EasyRhino said:
Card counting, holecarding, spooking, and bet-capping all seem equally magical... so wouldn't they all be cheating?
I had a very bad experience with something like this a few months ago. I was playing a friendly game of poker with some close friends. None of us really knows how to play so we just try to have fun while goofing around. The person sitting across the table from me was terrible at shuffling the cards. When he split the deck in half to riffle them he would always show the bottom card of each pile. I mean, it was totally obvious to everybody there. Obviously it was pretty easy to tell what the bottom two (or so) cards were every time. I decided to take things a little further. He would always shuffle the deck three times. I would ignore the first shuffle. For the second shuffle I would remember the bottom two cards and know that they would end up about 0-3 cards from the bottom after the next riffle. Then I would look at the bottom two cards at the end of the last riffle. I knew that those would be the bottom cards of the deck. So when it was time to deal I already knew the values of 3-4 cards that were buried at the bottom of the deck.
During one memorable hand I folded pocket Jacks before the flop. This was a very casual game so people would often look at the folded hands just to see how everyone else was playing. Somebody said “Dude, what are you doing? You folded Jacks off the top? Why?!” I said “Because the Jack or hearts is the second card from the bottom and the Jack of clubs is about 4-6 cards above it. They’re not going to come out.”
Well, all of a sudden everyone started yelling and saying that I was cheating. Even after I explained how I did it they were still
really pissed off. :flame: They thought I was taking advantage of them, which I was, but any of them could have used the same information to their advantage. This guy was holding the decks straight up so everyone could see the bottom cards every time. People actually said “Yeah, but that’s not playing fair so I didn’t look at them.”
That’s the typical mindset of many gamblers. Even when they’re given the chance to get an edge they ignore it. Anyone who does something they think is “unfair” they call him a cheater. They go out of their way to
not use their brains.
But at some point you do run into a morality/advantage issue. As APs it is our job to take advantage of people, plain and simple. Whether it is a dealer, a pit boss, casino management, the cashier, the ploppies, whoever. That’s what we do. But most people are taught that it is “wrong” or “immoral” to take advantage of people or to trick people. I’m not disagreeing with that, but at some point you have to draw a line. If it is okay to buy insurance on a ploppy’s hand because he doesn’t know any better, is it okay to scam old ladies? Maybe I'm a man of thin morals, but I let the law decide what is “unfair” and what is allowed. If the court decides that something is legal then I’ll go with that interpretation, not what someone else’s interpretation of “moral” is.
-Sonny-
), but really counting IS against the spirit of the game. It is not legally cheating, I don't know if it is morally cheating or not, but it DOES break the spirit of the game as it was intended.
