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The future of blackjack has been revealed and it’s ugly. As legalized gambling
continues to blossom, with a record 73 million Americans expected to visit a
casino before the end of this year, the industry’s managers are scrambling to
stack the odds on the simple card game of 21 ever more in their
favor.
The motivation is transparent: Blackjack is the only game in the
casino where a player’s skill can radically increase his or her chances of
winning, maybe even shifting the edge away from the house.
Now,
gambling-machine maker Bally’s is marketing a player tracking system that
crushes whatever tiny advantage can be had, and that threatens to turn your
average 21 table into one more thinly disguised vacuum cleaner.
“After
you’ve played a series of hands, this table and its computer will evaluate your
play, keep track of whether you are an advantage player or not, keep track of
what you hit, when you hit it and how you hit when the deck was positive or
negative,” said Bally’s sales exec Dave Lucchese as he showed me the company’s
MindPlay blackjack table during an industry trade show this past spring in the
now-hurricane-ravaged Gulf gambling resort. “This is the holy grail for us. You
can’t do this with a slot machine.”
Skilled blackjack players win money
by at least counting the high and low cards that have been played as the game
progresses, and by betting accordingly. The more low cards played, the more
“positive” the deck is. With so many high cards still lurking in the deck, the
greater the chance that the dealer — who has to hit through 16 — will break. As
a deck turns more positive, a good blackjack player will increase the bet and,
likewise, scale it back when it goes negative. This is called the
advantage.
For almost a half century, casinos have been trying to limit
this advantage. In the 1960s, after the first beat-the-dealers books were
published, the big Las Vegas casinos moved from a hand-dealt single deck of
cards to a show-dealt game of six decks, making card counting that much more
difficult.
Other casinos are now introducing single-deck games, usually
called something saccharine like “Super Fun 21.” Using only 52 cards, they
restore the player’s ability to better track the cards. One catch, however.
These mongrelized games radically re-order the payoff rules (reducing a
blackjack from 3-to-2 down to 6-to-5, and barring players from doubling their
bets on certain combos), thereby handing the advantage firmly back to the
house.
In the past few years, some casinos — especially Indian casinos —
introduced perpetual-shuffle dealer machines. After each hand, the played cards
are returned into the machine and mixed back into the deck. No shuffle — no
counting. But many players, wisely enough, won’t sit at such tables.
Now
Bally’s $19,000-per-table MindPlay system takes all of these techniques a step
further and packages them in a user-friendly presentation that sets off no alarm
bells among average players.
“But let me quote the great blackjack
player Max Rubin,” says Bally’s Lucchese. “‘MindPlay means the death of card
counting as we know it.’”
The MindPlay system, promising “total casino
management,” looks like any other standard 21 table. “It has minimal impact on
the presentation of the game,” says Lucchese. What the player may not notice is
that after the cards are shuffled and before they are loaded into the dealer’s
shoe, they are very briefly placed in an indented bay where they are instantly
scanned into a database. An invisible 1/100-inch computer code marks each card.
As the card is eventually dealt out, it is read by another optical scanner
embedded in the table’s shoe.
Yet another optical reader, implanted
underneath the dealer’s chip tray, reads and calculates every chip on the table
— as long as the chips are the specially made “Moneypieces” treated with
“optical pattern recognition.”
All this info is fed in real-time through
a computer and then displayed on a monitor, ostensibly sitting on the desk of a
blackjack pit supervisor. “This game keeps track not only of the money,” said
Lucchese, “but it also tracks the player’s skill.”
Whoever sits in front
of the monitor knows everything — the tracking and recording of every card dealt
and every wager made — in real time. Screen after clickable screen computes,
ranks and breaks out every slice of data imaginable: the precise average bet of
each player, the relative profitability of each table, how fast or slow the
dealer’s pace is, whether the dealer is a “game builder” who attracts more
players or a “killer” who chases them away, what precise percentage of advantage
or disadvantage each player is performing at and, of course, how much, down to
the penny, each one has won or lost. For those players who have handed over a
“loyalty card” — the ever more common frequent-gambler card that accumulates
points for later freebies — their player histories are permanently filed and fed
into a running database. Next time they sit down and hand over their cards, the
casino will instantly have their player stats.
Lucchese calculates that
an average casino can recoup its investment in the MindPlay system within just a
few weeks. “This is why we call it total casino management,” he said. “Everyone
is tracked. Every player and every dealer. The biggest savings is made primarily
by reducing complimentaries.”
Let me translate. Traditionally, casinos
are willing to “comp” back 40 percent of a player’s estimated loss in free
meals, rooms or entertainment. The pit boss standing in a suit behind the table
makes the estimate based on how much a player bets and how long he’s been
playing (the loss can be estimated by the standing house advantage). MindPlay
now eliminates any estimate whatsoever. There’s a cold black-and-white
calculation making it easier for a table supervisor to shrug his shoulders at a
player’s comp request and say no-can-do — “the computer says you haven’t earned
it yet.”
Nor does MindPlay necessarily lead to the casino banning a card
counter once he’s been identified. Lucchese says with a smile that there are
more people who “think” they are effective counters than those who really are.
Armed with MindPlay’s scientific analysis, some players who count, but play
poorly, would now be encouraged to play more instead of getting
86-ed.
It’s not just the players being put under MindPlay’s scrutiny.
“Dealer evaluations are historically very subjective,” says Lucchese. “MindPlay
is very objective. It identifies each dealer’s ranking against his or her entire
class.” Meaning, of course, that even in the hypothetical situation where all
dealers in a certain casino are doing an adequate job, some will now be
considered “objectively” at the bottom of the cut and undeniably more
vulnerable.
Another threat posed by MindPlay is that its tracking
technology could be used to interrupt a game when the deck has turned too
positive and advantageous for the players. One Woodland Hills attorney, alleging
he saw a Nevada casino reshuffle decks at a MindPlay table in the middle of a
game, sued the makers. But the case was dismissed. And the makers of MindPlay
say it will never be used as a house cheating device. It should be noted that
compared to Nevada’s stringent standards and enforcement, most other states’
gambling regulations are quite lax.
About a hundred MindPlay tables are
currently in use, a figure that is growing and that will very soon double. They
can be found in the Fantasy Springs Indian casino near Palm Springs, at the El
Dorado in Reno, in Aruba, aboard the Titan Cruise Line and throughout the
Flamingo on the Las Vegas strip. Caesars Entertainment, which merged with
Harrah’s Entertainment in June and owns the Flamingo, is considering placing
MindPlay throughout its many other properties.
Toward the end of
Lucchese’s presentation to me, we were joined by Bernie Burkholder, president
and CEO of the nearby Treasure Bay Casino — a Biloxi-coast gambling house built
into a replica pirate vessel, which got shipwrecked in the Katrina
fiasco.
“Isn’t this going to chase away my serious players?” Burkholder
asked Lucchese as he ran his hand over the reddish MindPlay table
felt.
“Exactly!” answered Lucchese excitedly. “That’s the whole point.
That’s your competitive edge. The advantage player is going to get up from this
table and go next door to play. That’s exactly what you want. Let the other guy
have the players who win.”
Burkholder merely stroked his chin and
pondered the new future of blackjack.
[via]La Weekly
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