Advantage Play

So, what exactly is a professional gambler? A professional gambler is a person who lives from gambling and spends most of his time at the casinos. Professional gamblers are actually earning their paychecks by making the right bets when they play at the live casino tables. In this article, I will go over some general misconceptions about casino gaming as well as go over a few real-world examples, gathered from several friends of mine who are professional Advantage Players.

Baccarat is a betting game best played using a strategy. There’re many Baccarat strategies to choose from. But if you were to ask me for my top three, I would have to choose Baccarat strategies that are:

• Logical.
• Easy to understand
• Have the best possible chances of reducing the casinos house edge; meaning you have a strong likelihood of winning.

The whole concept of how to play Baccarat requires a strategy to be applied to the game. 

Playing winning blackjack is as much about extending your playing life as much as it is about scaling your bets proportionally and playing the correct basic strategy and appropriate index adjusted numbers. After all it’s hard to make money by playing when you’re not allowed to play. Here we will go over some important aspects of casino camouflage and how to apply.

One of my long time clients knows a lot about California card rooms (see this post and this post). He both works as a player/banker for a corporation and has invented and placed his own game into a card room. He recently shared his thoughts about advantage play in card rooms in an E-mail to me, and generously agreed to let me re-post his E-mail on this blog.

How can a player legally beat a casino? When this question is asked of the typical gambler-in-the-street, the answer is almost universally “card counting blackjack.” When asked about card counting, this gambler talks about how smart you have to be and mentions the MIT team, but has no idea of what is actually involved in being a card counter. This myopic view of beating casinos is not unique to the player side. Austere policies are put in place in many casinos to protect themselves against the army of card counters.

In this post, I am going to offer my opinion on the top five opportunities APs will be seeking out in 2014. First, I offer a disclaimer. APs are continuously scouting, researching and innovating. They exploit one-time opportunities. They burn out games. They negotiate special circumstances. There is no way to keep up with or fully know what top APs are doing or how they are doing it. It follows that the list below is incomplete and out of date in both content and methods. However, more methods and games are coming to light all the time, so stay tuned.

Earlier this week I met at length with executives from one of the corporations that back wagers in California card rooms.  In anticipation of these meetings, I wrote this blog article. The main topic of these meetings was advantage play: what is possible and what they can do about it. As I outlined the issues, the inability of the corporation to take immediate or meaningful action became ever more clear.