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Story Of The Joy Luck Tower Blackjack StrategyStory Of The Joy Luck Tower Blackjack Strategy
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Letter to a friend:
Wow, a job at a casino! Cool!
Actually, I'm one of those people who probably could make a living at the casino. I am a card counter at Blackjack. I have paid for more than one vacation by spending 8 hours of it playing Blackjack. It's grueling though. In a typical 8 hour shift, I'll make about $400, but I make all of that on like just two or three of the hands I play. The rest of the time I am just breaking even, betting the minimum, counting the cards. When the proper time comes, and I detect a moneymaking opportunity, then I bet the table maximum. I find about three of these opportunities in 8 hours. I'll win two hands, and lose 1.... Two deck blackjack is best (depending on their soft 17 rule), and 6-deck from a shoe where they never go past the halfway point in the shoe is the worst.... The only problem is that the playing style of a card counter is very obvious. They are never betting the max except on what they think is the last hand to be played before a shuffle (because that is when the deck is likely to be the richest and give them the best chance, that is the most tens), and the rest of the time they are playing the minimum bet. They usually aren't drinking anything other than soda, and they are watching everything dealt.... I never play anything other than blackjack, the odds on everything else is worse.
Funny thing is that my biggest winning was in Vegas where I did almost exactly the opposite, and won about $5K in one night. I was there for the consumer electronics show, sometime between 1996-1999. My buddy Bob was there at his favorite casino, slots of fun, next to circus circus. We had been there a few days, and I was down to my last $100 (I think I started with $300). I called Sarah, and she said "Well, the rent is paid, go have fun with it."
I went by myself to Circus Circus. Sat at a table with three or four Taiwanese guys (there was also some asian convention in town at the same time), a Belgium guy, and a couple of others. Eventually I was down to $40, and had the dealer lecturing me about how to do better money management. Eventually things turned around and I started accumulating a little bit. Eventually, I was able to bet more than the minimum without worrying to much. At some point I put out a little stack with one or two greens on the bottom ($25 ea.), capped with a red ($5), and two gold ($1 ea.). I did this on the first hand out after a shuffle. It won.
I tried it again, and it won again.... Pretty soon, I've got back my original $400, and a bit of a surplus beyond that. So I add a few greens, getting really bold, three, maybe four greens, plus the one red and two golds, but only on the first hand.... Win... win.... loss... win.... win.... win..... loss.... win.... win..... win.....
Pretty soon, I notice I've caught the attention of the Taiwanese guys. Everytime my little stack would win, they'd whisper among themselves "ah no ney, do desh ka blah blah blah..." Pretty soon I notice when I order orange juice, they order orange juice. I order coca cola, they order coca cola. I put out a tower of chips, they start putting out a smaller tower of chips. And they start winning too....
Mathematically, probably no game has been studied more than Blackjack. I have all kinds of books about strategies, and groups who tried to team up to find ways to beat the game.
Fundamentally casinos make their money through the use of "the grind". They know that for a given odds game, lets say one that pays out 95% of all winnings, the vig (or take for the casino) is 5%. That means that over the long run of a lot of people who each sit down and play $100 through the table, the casino will end up with $5 of each of those hundreds. So the player who sits down with $100 to play, can expect to walk away from that game with, on average, $95. If he runs that $95 through the table, he'll walk with 95% of that, or about $90.50. If he runs that through the table, he'll end up with 95% of that, and so on. If he sits there long enough, odds are that the casino will end up with all of his money. That's the "grind", where they have ways to encourage you to keep running your money, and then your winnings, through the table again and again.
Blackjack has the best odds for the player in that it's take for the house is probably the smallest of any game. Slot machines are around 10% vig, poker and pai gow around 5%, craps something like 15%, etc. For Blackjack, the odds depend on the house rules, things like are double downs allowed, do they stand on soft-17, etc. Generally though, the vig is only about 1.5% in most casinos, down to as little as 0.5% in some liberal Vegas casinos. For the player that means that if you aren't stupid with your money, your money is likely to last longer at Blackjack than any other game.
Most of the reliable mathematics says that an effective card counting strategy can change the house percentage by about 1%, or as much as 1.5% for a very advanced strategy. So if their vig (the percent in their favor) is 0.5% (as it is in very liberal rules), getting a 1% advantage shifts the odds to 0.5% in your favor. One of the quirks of the game is that the very first hand dealt from the deck gives a very slight advantage to the player. But no where near enough to account for the winnings I was seeing!
I named this the "Joy Luck Tower" strategy in honor of my first protйgйs, the Taiwanese business men. Eventually I was up about $2000! Around this point the original dealer that I had at the beginning of the night rotated back to the table, and he did a double take look of amazement at the piles of chips in front of me, in addition to several prebuilt joy luck towers ready for deployment.. "Yeah, I guess you were right, I needed to manage my money better" I said to him.
Well, he started dealing. I don't know what he did, but he broke my streak. Big time! He started lecturing the table about their playing. When one guy would miss taking a hit when he should have, at the end of the hand the dealer, instead of picking up the cards would start telling the guy how if he had taken the hit, then he would have gotten the next card which would have helped him win, and the guy next to him would have gotten a different card that would have made him win, etc. He started telling us that the whole table was a team, and we were no better than our weakest player. What a bunch of mythology! Pure bunk!
You see the casinos love it when you get any kind of mythology under your skin. Having you think you can chase your losses is the best, which is what most "money management" strategies are. All of those kinds of things only increase their take from your pocket.
I wanted to shout at the guy, "You're here to deal! Not spout nonsense about team playing!" He was dealing so slowly, it was frustrating me greatly. But even worse, somehow, I don't know how, I dropped by $500 in no time. At that point I stopped, and I told him, "I don't know what you're doing, but I am not going to stick around and spend any more money to find out."
I got a rack to take my $1500 or so that I had left next door to slots of fun.
I walk in, and find Bob there with a couple of kids we'd met a couple of nights early. We learned they were there on a honeymoon, and were having a little fun at the casino. There were going to just stay one or two nights. Unfortunately, the boy got what I call "gamblers glaze" in his eyes, that glassy stare when all the person can think about is finding some more money to chase their losses with. So here it was, their third night, and they are almost entirely broke.
Bob was surprised to see me walk up with this giant rack full of chips. I had tried to arrange it with one of the pit bosses to bring my money to me as if I was calling for a credit marker, but they couldn't do that for me...
Anyhow, as I started deploying my Joy Luck Towers, I let Bob in on my discovery, and everything that had been happening. Bob was my programming partner for many years, and able to drink whiskey and beer at the table, and still not lose all his money. I threw a couple of greens as a gift over to the boy and girl so they could stick around and play some more. I was also tipping the dealer golds and reds, and occasionally a green as my Joy Luck Towers started doing there thing there too. The sound of greens tips being tapped on the tray by the dealer soon got the attention of the "Pit Mom".
We nick named this one lady pit boss the "Pit Mom". The previous nights we'd been bringing different trinkets from the trade show, including these really loud clicker devices, plastic with a piece of flexing metal inside. Bob said that in the olden days, you'd use these clickers to call for another drink. Well, we start handing them out to the pit boss who had fun clicking them at each other. The place started sounding like it was full of crickets. The cool thing was this gave us a way to know where the Pit Mom was just by listening for her clicker....
Anyhow, Bob and I start developing this whole mythology to go with my discovery. "You see the dealers tray, how he has gold chips interspersed with the other colors of chips?" (They put the silver or gold chips to separate groups of ten of the higher denominations so the pit boss can count their tray from a distance.) "Well, it turns that arrangement of chips creates a kind of feng shui that pulls the players money into the dealers tray. What we've done with the Joy Luck Tower, by capping it with one red, and two gold chips, instead of just one gold, is we've reversed the flow of the energy, enabling our tower to suck money out of the dealers tray." We had great fun publicizing our theory to anyone who might listen. And having lots of fun tipping, big time, with our winnings.
Bob was winning too... Somehow the boy and girl were able to stick around for a while too, I think I threw them two or three more greens to keep their company at the table.
I know we were causing a conniption for the casino. We were doing everything the opposite of how card counters usually do things. We were betting big on only the first hand. We were tipping big. Bob was drinking enough to equal anyone's loss at the tables. We noticed that eventually we had a full time pit boss paying attention to only our table, the whole time she has a telephone to her ear talking into it. We're positive she was talking to the eye in the sky people who were also trying to figure out how we were doing this.
We had a great time with several dealers that they rotated to our table. We initiated each of them into our mythology. A whole table of minimum betters. As the dealer would be shuffling, we'd each push our two dollar bets out, then one of us would ask in a loud voice, "What time is it?" And someone else would respond, "uh, oh, wait a minute! It's Joy Luck Tower time!" And we'd all pull back our minimum bets and push out towers of various sizes. Click click would go the dealer's tray with her tip.....
Eventually the casino gave us this really sour faced dealer named Arthur. We'd never seen him before in the several nights. We figured he was a breaker they'd brought in to kill our streak. We nick named him "King Arthur" because of his seriousness. He wouldn't smile at all. But we kept winning with him too. But since he wouldn't smile, we wouldn't tip him. We started mercilessly teasing him though, and cracking every joke we could think of. We did finally got under his skin, and eventually we did get him to laugh. So then he started getting some nice tips too.
Well, finally it was something like 6am, and we figured it was time to go back to the hotel room and pack for our 9am flight. I had about $5000 in chips, and Bob actually won about $600. As we were leaving, the casino people stopped us and were very insistent about giving us a souvenir polaroid picture to take with us. I noticed they took two pictures, but we only got one. I remarked, "Ah, going to put our mug shots on the wall in back in case we return?" They denied it, saying they always have big winners, but I knew better.....
When I got home later, and told Sarah about the happenings, and showed her the polaroid, she cleared up one mystery. When she heard about the red and gold chips, and how I got the interest of the Taiwanese guys she told me, "Red and gold is a color combination they consider to be very auspicious, it's no wonder they took notice."
So that's the story of my last trip to Vegas, and the discovery of the Joy Luck Tower.
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