Tournament Strategies
After receiving pocket cards, you are immediately faced with a choice: play your cards and either raise or call the blinds, or fold.
Practice Matters
So what were the casino’s options?
So what were the casino’s options? One option was to administer a harsh beating that was accompanied with a stern warning never to return. But, this would be a losing battle. Judging by the popularity of Thorp’s book, hundreds of thousands of blackjack players would have a better chance of winning; that’s a lot of beatings! So casinos came up with a solution: continually reshuffling a table’s card’s at random points during an evening’s play. This worked. However, it left players impatient and bored. They started leaving tables – that meant the casinos were losing money.
Finally dealers came up with a solution: eaching their own dealers to count
Finally dealers came up with a solution: eaching their own dealers to count cards using the Thorp method. This enabled dealers and pit bosses to quickly identify card counters by examining their betting habits, and their expressions (card counting requires a lot of concentration for most people).