Blackjack feels winnable because the house edge is minimal
“Here's how diabolical blackjack is. Unlike most casino games, if you play blackjack correctly, the casino barely has an edge. The odds are very close to fifty fifty. You win almost half the time. So the dream of winning is right there in front of you just out of reach. And if you did have a system that could beat blackjack, imagine what that would mean. It's like the money is just sitting there in casinos everywhere all over the world, huge stacks of chips and $100 bills waiting for you to take them home.”
“It's not a complicated thing. You don't need a great memory. You don't need to know how many queens are left in the deck. You just need to know that one number. And when that one number when your running tally gets up to seven or eight or nine, it means that there are lots of aces and tens left in the deck. So it's good for you. Right? It's really, really good for you. And that is the time that you wanna start to bet big.”
“After Bachman lost a quarter of $1,000,000 in one night at the casino in Council Bluffs, the phone calls began. It probably went from a couple of times a week to five times a week from various casino hosts, throughout the country, really. I have been assigned to be your casino host here in Kansas City, and I was just calling. I noticed that you haven't been in for a while. And that you had a birthday coming up. So I was calling to invite you to come to Kansas City to celebrate your birthday.”
Addicted brains process near misses as actual wins
“In pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses. And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem, which are involved in reward and and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system. So the pathological gamblers are are seeing, or their brains at least are responding to these near misses in the same way that they respond to wins.”
“But we follow every rule that casino has. In fact, if you call up a casino and you ask them, is it a is it against the law to account cards? Is it against your rules to account cards? They'll be like, well, no. Not really. But it is kind of frowned upon. How could that be? We all know that casinos spend tons of money on overhead cameras and security guys to detect card counters. Maybe because most of them are so bad at it, they lose money anyway.”
“In time, their trust in each other began to fray, and suspicions that some of the members were stealing grew. One player lost big one night and phoned a lot of the other players. He was hysterical that he had cost the team so much. But their reaction? That he'd probably hadn't lost, but was stealing. Ben, the founder of the group, told me about one time when a team member claimed that he'd never even contemplated stealing. That struck Ben as unusual, and he immediately began suspecting that player of stealing.”
Casinos track player habits using total rewards cards
“Harrah's knew how to track each gambler's habits through total rewards cards that each gambler, including Bachman, would use throughout the casino. And that told the company exactly how much money each player spent, on which games, and at what frequency. The company would then use that information to tell them exactly what kinds of perks and rewards would keep certain gamblers coming back, and at exactly what juncture to offer those perks and rewards.”
Courts prioritize personal responsibility over predatory marketing
“The majority ruled that Bachman couldn't bring her counterclaim because there is no common law duty obliging a casino operator to refrain from attempting to entice or contact gamblers that it knows or should know are compulsive gamblers, unquote. In other words, it's perfectly legal for Caesars to target an addicted gambler like Angie Bachman. It might be wrong, but it's legal.”
Card counting gives players a mathematical edge over casinos
“There is a way to count cards that definitively gives you an edge over the house. And you don't need to be a a rain man or have a photographic memory to pull this off. A normal person can do it.”
“Once I got known as a part of the MIT blackjack team, it became hard to play, and I would get kicked out of just about anywhere I try to play. And sometimes I would take friends there. They just wanna see me get kicked out of some place. Play for a little bit. After, you know, fifteen minutes, an hour, they'd come over and ask me to leave.”
Christian card counters see gambling as pure mathematics
“As a card counter, you go in there thinking there's no such thing as luck. There's only math. We're gonna sit down and and work for eight hours and and make money. And that's the exact opposite of what 99.9 percent of all people do in a casino.”
Casinos track player data to optimize predatory marketing
“Harrah's knew how to track each gambler's habits through total rewards cards that each gambler, including Bachman, would use throughout the casino. And that told the company exactly how much money each player spent, on which games, and at what frequency.”
Addicted brains process near-misses as actual wins
“In pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses. And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem, which are involved in reward and and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system.”
“The majority ruled that Bachman couldn't bring her counterclaim because there is no common law duty obliging a casino operator to refrain from attempting to entice or contact gamblers that it knows or should know are compulsive gamblers, unquote.”
