Bankroll: July 07- $10,000; August 08- $20,870
I first played BJ at a casino in LV in late May last year after learning fairly decent Basic Strategy through the trainer on this site.
I played four sessions of 6D, arbritarily deciding I'd risk $500 and quit when I either won or lost that amount. I wound up $2K to the good, pretty much evenly distributed through the four sessions. Most were slow and steady, one had a serious downswing which I eventually overcame.
I reported my experience on this board and was advised I was simply lucky.
That seemed right to me, so I started learning to count using KO as it appeared to be 1) reasonably good and 2) was simple.
I bought Casino Verite for training and CBJN for assessing available games.
I started with reKO and eventually shifted to KO Preferred.
I decided I'd use a bankroll of $10K and the guideline of 1% as a max bet. I've never been good with math and I'm either old enough or experiencing the results of too much fun in earlier years that it's been a surprisingly challenging endeavor to track the count and play my hand simultaneously without appearing to be an idiot. Fortunately, my personal demeanor probably makes the nice idiot aspect seem credible.
I live in an area with very few venues offering good games and those that do have very few tables. So I learned the hard way that you can't go to a small time place every week or two and walk out up 20-25 units without having your play limited.
My preference is for DD, but there are few of those games in my locale worth playing. So I've worked on my skill set in locale area games on play- all 6D and made a few trips to LV and So CA where the DD games are better.
I also learned the hard way that other than working on your skill set, it's financially frustrating to play marginal games. So I basically stopped playing for three months locally out of frustration on one hand and not wanting to burn out my welcome at the few good venues in the region on the other.
During that time I worked on trying to mentally "park" the count, then play my hand, then come back and adjust the count. Just this week in several real time settings, I discoverd I still have a lot of work yet to do.
But on that return to playing during a business trip to an area with a few decent games, I won $1500 over three DD sessions of a total of 7 hours.
That put me up $10,870 since July 07.
My play has been on occasional weekends locally, two trips to LV-one for work and one personal, and two trips to So CA.
In all, I've learned I have a lot of work to do on counting and being natural, playing within my limits (easy because I'm cheap), not coming back too soon when you've won enough to be noted (which can be entirely situational), and above all, not playing games with crappy penetration.
Happily, I'm able to now bet at a level which produces good increases to the bankroll, so between that and getting smoother in my play, I hope to reduce the time to double my bankroll in a shorter time.
This board has been a great help to me and I want to thank everyone who contributes here.
I first played BJ at a casino in LV in late May last year after learning fairly decent Basic Strategy through the trainer on this site.
I played four sessions of 6D, arbritarily deciding I'd risk $500 and quit when I either won or lost that amount. I wound up $2K to the good, pretty much evenly distributed through the four sessions. Most were slow and steady, one had a serious downswing which I eventually overcame.
I reported my experience on this board and was advised I was simply lucky.
That seemed right to me, so I started learning to count using KO as it appeared to be 1) reasonably good and 2) was simple.
I bought Casino Verite for training and CBJN for assessing available games.
I started with reKO and eventually shifted to KO Preferred.
I decided I'd use a bankroll of $10K and the guideline of 1% as a max bet. I've never been good with math and I'm either old enough or experiencing the results of too much fun in earlier years that it's been a surprisingly challenging endeavor to track the count and play my hand simultaneously without appearing to be an idiot. Fortunately, my personal demeanor probably makes the nice idiot aspect seem credible.
I live in an area with very few venues offering good games and those that do have very few tables. So I learned the hard way that you can't go to a small time place every week or two and walk out up 20-25 units without having your play limited.
My preference is for DD, but there are few of those games in my locale worth playing. So I've worked on my skill set in locale area games on play- all 6D and made a few trips to LV and So CA where the DD games are better.
I also learned the hard way that other than working on your skill set, it's financially frustrating to play marginal games. So I basically stopped playing for three months locally out of frustration on one hand and not wanting to burn out my welcome at the few good venues in the region on the other.
During that time I worked on trying to mentally "park" the count, then play my hand, then come back and adjust the count. Just this week in several real time settings, I discoverd I still have a lot of work yet to do.
But on that return to playing during a business trip to an area with a few decent games, I won $1500 over three DD sessions of a total of 7 hours.
That put me up $10,870 since July 07.
My play has been on occasional weekends locally, two trips to LV-one for work and one personal, and two trips to So CA.
In all, I've learned I have a lot of work to do on counting and being natural, playing within my limits (easy because I'm cheap), not coming back too soon when you've won enough to be noted (which can be entirely situational), and above all, not playing games with crappy penetration.
Happily, I'm able to now bet at a level which produces good increases to the bankroll, so between that and getting smoother in my play, I hope to reduce the time to double my bankroll in a shorter time.
This board has been a great help to me and I want to thank everyone who contributes here.
