Visual Acuity

Sucker · Apr 19, 2011

I can relate MY experience when I first learned to read hole cards. My mentor Julio sat me down at a table at the Stardust, where he said the dealer was a 100% 3b "loader". I could not see a THING! I sat there for 8 hours and STILL could see NOTHING! The next day I went back to her table for another 8 hours. STILL nothing! After one week, I finally saw the first one. Suddenly, it was as though the floodgates opened! From that moment on - 100% game! :grin:

Moral of this story: Galileo was RIGHT. Unless a person has macular degeneration or some other physical or medical problem, his eyes CAN and WILL be trainable!

metronome · Apr 19, 2011

As I understand hole carding, I wonder what sort of further exercises would be useful in "capturing" the "pieces and parts" of cards that give us fairly reliable info. Ex: quick recognition of the slightest hint of color, thereby exposing a face or a glance at the double rounded edges of an eight, etc. etc.
Extensive practice is in order.....

Severity8 · Apr 19, 2011

it would be cool

It would also be interesting to do a poll or something after you see said video and see what the general times were for seeing said card and then add complexity to it change color, suit or other things while increasing the frame rate. To see how fast the brain can cognizantly retain something. What a curious thing.

zengrifter · Apr 19, 2011

Sucker said:

I can relate MY experience when I first learned to read hole cards. My mentor Julio sat me down at a table at the Stardust, where he said the dealer was a 100% 3b "loader". I could not see a THING! I sat there for 8 hours and STILL could see NOTHING! The next day I went back to her table for another 8 hours. STILL nothing! After one week, I finally saw the first one. Suddenly, it was as though the floodgates opened! From that moment on - 100% game! :grin:

Moral of this story: Galileo was RIGHT. Unless a person has macular degeneration or some other physical or medical problem, his eyes CAN and WILL be trainable!

Good anecdote! zg

21forme · Apr 19, 2011

Southpaw said:

I recall a friend of mine in high school doing a project like this for a science fair competition. It's called subliminal perception.

What he did was show a short film. Within the film there were a few frames flashing a color - either red or blue - too short to be consciously perceived. At the end of the film there were 2 bowls of candy by the door - one with a blue wrapper and one with a red wrapper. He found a correlation between the colors flashed during the movie and the color of the candy people took on the way out.

zengrifter · Apr 19, 2011

21forme said:

Here's a classic verifiable one >>

SILENCE OF LAMBS W/SKULL LEZ ORGY

blackchipjim · Apr 19, 2011

training?

I was under the impression it is skill that is really not something you can improve on. Your mind either has the ability to process the image or it can't. There is furthermore other skills that your mind is wired for or it's not and no amount of training will rewire your mainframe. This of course is just my oppinion from what I read from various sources.

Sucker · Apr 19, 2011

blackchipjim said:

There may be some truth to this, in that there may be some people that will just never be able to do this correctly; no matter HOW much they train. But I can unequivocally state that if you DO possess the ability (and IMO MOST people do), you must train yourself if you wish to develop it to its HIGHEST extent.

Besides hole cards, there are certain OTHER (non-cheating) things that - after more than a year of intense training - I have trained my eyes to do (and which I will NOT discuss publicly). Many people would not even believe that these things are even POSSIBLE. For that whole year I did not believe it myself, but the person who taught it to me FORCED the practice exercises upon me until I finally DID get it.

Human beings are capable of things that are almost beyond imagination, if only they have the desire. -Believe it or not!

21forme · Apr 19, 2011

Of course training is possible. Learn to read the cards by their pip pattern. Not only is it useful for HCing, but it permits backcounting from quite a distance from the table.

psyduck · Apr 19, 2011

Sucker said:

I tried for years to read a faced down card by seeing through its back. So far no success!

blackchipjim · Apr 19, 2011

The flash

I agree most people could see a color flash and that's enough for alot of decisions. To see the actual numeric value is something else. Certain dealers flash color unknowningly and for me that's enough for the majority of the decisions.

Lonesome Gambler · Apr 19, 2011

Maybe I'm alone here, but I think you should be careful with color. You'd be surprised how black red can look at times. Shapes and patterns are much easier than colors.

Friendo · Apr 19, 2011

Sucker said:

You'll want to revise that magnification number down a bit. I have seen them with 7x binoculars. These were tripod-mounted, however. I have tried and failed to see those moons with handheld binoculars many times.

Naked-eye stories abound, but I have no idea whether this is really possible.

A friend with extremely high visual acuity swears that he saw them one night in a dark-sky setting.

My favorite:

metronome · Apr 20, 2011

now thats an anecdote worthy of discussion

Tree · Apr 20, 2011

SP,

I'm not sure if you've done this already but couldn't you just write basic program in C++ using openGL/directX API and continuously redraw a poly with an image of a card rendered to it?

Provided you have sufficient buffering and small enough images (size wise), you should be able to get quite the speed on that, and of course it's all adjustable.

Come to think of it, if your computer is fast enough you could probably even just use Visual Basic for it.

Southpaw · Apr 20, 2011

Tree said:

This is not something that I've thought of. Unfortunately, programming is a huge weakness of mine, and thus I don't know exactly what you're talking about, since I'm not familiar with the programs you've mentioned.

Thanks for the idea. When I get started in a week or two, I will look into these programs.

Spaw

johndoe · Apr 20, 2011

If you wanted to do something really easy without coding, just make some animated .gif's, and maybe find something to display them randomly.

If I remember right the gif format allows time resolution of 0.01sec (subject to the abilities of the display/software).

MangoJ · Apr 20, 2011

Animated GIFs are no proper tool for timing purposes. They are not synced with your display hardware.

OpenGL or DirectX is the right way to go, it allows you proper timing and syncing your software with your hardware (There is a multi-billion industry in that spot - called computer games). Although you need only a subset of OpenGL or DirectX functionality - it is certainly not suitable for beginners of programming.

Tree · Apr 20, 2011

Maybe I'll take a shot at it on my days off. It's been a while since I've touched anything like this but who knows. Worst case scenario I could probably do a VB hack job.

Sonny · Apr 20, 2011

Tree said:

There are flashcard programs out there that can do this already. You can load any text/image/photo as a flashcard and it will flash the image very quickly. A Google search should uncover a few free trial versions that you can test.

http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showthread.php?t=15838

-Sonny-

Visual Acuity

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