[00:02] the odds are always stacked against you if i take all of my chips and place them on a random number let's say 25 pretty crazy bet there give the ball a spin even if this comes in the return i'll
[00:15] get will only be 35 to 1 despite the odds of this happening being 37-1 every spin of the roulette wheel is completely random and completely completely random and completely unpredictable
[00:36] as i was saying [Music] completely random and totally unpredictable there is no way to gain an edge over the house at roulette but that is not so with blackjack
[00:51] usually of course it is in the house's favor but some people can beat the favor but some people can beat the casinos by counting cards so how difficult is it to do it let's find out
[01:04] so the movies rainman and 21 make card counting seem like a way to generate counting seem like a way to generate hundreds of thousands of dollars if you have some superhuman level of intelligence and can do complex maths in
[01:17] your head but is this actually possible can you actually beat the house and if so how difficult is it to do this are there actually people out there who do this for a living like for real
[01:31] let's meet one um my name is stephen bridges and i am a um my name is stephen bridges and i am a card counter
[01:48] [Music] in an hour
[02:09] out the door [Music]
[02:31] player but you're not counting if you're a perfect basic strategy player which game like a computer you're making all of the mathematically correct plays the casino is still going to have about a 0.5
[02:44] on the game so that's if you're playing perfectly you'll just lose money very slowly if you're counting all that you're doing is clawing back that edge and gaining about one percent edge over the house or maybe two percent
[02:58] it goes up as the count gets higher as the as the shoe is is more hot it's hotter but in general you're getting a tiny margin so it's not like people grand it's nothing like that at all card
[03:11] counters will lose just under half the time when they're playing and that could tens of thousands hundreds of thousands depending you can go through massive streaks of losing but overall you have the edge not the house so given
[03:25] enough hours played you are well in theory over an infinite amount of time guaranteed to win so here's the script i want to find out if a normal person can learn card counting how long does it take to learn
[03:40] and can we actually win some money with this i want to know i have four days with stephen to learn as much as i can from him and practice and on the fifth day working as a team with me counting we're going to try and
[03:54] beat the house in a simulated game of blackjack first let's start with the basics do i even know how to play blackjack to find out we started off with 500 pounds worth of chips and let me loose
[04:08] pounds worth of chips and let me loose at the table
[04:39] give me a big number [Music]
[04:52] well you could have played it better [Music] that was a fast way to lose 500 quid it turns out i don't know how to play
[05:05] blackjack like at all which isn't surprising really because i don't gamble i obviously know the rules but as far as strategy well i have none i should stress that there is only one way to play blackjack there's no opinion or
[05:19] superstition involved basic strategy is just piles of cold hard data that you need to know and i know none of it this is not a good foundation atop which to build a card counting career but anyway
[05:34] onto cardkin i was concerned that this all seemed very complicated and above my intellect level i think it's easier to count cards than people think it is and it's also harder than people think it is in essence it's
[05:47] not that hard it's not that complicated you're just doing a few things at once it's all of the extra stuff people haven't even considered that's where the difficulty of the job comes in with card counting you really have to get as close
[06:01] to perfection as possible there's not a massive amount of room for error because edge over the house so if you're making to get rid of your entire edge so yeah you don't have to be rain man i'm not
[06:15] great at math but i can still do it well that's great news so how does it work and why isn't everyone just doing this in principle card counting works by
[06:28] keeping track of the low cards and the high cards when the shoes got a lot of you bet bigger people think that card accounting works that you see which is not what we're doing and way more difficult what we're
[06:42] actually doing is assigning each card a point score so in this case 236 are seven eight and nine we just ignore they're zero and ten jack queen king and eight are worth minus one point and all we're doing is as we see these cards
[06:56] track of that running point score so for example if you saw a two that would be number in your head so i'll be going plus one plus one plus one if i then have a three that's another plus one so now we're on two as a total so i'll be
[07:11] saying two two two three three three four four four five then we have minus one so it'll be four four four three three three two two two i like that and all we're
[07:26] in the shoe is every single card that we see tally and that's what we're doing is focusing on that one number means is that there's a lot of tens and aces left in the shoe and there's a
[07:40] tipping point if that number is high enough then you are more likely to win playing like perfect blackjack so when it gets to a certain point where it's like quite dense with picture cards and aces then we bet much higher and then
[07:54] not many picture cards and aces we want to bet as little as we can get away with too easy well yeah that's it it's easy no it's yeah in essence in essence it's pretty
[08:09] straightforward it's one of those things that's simple in theory but to execute it is quite tricky so if you're keeping perfect track of the count blackjack and you're playing a game that involves numbers whilst thinking about a
[08:21] number whilst also how's your day going today sir and you know all this stuff too and so there's a lot that you're you're sort of having to such a small margin of like such a small edge if you make
[08:34] one okay maybe that's forgivable but if now we're really in a we're getting in a bad spot seems easy right let's recap you watch each card that
[08:47] comes out of the shoe and if it's a two three four five or six you add one to the count you ignore seven eights and nines and pitcher cards and aces you take one away from the couch piece of cake
[09:00] piece of cake let's try together starting at zero
[09:17] tricky right steven set about helping me to learn to be a card counter starting slowly and trying to get me to play decent blackjack along the way so let's start learning to count cards then so this is
[09:31] learning to count cards then so this is day one hour zero minus one is this okay minus two now minus two the next one this we ignore it so seven eight nine minus two still we start on zero
[09:46] so that's one [Music]
[10:03] a minus one and a plus one you can just ignore it the things i have to do what's the count yeah very good all right just do your best
[10:22] yes but what's the count eight no am i getting a wrong again what's the count five
[10:37] what you got i'm on four what were you one two that's four fail yeah without with the margin affair
[10:51] where where where we're at right now is that this wouldn't work yeah i still think we can get there yeah i think we can gather but jesus because there's times when you're really on it it's just that in this game
[11:04] i was understanding the basic concept of counting when the count is high there are proportionately more face cards and aces which favors us the player so that's when we bet big but how big how do we turn this tiny
[11:18] but how big how do we turn this tiny advantage into cold hard cash do we up our bet to 50 bucks a hand or a hundred bucks because the edge we get is so tiny to make any decent profit you got to go big
[11:32] you got to go big and i mean big the same every time if i'm working with a team and we've got a large bankroll
[11:44] then it's going to be a lot higher i think the most that i've bet per hand we're talking the potential you know the couple thousand that every single hand playing two hands at once then that you could lose a few
[11:59] hands in a row and that'd be a lot but i've had like a 30 000 loss in a close to 100k usd on a bad run in a really short space of time
[12:11] and then the flip so losing money is a is a really it's like that's the hardest thing because even if you're playing with an edge and you know i know i'm gonna win eventually you could have such a bad losing streak
[12:25] the course of your card counting career the more guaranteed you are to have longer losing streaks and longer winning streaks steven will regularly work in a team with half a million dollars in bankroll between them betting hundreds
[12:39] of thousands of dollars in a session that could last hours and hours this is a marathon not a sprint and to ensure you land on the right side of that tiny edge you have to play a lot of blackjack right this is day three
[12:54] day three and we're just doing uh more more characters that's very well summarized
[13:16] brutal hours of non-stop blackjack i constantly found the game too fast to count and was regularly off by two three or four which is disastrous d1 yeah i i was i was it was d1 yeah did you say one
[13:31] yeah i got it i counting and my blackjack was just horrible but worse than all of that it was so obvious i was trying to count cards i would pause on like 20 trying to
[13:47] pretend as if i was considering taking a card when really i was just trying to update the count in my head before the cards disappear this doesn't seem like a big deal right well if you watch any of steven's videos
[13:59] you'll quickly learn that the difficulty for card counters isn't counting cards or streaks of bad luck it's the outrageous verging on criminal behavior outrageous verging on criminal behavior of casinos towards advantaged players
[14:40] count and illegal card counting is not illegal at all it's not even classified as cheating that's something that people say a lot to me is not cheating any more than the way that i say it is
[14:53] would it be considered cheating in any game in the world to think too much can you imagine if you put a cap on a chess player for thinking too much it would be ludicrous or a poker player for memorizing too many charts and stats so
[15:06] and you can't say that it's illegal because all you're doing is using your information that all the other players at the table have you're not using a little computer none of that you're just using your head so not only is it not
[15:19] illegal it's very legal and it's not cheating despite what casinos would love of casinos i'm banned from and it depends on what you call a ban but i think nearly every casino that i've played blackjack in has at the end asked
[15:33] me to leave or stop me playing because it's a private business they can they have the right to review service so they can kick you out for any reason they discriminating i have lost count of the amount of times
[15:45] out from the casino escorted out of the casino or just told that i can't play blackjack or i'm not allowed to play blackjack can we just take a moment to consider how absurd it is that casinos will throw you out of
[15:59] their establishment if you think too much about the game how is that not illegal watching steven's videos i genuinely feel a sense of rage at this gross injustice as he gets removed sometimes they'll even call the police
[16:12] because he used his mind to beat a system that is in itself predatory anyway back to card counting one this has to be a picture or an ace
[16:24] and if so and you've had a perfect shoe yes you smashed it though yeah so what is it it's five o'clock and we've been going since like 12. so that's five straight hours of just counting cards
[16:37] i was really surprised at how difficult the seemingly straightforward task was i found it similar to sitting a five-hour exam i was dreaming of cards at night and counting in my sleep and needed a constant flow of caffeine to stay
[16:50] effective after four days of practice eventually we started seeing some results my camps were more accurate i was faster and i normal
[17:02] finally i got through a six deck shoe with zero mistakes that was a milestone six running six if this gets to zero that'll be the first six deck shoe that i've covered and then had no errors and that's a
[17:16] two one we want yeah yes we did it the whole six days no mistakes and i was chilled right you were chill
[17:32] you smashed it i am ready [Laughter] that's a really good sign there yeah i feel like i'm counting cars now so it was time to try this out for real here's the setup we replicated a real
[17:46] game of blackjack that you could play in real life we have a real deal around this is james our dealer and i have 10 000 in chips here on this table the minimum bet is 50 and the maximum is 10 000. this is the high rollers table and
[18:00] in this scenario i'm going to act as the spotter so i just sit and play blackjack betting the table minimum keeping my cool quietly counting cards waiting for the opportune moment we do this for two reasons one it won't seem so suspicious
[18:14] as my bet will always remain the same and two i can't play blackjack anyway so i end up losing all our money when the shoe is hot i when the count is a true i'll cue steven in using a sneaky subtle signal i'll also indicate the running
[18:29] cam using chips hopefully i've got the count right stephen rolls in with the big box and starts betting heavy whilst playing textbook perfect blackjack hello can i join you could i have some thousands
[18:43] please we each make millions of dollars and ride off into the sunset stephen starts with a hundred grand in chips with our total bankroll at half a and remember although this game is simulated all of these numbers and the
[18:59] table rules they are all real [Music]
[19:13] so the first shoe i actually felt like i counted the cards correctly but the count went to negative 13. in other words that's terrible for us it's too low to be salvageable so we just wait till the next shoe
[19:30] counting is on point i signal to stephen and hand over to the big dog time to make some money hello can i join you
[19:58] now the count's just dropped a point where it's not an advantage situation no i think we're down quite a bit come with a hundred grand or 50 grand it was 50 grand i sat down with you know 10
[20:10] was 50 grand i sat down with you know 10 20 21 22 23 24 so after the first shoe we were down 12 and a half grand but this is like well within like this weirdly we wouldn't really be you know
[20:26] but this could this is for one shoe if that can happen that way it can happen either way in the next 20 minutes and now we're up so remember what stephen said earlier the edge is like one or two percent so just
[20:39] edge is like one or two percent so just under half the time card counters lose under half the time card counters lose right onwards and upwards
[20:54] so i lost the camp there so just walk away and everything all that time was wasted twice i lost or forgot the count this is really hard each time i messed up we had to wait to reshuffle and start
[21:08] again which is incredibly inefficient after some coffee and lunch however my counting got better and we got a hot shoe i signaled steven in and thankfully things started going our way
[21:23] come on yes yes twenty
[21:39] that shoe got us up to even nearly straight after that we got another hot shoe this time the count was really high this time the count was really high [Music]
[21:56] come on come on picture picture picture picture yes it's not even real money look how happy we are
[22:30] all right let's see where we're at [Music] 400. that last shoot everything seemed to go our way so what was our running total so i started with ten thousand dollars and amazingly without even
[22:43] really thinking about playing blackjack i made 115 dollars so i'm up 115. how did you get on steve yeah pretty well yeah overall when we take it all into account uh we start off with a half million dollar bankroll we now
[22:57] have winnings of forty six thousand six hundred and fifteen dollars yeah that is a good thing i mean i'm very happy with that yes that would be about about 11 653 dollars per hour
[23:12] which is considerably above expected value yeah so we ran good yeah and it's more than i get paid now in terms of how you did you signaled me in when the count was high and you signaled me in and you
[23:25] communicated the correct count so you didn't make any errors there there were off on the count but the vast majority of the time i think every time you were self-aware enough to know that you would leave the table and find another table
[23:38] in which case you weren't you weren't a risk to us yeah i wasn't forgetting how much we actually ended up winning because it could have gone either way i think you did your job just about
[23:53] emails from blackjack teams but i'm very impressed yeah it's hard this episode was supported by curiositystream right now curiosity stream are offering just 14.79 that's 26 off and works out at
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[25:28] enjoyed this one and i'll see you next time peace