I can't speak to Atlantic City in present tense because I have made 2 short visits in the last 10 years, but I think I am safe in assuming that conditions and games haven't improved since I left and that would mean Atlantic City 8 deck games (is Borgata still 6 deck?) is among the worst games in the country, excluding 6:5. Hard to win. But not impossible.
First of all why would someone based on the east coast be playing there now? There are much better opportunities including Pennsylvania right next door, which is 6 decks and has surrender. I am not going to get into how huge a difference 6 deck is over 8 decks. It took me a long time to understand that. If you look at the initial house advantage it is only .03%, but in actuality it is far greater. Look at the far smaller true count frequencies for 75% dealt 8 deck vs 75% dealt 6 deck and you will quickly understand the difference.
So that said, forget about Pa and other better places. I'll talk about AC during my time there. First there were no table games in Pa at the time. There was no table games anywhere on east coast when I started in 2004. Delaware came along during my 5+ years. No Maryland. No New York.
So my 5+ years AC was 8 decks no surrender, dealt to 75% pen. (Borgata was 6 decks, but has only 1 $5 table). So the first almost 3 years were an absolute struggle. I
averaged 10k a year and one year made just under 9k. This was my total income. I paid my half of rent out of this money. But I didn't have the BR to play anything more than $5 tables and a small spread, so I was only going to make a few dollars an hour, if I was lucky enough to not tap out my small bankroll, which never occurred.
I actually think these very mediocre conditions helped in that regard. I have mentioned this a few times and expected some push back but so far haven't received it. My thinking is that negative variance occurs when you hit a period that the majority of your larger bets lose for a short time. Well with this very mediocre penetration on a 8 deck game, you are placing fewer max bets, so you are less likely to have a period that you lose a whole bunch in a row. Of course you are also less likely to have a period where you win a whole bunch in a row.
Sort of keeping your variance lower but at the expense of keeping your win rate lower. Let's see if I get an argument from anyone this time for this theory.
Anyway, it took till late in the 3rd year before I finally hit a period of extraordinarily good positive variance and grew my bankroll enough to start betting a little more. And it quickly snowballed from there. Years 4 and 5 were my game changing years. I won enough to start growing my bankroll and bet more and more. I sort of thought this was going to happen in year 1. A case of not really being prepared for what I was doing.
Anyway as I finally started to win a little money and moved up in stakes, eventually to playing green, my time in AC came to an abrupt end. I had been tolerated playing the small rotation of casinos spreading red for a number of years, but I wasn't going to be tolerated by the same pit people spreading green. Borgata is the casino that put an end to it. They started half shoeing me and using the $5-$50 min.max cards that applied only to me. Without Borgata, I knew I wouldn't be able to get enough play in AC and besides counter measures at the other casinos were likely to follow.
At that time AC was 13 casinos and really more than that as Bally's had three different casinos (park Place, Wild West and Claridge) operating under 1 casino license, so it counted as 1 casinos but really were 3 different pits. Borgata had 3 different pits as well at the time. So small as that rotation was then, there are probably half the casinos and pits and tables available now. I could only have accomplished what I accomplished (building my bankroll) during that specific time at the height of Atlantic City. My guess is AC today equates to Reno. A player can roll into town and play for a few days, maybe a couple times a year, but playing that as your homebase? Forget about it.
So if you are going to play 8 deck game or even 6, you must escape at least some of the negative counts, through aggressive wong outs, switching tables, bathroom breaks, or just ending sessions on negative counts. Playing the old traditional "play all" approach is just going to require a huge spread and be too obvious.
And you are going to have to ramp up fairly quickly. None of this raising $10 at a time. You gotta get to max bet by TC +3 or +4 at the latest. The higher TC's occur too infrequently at 75% pen games to wait any longer. And ramping up quickly requires a larger BR and it is going to mean bigger swings. A player must be both financially prepared (properly bankrolled) and mentally prepared to handle the short term losses.
I don't know what else to say about AC and I am sorry if my experiences are outdated by 10 years
