Blackjack Therapy by Clarke Cant
Chapter 12, Moving on up, how high is the blackjack sky and how to safely climb on up.
T-hop (a well known and liked poster on bjrnet.com) one time posted his views on this subject. Here are mine.
I recommended that everyone, except the high roller etc., should start with a couponomy mini bankroll, just to experience the feel of the roller coaster ride that even the best players and estimates of optimal bankroll are subject to. The jumps in the ratio between your bankroll and daily wins or loses in a coupon run are about what you will experience with about 4 hours of play at single deck games, played with normal estimates. I also recommend the once the coupon bankroll is up to about $150 or so that you begin to go ahead and play $5 minimum single deck games, and quit when you lose more than your weekly couponomy expectation; or, in other words, play with the money above $150, since your element of ruin, for coupons, will remain low, and quit when loses hit this barrier.
There are of course $3 minimum tables, but the spread of 1 to 2 or 1 to 3, that I would recommend, is clumsy and looks like more or a spread to the eye, at a distance, than betting with $5 chips does. If you can find, OF COURSE, good $1, or $2, single deck games, by all means start with those instead (they are just too rare these days, but who knows, the Gold Spike and Western may turn into good games—their customers will toughen you up regardless, be careful), if you find any. Once your total bankroll approaches the normal optimal levels, you may or may not continue your coupon playing.
If you can keep your appearance up – for the homeless, or near homeless category—you should by all means continue coupon playing. Please stick to the HD measures for game quality and your required bankrolls.
Look for the climb through $1 or $2 units to $25 units to flow smoothly. A $10 to $30 spread is going from 2 red chips to a red and a green chip after all. Rounding upward will not have any real impact on your long term bankroll growth if you have at least 60% of the money required to move up. A real difficulty is going from $25 units to $100 units.
At that level, in any casino (see Max Rubin’s, Comp City), you are moving up the comp level even without any suspicions of your play. You must have explanations for having the money that are just smart enough to have gotten it, and too dumb to be regarded as a threat. You might also consider a strategy of holding out on moving your betting units and playing in the style of a so-called “money management” player. Playing directly $50 units is a mistake, in my opinion. The move from 2 green to adding a black chip looks too suspicious. You wakeup the pit once the black chips come out. Mix in other colors of chips; at the end of winning sessions, try to remove about half the black chips you have, try to bet green, and play back if you will by going ahead and betting $100 units for a few hands, and appear to chicken out ASAP. Going from 2 green chips to 6 green chips, doesn’t bring the same heat that going ahead and betting in a black chip does.
This book doesn’t cover the calculations for how variance and covariance effect your betting. During the mid to late growth stages of your bankroll this is seldom optimum anyway. But it is possible to spread more than 1 to 3, in single decks if you always bet two hands. You would then use the variance and covariance formulas to estimate your overall sd, based on one bet and earnings, and add the gains, but use the special formulas for the higher sd (but below 2). Telling the pit that you are trying to capture an ace, or the like, works usually (and the last parts of banger strategy may allow you to do just that).
Another tip is to always set your unit bet size based on the normal counting of that single deck game, while letting the added gains, from the tactics in this book be “gravy.” The money will come.
Once you are at the $100 unit level, for single decks, taper off and top off your betting levels and take it easy. Three hours a day, $100 units, spread over Las Vegas, Reno, or even Laughlin or Tahoe, is not a lot of exposure and is still $300K per year (unless you have exwives like mine disrupting things). That level of average daily wins can be sustained, you don’t want to just play single decks, by looking upon other games, such as the CS machines, as income games–to add to your investments let’s say. Then you can look forward to taking the plunge with things like ST.
Have a top-off goal and be quiet about it. There is such a thing as a compulsive gambling WINNER you know. I never forget the first time my bankroll went into the blackchips and I walked by a DeLorian I had the cash to buy—this was just before the factory closed and a stainless-steel car sure would have been handy when I moved to Minnesota later too. I didn’t buy it. I was so wrapped up in taking my bankroll to the next level (there was no IRS transaction reporting then either) that I didn’t buy it. There are other opportunities you know. If you cannot find other ways of making money, when you have 300K per year coming in, you don’t deserve it! (That experience ended badly when I started having problems with a former girlfriend who was in the music business, and was harrased, by her from playing. I went back to dealing craps and laying low, except to make a few tries, but by that time I was too known as a local and dealer and the tip hussles—“you deal too so tip—“ were almost as bad as getting Griffinized. The girlfriend I won’t name, except to say she was the cousin Patty Smythe always complained about in several interviews, about how she would probably drive her out of the music business if she screws up the publishing of one more song. Then came 6 years of being in and out of wheelchairs….)
The IRS is beatable as are some of the reporting requirements. Example: sometimes having markers at 2 different locations, owned by the same casino company. You can sometimes have transfers between the locations written down as happening at only one of the two casinos, or even more. Sometimes you can arrange for the same to be done to accounts that are overseas that appear to be creditors of yours, where the transfer can be regarded as being totally overseas. A few cards or statements that show a numbered account and direct billing and payment being available to that account can have the casino pay the wire fees too. Be creative.
The same is true regarding the IRS itself. Whether you take the approach of the Audit Defense Network, that everything that can be related to attempts to earn income is deductable, and seeking every tax credit, or the opinions of people like Irwin Shiff (The Federal Mafia is good), that the IRS is full of it, the IRS tax code is 20% the government equivalent of a Seinfeld script (about nothing), nothing, 30% if nothing applies to you, another 30% special interest deductions, 5% actual taxes, and 15% attempts to have civil rules (best case wins) apply to criminal prosecutions (which should be presumed innocent). US laws are a worldwide joke. The US has perhaps the world’s fairest jury system and criminal rights, but the US constantly fails in trying to pass new laws in screwed-up ways that are known to be null and void, if properly challenged from the time that a congress critter’s aide first types up a proposed language file.
The biggest power that the IRS has is claiming (successfully—judges know who gets the money that results in their paychecks) that defeats are injuris rulings (that is bad latin for only applying in this case and means that quotable precident is NOT set by that decision). The second biggest is the failure of juries to know that they are allowed to judge both the case at issue and the law as well, AND CAN IGNORE INSTRUCTIONS, and aquit for any damn reason they want. What do you expect however from a public that doesn’t know pleaded is a double modifier and that plead (as in rhyming with head) is the original and proper past tense verb form of plea. The first means that you can beat-em but your neighbor next door has to totally reconstruct his case to do the same, by not being able to cite your case and decision. The last is ignorance of the law.
Treat all of these as further games to master, or games you graduate to playing and maybe you can become wealthy enough to start changing things. But if you do, don’t fall for whatever it is that keeps us trapped on this planet. Raise hell and try to get us into a real space program. Example: there is a $110 billion backlog in bids for launch vehicles to orbit comsats. Every month a NASA funded publication, Ad Astra, shows the total going up. Yet the total costs of funding “a cheap not dirty proposal for a space plane,” that would use a 747 as the first stage of an otherwise direct to orbit mini shuttle could be funded for $2 billion. That is quite a multiplier for an investment, that people like Bill Gates virtually walk around with. Until we reach out, and the gov’ment won’t do it or will screw it up, into space all of our troubles in “all living together on this one planet,” will keep us STUCK on this one planet, until we become Nebishes (the term comes from T. J. Bassinger’s books, Half past Human, and, The Godwhale—he shortened his name to Bass, for these two scfi classics. Nebish also is found in Yiddish as a term for a “nobody.”), or with all of our computers and neat toys, nothing more than that we might as well be chipmakers for a “grey alien” version of the Star Trek Borg!
It must take great efforts to keep us stuck while the money is to be made getting up off or butts and going to the stars. Maybe by this book some candles can be lit or relit, where people of true faith and goodwill will have sources of high income not subject to us staying krazy glued to our cubicles like the Dilbert strip pictures by whatever wants the earth to just plain SUCK and keep us here, and can be sources of getting us going. The entire personal computer industry was made by hacker misfits and the like. Who says that maybe it isn’t time for an independent venture capital movement that has thousands of sources….You get the idea…..CC out!
APPENDIX A – Ruin and Distribution
APPENDIX B – Showing the maximum profit and BJF for continuous shuffle machine games
APPENDIX C – Estimating Bankroll Requirements
Last Update: 04/19/05