466: Blackjack

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”