Mad Dog

I stand quite often in the 10-2 clumps. I have mentioned before that I watched Ed Goldstein play a 10-2 against a dealer 10 one time. He took forever to make the decision but he finally stood, and the dealer broke.

Well it's different from AC because they use 6 decks instead of 8, and the cards are closer to random. The "Finer Points" thread is in the World Class Blackjack area. Talk to Keith about how to get access to that place. I can't repost here because it is not my place to reveal Ellis' WCB material.

Each level starts with 12 units. When there's 24 units, that's when you go up and compute a new unit size for your new 12 units based on Fibonnaci: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 Note that your locked up piles will be based on the previous Fibonacci number.

Clumping is way different in Vegas. Read my "Finer Points" thread in the WCB area.

I should have said I put my trust in 1-4-6 and Fibonacci and enlightened NBJ card play because 1-4-6 and Fibonacci are worthless without it.

Regarding going for the jugular, I tend to do it early and often. I figure it this way: If the table reveals itself to be a good table, that represents some good play that I could have been taking advantage of in terms of advancing in Fibonacci. If I give the table the benefit of the doubt, I'm riding the wave right from the beginning. It gives me more time on that winning wave, and that extra time could be the difference between a big win and a small one. Now if the table doesn't perform, I may be out a table buy in. It is a matter of style.

Some people simply never raise the stakes. This precludes any big win. Look at it this way. If you've been able to make a profit of say 5 piles of 12 in a row and then walked, you could've made way more. Here's a short choppy narrative to give you an idea: initial pile of 12 win a second pile of 12 and lock up original win a third pile to create a double size pile in play win a double size pile, lock up a single size pile as profit leaving you with a triple size pile in play win a triple size pile, lock up a single size pile as profit leaving you with a quintuple size pile in play win a quintuple size pile and walk away with both your old and new quintuple size piles The total profit on this would be 12 piles of 12 with the same 5 wins in a row. That's how it's done with Fibonacci (except for the walking away part.) I say stay in it and see where it takes you. The profit on Fibonacci goes up exponentially, just like your betting level. That's why it's cool. That's why investment professionals use it. The Fibonacci sequence looks like this: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 The same numbers are used for locking up chips as are used for the chips in play, but the locked up chips lags behind the betting level. It is deeply wonderful.

Sometimes, even when the double down looks very good from an NBJ/WCB perspective, I don't do it. It depends on my chip stack. One double down isn't going to take me where I want to go. Losing a double can take me where I definitely don't want to go. I put my trust in 1-4-6 and Fibonacci, rather than risk table exit on one hand. The card counters might say no guts no glory. They have no glory because for the most part they lose due to biased cards. For me the guts comes in betting the big money when the progression takes me there. Going for the jugular with Fibonacci is a way of doubling down on the whole game rather than on one hand.

When I wrote this, I should have made the point more clearly. Doubling down DOES NOT increase your chance of winning this hand or your progression and it increases risk to your table bankroll. When you double you think things are looking good, but a lot of things can go wrong. Our objective is to win our progression and advance to the next betting level. We really need to win that progression and losing a double can really devastate your chip stack. While I seem to be arguing against doubling down, it is a fine thing to do IF YOU HAVE A GOOD READ, THE DEALER IS WEAK AS ALL HELL, and you strongly predict that you are sitting pretty with one hit card. Doubling down can help you surge to the next betting level. It speeds things up, but is not necessary to our way of playing, and can undermine our money management which is critical to advancing to high betting levels.

When you play NBJ/WCB you are there to make money. A lot of money. ALL of the money. You are not there to goof off. The only way to get ALL of the money is to raise the stakes. To do that, we use the Fibonacci sequence, or something like it. The beauty of it is that it provides for exponential growth of your locked up winnings, combined with exponential growth of your betting level. In order to ride the Fibonacci wave to a high betting level, you need to survive. Not for one shoe, but for many shoes. Our methods allow us to, in certain games, win one hand in three. If we can do that, we can climb to higher and higher levels of Fibonacci. NOW IF we see a double down situation, it can be very very tempting. Players will encourage you to double. The dealer will encourage you. Don't let them influence you. Basic strategy relies on double downs, and other option plays to help make up for its low hands won rate. We use a different, better method to play our hand. We are challenging the dealer during low rounds. We are standing short when tens are running. We are doing all kinds of things to win one hand in three, suspending the progression if we suspect a low round. If we have practiced as we have been instructed to do, we are able to win one hand in three in some games. Our table buy-in is a pile of twelve units. Double downs increase risk to our pile of twelve. We know that there is cash galore as Fibonacci rides up. We trade in the short term benefit of some double downs so that we can reduce risk to our pile of twelve. Some day Fibonacci will turn your pile of 12 into a pile of 252. (That's 21 times 12.) When that happens, you'll be glad you stayed in the game and rode that sucker all the way up. When it happens, just keep on riding that wave until you reach table max. Incidentally, before you reach table max, you need a plan for when you get there. I recommend taking the table max, and dividing by 6 to allow for a 1-4-6. So if the table max is $5000, your unit size is around $800.

Attention on deck. We are now boycotting all machine shuffled games.

I hate them. I hate them with all of my hate. Why? Because I can't watch the shuffle. I can't tell if some counter-measure is being applied. For example, if I am playing NBJ and beating a CSM, it is conceivable for the casino to command the machine to shuffle differently. All of a sudden I am playing against a totally different situation. They could have commanded the CSM to produce completely random cards, and I wouldn't know jack and then I lose my progression. I have no idea what they can or can't do with those machines. I really prefer hand shuffled games, but they are getting harder to find.

One day during the filming of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven in Las Vegas, George Clooney, a famously unfortunate gambler, joined the rest of the film's cast on a casino run to play blackjack. Things went even worse than expected. "Twenty-five hands in a row," Damon later marveled. "The odds were mind-boggling... There were professional gamblers in the place who were pulling back their chips until Clooney left." Clooney did leave, but not before borrowing, and promptly losing, $600 of Damon's money. The next morning, Damon found an envelope which Clooney had slipped beneath his door and was impressed to find a check for $600 inside. Upon closer examination, however, Damon discovered that George had also filled in the "memorandum" section on the check and that, if he wanted to bank it, the cashier would think he had earned $600... for lap dancing.

I have many times been in the situation where I enter a table while the minimum is low, and then while I am there the limit is raised. I retain the right to bet the previous minimum. That's good. Other players avoid the table because of the higher minimum. That's good too. Sometimes, because of aforementioned good, I avoid leaving the table. That's bad.

Perhaps the reason he doesn't grasp this is that before you can grasp it, you must first accept that the shuffle isn't random, and that the players and the dealer generate order by the way the cards are played and picked up off the table. Understanding that clumping exists is step one. Mathematicians are trained to be wary of apparent patterns and they actually pride themselves on ignoring apparent patterns. Imagine going to school for 8 years to get your PhD in mathematics. Along the way, you are trained in statistics. Then you encounter a game that appears to deal in random chance. You might have a tendency to say "Hey, I know all about how to tackle this game." Any game component that has an element of random chance might be assumed, prematurely, to be the pure randomness that you came to know and love when you were studying stat. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

I recently had a look at Stanford Wong's website. On his site, he repeatedly and emphatically says that progressions don't work. Now that's funny, because I do this 1-4-6 thing all damn day, and it seems to be working fine. Wong is essentially saying that even with perfect basic strategy, you are playing with a slight disadvantage to the house. Without card counting to help you vary your bets, you are doomed to a negative expectation, and no negative progression bullshit can turn a negative expectation into a positive expectation. Now when we advocate negative progressions, we are saying, unequivocally, that WE HAVE A POSITIVE EXPECTATION. So what's the trick? How can a negative 1-4-6 progression do jack all against the negative expectation monster? We use table selection to find games that exhibit certain characteristics. We are looking for games where the tens are distributed evenly throughout the deck. There is a gentle periodic up and down pattern to the density of tens that you see. This kind of game will generally fail to attain the high count that is Wong's dream. When a shoe game gets like this, it takes it a while to change into some other type of game. It can't just suddenly turn into a highly clumped game. There is no process at work that could cause that to suddenly happen. When we play this game we apply a whole new approach to card play. This allows us to have a positive expectation, not on a single hand, but on any given three hands. The tens are in there, and since they are evenly distributed, they have no choice but to show themselves on one of these three hands. We don't expect to win every hand, and we don't claim to have a positive expectation on every hand, but we do claim to have a highly positive expectation of winning at least one hand in any given three. It is our enlightened card play combined with the up and down pattern in the density of tens that makes this possible. So in the end, we are, in a way, counting cards. We labor long to find a game that has certain characteristics, and then we attack it with our negative progression. The game yields a win on one of the three bets of the 1-4-6 progression because we know that the game has to produce a tens rich round during the progression. We vary our card play during the low rounds to challenge the dealer and win our share of the low rounds as well. Then on a larger scale, we raise the stakes and take down cash using the Fibonacci sequence. If the shuffle were truly random, then Wong would be right, but the shuffle isn't random, and Wong is wrong.

I have often thought that if someone was really really patient, and had a large bankroll, they could make a mint by waiting for just this kind of superbet opportunity, and just didn't play any other hands.

I recently tried farming in a game that had a severe cycle bias wherein I tried a new strategy for ten clumps. I split my tens. Four tens in a row. I was able to get a low card on most of them. This helps create the HI-LO-HI-LO pattern that helps the dealer break. It dilutes the tens clump and lengthens it as well. It must have seemed like I was trying to lose, but I played even.

Regarding farming, the last time I used it I started out with a schlocky table and produced a productive type 1 game. It was beautiful. If you have never played a type 1 game using 1-4-6 then you don't know what you're missing. It is a myth that type 1 games don't exist anymore. They do. You can find them using table selection, or make them using farming techniques.

Here is another great tool: http://www.pcap.com/lvconv.htm This tells me where to stay and play, or rather where not to stay and play.

Note that I have only used this method against a six deck game. It is often the only star I have to steer by because the cards can be very random. When that happens, I use the whole table, not just the cards around the hole card. The best type 1 games seem to respond to this method. Combine it with farming, 1-4-6 and fibonacci. Try it in your home practice before you deploy it.

I stand corrected. HAHA

... is Benadryl. Night time is not a good time for blackjack. That's why Mad Dog recommends dropping Benadryl right around 8:30 PM. You probably won't be the life of the party, and you definitely won't get lucky, but you'll be rock solid in the morning, ready to pound the dealer right off the wash. Bac players can party like it's 1999, but blackjack players need to be disciplined. Take it from Mad Dog and sleep tight, or the jugular you go for just might be your own.

The thing is, the pit bosses bring up the subject. I never used the T word. So I figure they're pretty adamant about it. However I'm sure there's no harm in playing together especially for people who are from out of town and are rarely in Vegas.