Why blackjack can be beatable
darrislance said:
If this were true, then why not make every game slightly beatable?
I constantly see games that have a high house advantage, but they still draw crowds of people, which is not logical, but they do. It seems unbeatable blackjack would do the same. I personally think the casinos are making a push toward this, because it seems that it is getting more and more difficult to find the good games. Casinos are greedy, they want all they can get.
From my personal experience it is not the games but the ammenities that bring people to certain venues. Time and time again when I visit my local casinos the masses gravitate toward the nicer resorts, which oddly enough have the worst games. I did read recently that of all the people that visit Vegas, fewer and fewer actually go to gamble.
Blackjack, in a similar way to Video Poker, is a game of decisions and can be offered with a small house edge because of the education necessary to make proper decisions is not gained by the vast majority of players. Nearly all the blackjack games that I play have house edges of .19-slightly higher than half a percent, yet the casinos are making about 3% on these games. In nearly 500 hours of blackjack play last year I doubt I ran into 5 people who played basic strategy perfectly. Though I avoid crowded tables you are probably talking about thousands of players and only a handful really knew basic strategy, much less counted! To add to this, I do all my playing on tables with $25-$100 minimums, which means that the amount of money in your wallet has nothing at all to do with how much you know about blackjack.
So, you feel that the casinos can increase profits by making the current rules even worse than they are at blackjack and people will still play because at games with bad rules the tables are already crowded.
This has continually been tried by casinos and one of two results always happen.
1. The bad game is somewhat popular but the amount of money bet on it is much lower than the amount of money on a similar blackjack table. Examples would be 3CP, CSM blackjack, or 6/5 blackjack.
2. The game just starts to disappear Carribean Stud or Mindplay21.
In reality there are not enough cardcounters out there to make a difference as to game popularity and if all the players were counters there would be no game. The difference is made by so many of those very bad players, who play decent size money, play it very badly but still see both real and imaginary reasons to avoid many bad games. A good example is someone I sometimes travel to casinos with. He asked me to teach him to count but he never mastered basic strategy and might jump his bets on a high count if he is winning. I would approximate he is playing at about a 1.5% disadvantage to the house. He plays loads of 3CP at $100, a game with a huge house edge but he would not ever play 6/5 blackjack or a CSM blackjack table because he considers 6/5 a bad game (it is 3 or 4 times better than 3CP though), and says that you can not get a run on a CSM (that Mythical Magical Flow thing.) But the importance here is that this kind of losing player is requiring the casino to keep decent enough blackjack alive because they will not play on poorer blackjack and their numbers are big. The bad player rules the rules and the casinos give him that as they take his money.
ihate17
