started with $100 deposit into a casino and probably made > $50k in the two years after that. About $40k of that went to bills and $10k became my initial poker bankroll while I taught myself to play poker professionally, which I did for the rest of grad school after the casino bonus gambling winded down (they eventually wised up to the slot machine thing too) -- and if you player poker at a high enough level and you use judicious table selection, you can always advantage gamble (because you are gambling with each other, not the house, though the house gets their cut with the rake -- so you have to win at a high enough level that you know you are beating the rake)
I was a "small time" person, just doing it on the side to earn spending money -- there were certainly other people who had many many computers, VPNs, shill addresses, etc who took those casinos for hundreds of thousands a year for those couple years.
I learned a lot about probability theory, estimated value, and the mathematics of gambling in general, gained the emotional strength to deal with high variance (the best description of playing poker professionally that I ever heard was that it was like playing a game of chess for $1, then flipping a coin for $100. In the long run that chess game is the only thing that matters, but in the short run those coin flips can be brutal). Good times.
[+] [-] dharmon|9 years ago|reply
I went a different route, though. I did the math and realized that even at a very good hourly take, I would never make very much money, and that by going up to higher stakes tables if anything I would do worse. I didn't have much hope for tournaments either.
A few years before this I had worked at a day trading firm. I don't recommend technical trading (I never could find an edge there), but then it finally "clicked" and I realized the obvious connection between the stock market and poker: you are trying to find mismatched bets where the odds are tilted in your favor.
Once I made this connection I promptly switched to the stock market and never looked back (this was over 12 years ago). It took me a while to figure out a "system" (what kind of bets to look for, how do you figure "odds" with stocks, etc.) but it has been quite profitable, even counting the Great Recession, and now I do it full-time.
So anyways, if you think you really "get" poker and are willing to put in the time it takes to get good, you may be better off switching to a game that pays much better, assuming you have an interest in business.
[+] [-] simonswords82|9 years ago|reply
Great quote! What books or online resources would you recommend for getting better at poker? Not looking to play professional but do enjoy the game and always looking to improve.
[+] [-] llamataboot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mod|9 years ago|reply
I should have done more casino whoring in the beginning, it was just free money.
[+] [-] wangarific|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryguytilidie|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TaroAnami|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downandout|9 years ago|reply
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Beyond-Counting-Exploiting-Casino-Ga...
Here's a link to his Beyond Numbers blog:
http://beyondnumbers.lvablog.com
[+] [-] SonicSoul|9 years ago|reply
If money is the end goal, wouldn't there be a bigger opportunity in pursuing investment strategy ideas (i.e. market inefficiencies), or working on making some process more efficient that could disrupt some industry (i.e. spam/phishing detection, or deep learning) and have better chance of long term gains. I'd think casino strategies once discovered can be mitigated over time so all that hard work will payoff temporarily?
[+] [-] ayyn0n0n0|9 years ago|reply
I'm sure someone has scanned it in PDF form somewhere..
[+] [-] PaulHoule|9 years ago|reply
Then one day she noticed there was a scratch ticket where you could put the losing tickets into a raffle being held at the local casino and win a prize but you had to be present at the drawing. Well, she looked in the jar a few days before the drawing and estimated there were only about 50 tickets in the jar so she bought 80 tickets and put the losers in the jar and got her mother to put 20 in... And her mother won a trip to Las Vegas worth around $2000.
Which is the rub because people who look for this kind of thing are people who are serious about gambling and often they lose it back some other way.
I think of the many WSOP winners who immediately lose the money playing craps.
[+] [-] the_watcher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_q_b|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jly|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ap22213|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmastrac|9 years ago|reply
What? How is that legal?
[+] [-] downandout|9 years ago|reply
Unsurprisingly, this is fraught with conflicts of interest, made worse by the fact that Nevada law entitles the DA's office to a percentage of anything it collects on behalf of the casinos. They are effectively a debt collector that can throw you in jail.
[+] [-] objclxt|9 years ago|reply
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2014/dec/3/debtors-pris...
[+] [-] Waterluvian|9 years ago|reply
But maybe I'm confusing it for: they can't throw you in jail for debts.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
One of the reasons why I always eye roll when some sports nerd is passionately arguing about how allowing sports books is some sort of expression of freedom.
[+] [-] the_watcher|9 years ago|reply
I grew up a few miles east of this casino, I wondered where craps went when I ended up there during a bachelor party.
[+] [-] moron4hire|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmywanger|9 years ago|reply
I used to play poker 30 hours a week. If you play optimally, it is extremely boring and fatiguing.
[+] [-] erik998|9 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Scarnes-New-Complete-Guide-Gambling/d...
He has a great story of how gamblers would get casinos to increase betting limits and allow them to successfully use a martingale system. To this day, casino owners still fall for this and lose substantially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_limit
[+] [-] abduhl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] im3w1l|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splonk|9 years ago|reply
About 10 years ago casinos started offering various hold'em variants played against the house, presumably to cash in on the poker boom that was going on. Most of them try to mimic the flow of a hold'em hand as much as possible. You'll always have to ante something (somewhat analogous to posting a blind, but also just required as a way to force action in a table game), and then generally there's a decision point after getting your hole cards where you can bet more or fold. The more complicated games include additional decision points after seeing the flop and sometimes the turn. There's a lot more details I'm glossing over here about how it works (dealer hand must qualify by being a minimum strength, different payouts for various final hand strengths, different allowable bet sizes, bonus bets, etc.), but that's the basic structure. I recall seeing 3 major variants at the time - from least complicated to most, WPT All-in Hold'em, Texas Hold'em Bonus (I think, whatever the WSOP branded one was that Harrah's had), and Ultimate Texas Hold'em. WPT seems dead, UTH I still see around a bit. Not sure if Harrah's and other places still run Bonus.
The basic strategy for all these games generally involves a simple lookup table for the preflop action - for WPT, the correct play is to max bet for 90+% of your hands [1]- it's a very easy game to play perfectly. For UTH, it's probably closer to 25% [2]. (Aside - ignoring bankroll considerations, it's almost always correct to bet the max on any game that allows a range of bets. Either the bet is +EV or it isn't.)
The easiest advantage you can take is to simply know more cards at the table. Most dealers in my experience will allow you to show cards to your friends, ask for advice, whatever. Knowing more cards lets you make better decisions. Simple example - in WPT 83 offsuit is a very borderline playable hand. If you see another 8 in a player's hand, that may make it unplayable (since you're less likely to make a pair of 8s). Alternatively, if you have a borderline unplayable hand, seeing a pair of high cards in another hand may make the dealer less likely to qualify, which is an advantage for you when you have any bad hand.
In WPT at least, this is an extremely minor advantage - the "strategic frontier" where your decisions may be changed by this knowledge is extremely small. It's theoretically a much larger advantage in UTH, but there the strategy changes you can make with this knowledge encompass such a huge state space that you'll not be able to apply it consistently.
A second advantage is touched on in the article, viewing the dealer's hole cards. This is much harder to do and usually involves finding a dealer with bad form - I believe they're trained to slide the cards right out of the machine along the felt to avoid this, but some dealers lift slightly, so you can catch glimpses if you're in the right seat. Hopefully the playing advantages of knowing the dealer's cards are obvious.
I wouldn't be surprised if shuffle tracking is employed as well, but I'm not really sure what the state of the shuffle machines is these days.
Surprisingly, the biggest advantage I ever saw was to simply understand how to evaluate a hold'em hand. I've played hundreds of thousands of hands (former pro), and I still get it wrong occasionally when I'm not paying attention. When all these games first came out, casinos had to train dealers to do this, many of whom had never played poker. I think I calculated that I'd need to see a mistake rate of something like 1/600 to make the game profitable right out of the gate, ignoring any other advantages, and I was seeing 2-3 mistakes/hr (out of maybe 30-100 hands/hr). Admittedly only about half of the mistakes will be in your favor. It's not quite as easy these days, but for the first year or so it was an absolute gold mine.
Orthogonal to all this, some of these games are pretty easy to play at 98+%. Watching how people play these games, I wouldn't be surprised if the average table hold is upwards of 10%. I don't have any particular proof, but I'm pretty sure I've gotten grossly overcomped for play at these games.
[1] Everything but 82o, 73o-, 63o-, 52o, 43o, 32o. I'm not sure why 53o is playable. [2] Something like Ax+, K5o+, K2s+, Q5s+, Q7o+, J8s+, JTo, 33+. You can find the full table at wizardofodds or similar sites.
[+] [-] defen|9 years ago|reply
What kind of mistakes are you talking about here? Like, the dealer has a full house but mistakenly thinks he has two pair?
[+] [-] olalonde|9 years ago|reply
That's pretty odd, anyone knows why that is?
[+] [-] cperciva|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] downandout|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ipsin|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Swery|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Mikeb85|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jly|9 years ago|reply
Having said that, the perception that it's possible probably helps to drive more business.
[+] [-] TheCowboy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|9 years ago|reply