Gambling Times - Player's Guide

Thinking Outside the Box

by Frank Scoblete

Players are in the gambling game. Casino executives are in the math business. For the casino, the underpinning of all their games is math. Casino games are structured to give the house the edge in one of two ways: the house wins more decisions or the house takes a cut of a player’s winnings—in other words, shortchanges a player’s win by not paying the true odds of the bet.

Winning more decisions is the easiest to understand. On the Pass Line in craps, the casino wins 251 decisions and loses 244 decisions. In the long run, the player is down seven wagers if he sticks to just Pass Line bets, resulting in a 1.41 percent house edge. In Blackjack, the casino wins approximately forty-eight decisions, loses approximately forty-three decisions and pushes on approximately nine decisions. Luckily for the player, many doubles, splits and doubles after splits, plus that juicy 3-to-2 payoff for blackjacks, keep the game much closer in terms of money won or lost, resulting in edges of approximately 0.15 percent to 0.6 percent for the casino (depending on the rules and number of decks).

Shortchanging players is also a very simple concept. In Roulette, you have thirty-eight possible decisions on the American Wheel; the probability of any one number hitting is therefore 1 in 38; the odds are therefore 37 to 1 your number will hit. The payoff for a winning number is not, however, $37 for a $1 bet but $35 to $1. In essence, the casino takes $2 from your theoretical win of $37. It shortchanges you. The same shortchanging can be seen in certain craps bets such as the Crazy Crapper proposition bets (among them: the hardways, the any seven, the whirl, the horn, the yo-eleven, snake eyes, box cars, and the field). Bet the any seven and it pays you 4 to 1; but the true odds of the bet are 5 to 1. The casino keeps 20 percent of your win! And that, my gambling friends, is why the casinos can take their money to deposit in the bank, while most gamblers have to head for the ATM machines for withdrawals: math. Ma-ma-ma-ma-math!

Over the centuries, individuals have tried elaborate betting systems. Some of which, like the Martingale—“discovered” by novice gamblers each and every day—attempt to beat the game by varying the wagers based on the winning or losing of the previous hand or hands, spin or spins, roll or rolls. All such betting systems ultimately result in one thing: the house wins the percentage of all the money a player bets based on its edge, regardless of how the player bet it! The only time this does not hold true is when a single gambler on a single night has some very good luck, leaves the casino, and never comes back—ever. But in the aggregate, all those gamblers—winners and losers—on all those endless nights will lose that percentage of the total money bet which is the house edge. Damn math!

Most of the savvy gambling public and most of the savvy gambling writers look at the games just as the casinos do: math first. However, some visionaries look at the games in quite different ways, operating under the assumption that the math might not be the be-all and end-all of it all. In fact, those who think outside the box have often been mathematicians or at least those well-schooled in math. Edward O. Thorp, the father of card counting at Blackjack, knew his way around numbers. In his book, Beat the Dealer, he figured out that while one couldn’t improve the basic win, loss and draw statistics of the basic strategy player, a person who kept track of the cards and who bet more when the cards favored him, could actually win more money than he lost—even though he lost more hands than he won.

Roulette theory shows that all numbers have an equal chance of coming up on each and every spin. Despite that fact, in his book, Get the Edge at Roulette: How to Predict Where the Ball Will Land!, Christopher Pawlicki clearly demonstrates several ways to attack roulette by tracking bias wheels; discovering dealer signatures; looking for dealers who can sector shoot (a technique Pawlicki can do when he himself deals roulette); and by visually ascertaining where the ball will land by following the spin, a nausea-inducing (at least in me) but very real method for beating the game.

John May, a controversial British writer of Get the Edge at Blackjack: Revolutionary Advantage Play Methods That Work and Baccarat for the Clueless, has taken two simple casino card games, Blackjack and Baccarat, and shown how new methods of approach can yield substantial profits. He is another individual who thinks outside the box. His methods such as card steering, card sequencing, the shadow and stacker plays have made it easier for players to get edges in ways that the casinos can’t counter.

Jerry Patterson has been writing excellent articles in Gambling Times for several issues now about controlling the dice. This controversial area of Craps play reflects outside-the-box thinking at its most daring. With his friend and protégé, Sharpshooter, Patterson has developed a course that offers students the opportunity to learn Sharpshooter’s methods of dice control. And the Craps world is anxiously looking forward to Sharpshooter’s upcoming book, Get the Edge at Craps: How to Control the Dice!

This may be the one time in my casino gaming career that I have actually thought outside the box as well. Long before I had ever heard of controlled throws or rhythmic rolling, The Captain of Craps was theorizing on why he was having such success with his 5-Count method of Craps play. He attributed some of it to what he called rhythmic rollers who could influence the dice in such as way as to make a slightly negative game into a slightly positive game. One such roller, known as “The Arm,” was a member of his celebrated crew of high rollers and became a legend in Atlantic City dice circles for her extraordinarily consistent and long winning rolls. Still, The Captain was going on instinct and intuition in the late 1970s and early 1980s; since then Sharpshooter has put the physics and the math to these concepts and has shown rhythmic rolling to be a skill that some, though not all, players can master to a greater or lesser degree. My humble contribution to such daring outside-the-box thinking is my own book, Forever Craps: The Five-Step Advantage-Play Method!

Of course, thinking outside the box does not negate the math of games; it merely changes the parameters of that math. If a roulette wheel is biased, you must ascertain that bias by using math to see how far off probability theory the wheel is. If you are an accomplished rhythmic roller then to understand your edge at craps, you must utilize math to establish just how much you have altered the odds of the game by your SRR (seven to rolls ratio). If you are going to play Blackjack with an edge then to fully understand whether you have such an edge and just what that edge means you are going to have to understand what level of penetration, what rules, and how much is optimal to bet in each and every circumstance.

Naturally, not everyone who thinks outside the box is correct. In fact, some are not even coherent. Many systems and booksellers offer elaborate betting schemes, often with guaranteed results, that don’t change the math or the parameters of the games one iota. Some of these systems and booksellers are actually sincere; they really think they have discovered the magic bullet since they have won, perhaps for an extended time of several months or several dozen sessions, with their system. These people might try to publish their systems in a moderately priced book in order to share their good fortune at a reasonable price. Usually, after many more trials and plenty of errors, they see the futility of it, as do their readers, and they and their books disappear, the former into obscurity; the latter into the pulp factories.

However, some systems sellers are peddling a known quantity: garbage. These scammers rarely write books, as the profits for authors on books are marginal at best (unless you can sell hundreds of thousands of copies, a feat rarely accomplish in niche publishing). Instead, they bang out cheap photocopies of their “foolproof” systems “guaranteed” to beat the casinos and sell them for outrageous prices—some as high as $100 or more! These scammers may claim that they are thinking outside the box, but in reality they are only thinking inside the box—the safe deposit box where all their suckers’ hard-earned cash is stored.

The bottom line is therefore this: you have to know the math before you can think outside the box, and to win at a negative-expectation game you have to change the parameters of that game and understand the mathematical consequences of that change.

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