Making A Living Off Blackjack

Zee, you can see how long someone has been on this forum by looking at the join date. There is a lot of us who have been around since the beginning. I don't make my living playing blackjack, but I've been playing blackjack for a very long time. I have been on BJ21 since shortly after I got internet, probably around 1999. Jun 21, 2010  Any of you make living off from blackjack table game? I would like to be a pro blackjack so I can make living out from it. I mean maybe make 500 dollars every other months. Just make money and the casino won't even noticed me being there make profit? I am sure they would have kick me out and not welcome me back to casino if I make as high as.

You could theoretically become a blackjack professional by just using the Hi Lo system. That’s the basic card counting system that almost everyone starts with. For recreational players, it’sperfect because it’s easy and effective.

But if you want to make your living playing blackjack, you’re probably going to need to milk the game for every tenth of a percent that you can.

The way to do this is by adopting a more complicated counting system that will increase your edge over the casino by being more accurate when it comes to when to raise your bets, being moreaccurate when it comes to deviating from basic strategy, or both.

Making A Living Off Blackjack

The Hi Lo system is a single-level system. You’re only increasing or decreasing the count by one every time a card is played.

Make A Living Off Blackjack

In a two-level system, you have two values that you use. You might increase or decrease the count by one or two depending on which card you see. This requires more practice, as it’s harder, butit also provides you with 10% more winnings per hour than you might expect with a single-level system.

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That might not mean much to the average recreational card counter. It might mean a few hundred dollars per year in earnings. That’s not worth the trouble for that type of player.

But a big player – one with ten times the bankroll spending two to three times the amount of time at the table – might make a few thousand dollars more per year. That’s significant.

Making A Living Off Blackjack

Let’s look at the math.

Suppose you’re playing for $50 per hand on average, meaning you’re probably ranging your bets from $10 to $100. Let’s also assume that you’re getting in 200 hands per hour.

You’re putting $10,000 per hour into action.

If you have an edge over the house of 1%, that’s $100/hour in expected return.

With a better counting system, you’re looking at $110/hour in expected return instead.

Let’s now suppose you’re playing for 15 hours per week, 50 weeks a year. This means you’re earning $1,500/week with the Hi Lo, or $1,650 per week using the more complicated count.

Over 50 weeks, that’s the difference between making $75,000 a year and making $82,500 a year.

That’s a significant difference, but if your average bet size is two to three times that, the difference becomes far more significant. You’re looking at a difference of $15,000 or $20,000 a year.

That’s a life-changing amount of money.

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And 15 hours a week is a pretty cushy work schedule, too.

But it’s not as easy as just switching to a harder counting system. You need to improve all your aspects of play, too.

The first step to becoming a professional gambler is learning enough about probability to get an edge when betting. Casinos stay in business because they have a mathematical edge over most players. Your goal as a professional gambler is to only bet when you have anedge.

But how do you know if you have an edge or not?

You have to be able to do the math.

Luckily, it’s not hard.

Probability is just a mathematical way of looking at how likely certain events are. A probability of an event occurring is always a number between 0 and 1. If an event has a probability of 0, itwill never happen. If it has a probability of 1, then it will always happen.

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Here’s an example:

You flip a coin. You want to know the probability that it will land on heads.

You determine that by dividing the number of ways you can achieve the result you’re solving for by all possible results. When flipping a coin, you only have one way of getting heads. You alsohave two possible results—heads or tails. So your probability of getting heads is 0.5.

That probability can be expressed as a fraction or a percentage, too. 0.5 is the same thing as ½, and it’s also the same thing as 50%.

When you bet on a particular event, you can compare the probability of winning that bet with how much you risk versus how much you stand to win in order to determine the expected value of thatwager. For most casino games, your expected value on each bet is negative—the casino has an edge over you.

Here’s an example:

You bet on a single number at the roulette table. The probability that you’ll win that bet is 1/38. If you do win, you get paid off at 35 to 1 odds.

One other way to express a probability is in odds format. That’s a comparison of how many ways you can fail versus how many ways you can succeed. Since a roulette wheel has 38 numbers, youhave 37 ways to lose and only 1 way to win. That means your odds of winning are 37 to 1.

If you got paid off at 37 to 1, you’d have an edge of 0, and so would the house. If you could get paid off at 38 to 1, you’d have an edge over the casino. But you only get paid off at 35 to1, so the house has an edge over you.

In all those cases, your probability of winning is low, but if you get paid off enough money, even a low probability bet gives you an edge over the house.

Here’s why:

Suppose you play 38 spins of the wheel. You’re betting $1 on every spin. If you get results that mimic the mathematical probability, you’ll lose $37 and win $35. You lost $1 on 37 spins, and youwon $35 on one spin. That means your expectation is -$2 over 38 bets.

You can divide that expectation by the number of bets to get an amount you expect to lose on average per bet. In this case, your expected loss per bet is $0.0526. You can express that as apercentage if you like, and in this case, that percentage is 5.26%.

Your goal as a professional gambler is to only place wagers where you have an edge. Since your statistical results over a large number of trials should near the mathematical expectation, you canexpect a profit if you play long enough.

That’s the math that works for the casino, and that math can work for you as well.