[00:00] and just quit while you're ahead, a few hundred bucks? either as a gambler or as a card counter? I'm gonna answer that question in this video with graphs.
[00:13] (upbeat music) and over my career playing and running teams, resulting in roughly $4 million in profits.
[00:27] But that came with huge losses and huge wins. and I've won roughly $50,000 in a day playing blackjack, but there were a lot of both.
[00:43] What if you just want to win a few hundred bucks every day Well, I get some version of that question asked and I thought I would answer that in this video.
[00:58] Let's say you want to just go into a casino each day The moment you're up $300, you walk out Well, to explain this, let me use an illustration.
[01:12] I offer you a coin flip and I say, hey, flip this coin. If it lands on heads, you win a hundred bucks. than any game straight up in a casino because it's 50-50.
[01:29] and the moment you're ahead, The odds of actually being up three heads And at that point you say, great.
[01:43] Well, does it work that way? At the end of one day, and there's over 75% chance of that working out.
[01:56] to be up six heads versus tails between the two days. By the end of that week, And over the course of a month,
[02:12] you're expecting or wanting to have 90 more heads than tails You see, the coin doesn't care that it's a new day. normally I'm 50-50, but if you stop today,
[02:27] and you get to start over. but those independent events add up or one flip for a hundred days,
[02:41] that's gonna result in 50-50 probability. So in this example, being able to be up three heads in one day is about 76% chance.
[02:56] it drops to a 15% chance of working out, drops to a one in 3000 possibility.
[03:08] here's a really hokey graph that I made But what you can see in it the odds are getting closer and closer to 50-50.
[03:23] is what you're trying to do over time, on the heads side of 50-50 as the probability gets closer and closer to the 50-50 line.
[03:39] It doesn't matter if you quit for one day Every flip of the coin is getting you closer and closer Now that example was for a 50-50 proposition,
[03:53] you're not playing 50-50. the casino has half a percent edge. God forbid you're playing poor blackjack,
[04:05] Every time you gamble, you're just working towards the inevitable, Well, the beauty and the curse of card counting
[04:20] If you leave while you're up a few hundred dollars, and avoiding losing streaks. how long it's gonna take you to get to the long run.
[04:33] you're playing a positive EV game every shoe. is building towards that long run. There was a guy that I trained.
[04:47] which was a large blackjack team that I ran. He left the team and then he started playing on his own I figured out a brilliant way to avoid losses.
[05:02] and I play at the blackjack tables, and I play on the Blackjack Apprenticeship iPhone app for my inevitable winning streak,
[05:17] which is sad and hilarious because that's not how it works. Every hand of blackjack is building towards this long run, being on a phone and the wins being in a live casino.
[05:34] with all the randomness of the game, is that the math will work out over time. until you get to the long run and you end up with profits.
[05:52] let me show you some charts from a newer This is someone that came to a bootcamp back in August, I'm really proud of him.
[06:05] to help illustrate this point. and next to it, expected value and AV or actual value. And each one of these bar graphs is for a separate month.
[06:19] is when he played the most hours and actually happened to win the most money. that you generate more EV, you win more money.
[06:34] He put in pretty good hours and generated but he actually lost money. No, he actually just experienced the inevitable losses
[06:48] You cannot just avoid those losses. Then look at January. but he had some of the strongest positive variance
[07:02] So looking at this, what was within his control? and generating positive EV, the luck of the game to work out.
[07:18] here is his six month graph. So you see wins, you see losses, where he was below his previous all-time high,
[07:36] Well, he ends up at a new all-time high. This is in my book, "The 21st Century Card Counter", and the goal was to show how this works out over time
[07:50] of five different card counters' careers, There's one person in the negative, And you know, there's some randomness in a hundred hours
[08:09] In the second graph, it's 500 hours you can see everyone is up in the positive. but everyone is up in the positive.
[08:25] of these same five card counters careers, and you can see that the five people are all converging in the same area of up and to the right,
[08:38] all the wins and losses rule out. which is that card counters end up with the casino's money. you cannot trick math.
[08:52] to get ahead of the curve each day. All you can do is learn how to play a winning game when I say, what is EV,
[09:05] check out this video right here on what is expected value It's also how casinos think, how to generate positive EV.