Interesting post Baron.
Thinking about Blackjack and card-counting reminded me of something I read in a book recently.
Jeff Duvall is a 58 year old English Professional Poker Player.He's mainly a cash game player but has also had some excellent wins and lots of experience in the world tournament circuit.
Jeff Duvall - Results
"
Jeff's Story
If anyone is born a gambler, Jeff is. His mum actually starts having contractions while she's at the dog track(Jeff was probably trying to
get out of the womb in time to place a bet on a dog in the 7.30!)
The family lives near the dog track; it saves time getting there.
When he isn't gambling, his dad's a carpenter, but both Jeff's parents gamble
on whatever is moving at the time- dogs, horses, whatever, and, of course, cards. They play cards at home and Jeff joins in. When he leaves school at sixteen Jeff goes straight into the industry as a trainee manager in a betting shop.
'It didn't last long. I had a few problems. I was a big gambler then. I was doing dog tracks every night. All around London, from when I was 16.
I was really compulsive, but not as bad as my brother. He became secretary of Gamblers Anonymous. He had a big problem. He was a professional fighter and a big seller of ticket money but he'd do it in gambling before he even got into the ring, so that lost of times he was fighting for nothing.
'For a while I managed pubs. Then in my late twenties I got into Blackjack.
I played Blackjack Professionally for a number of years. I started card-counting. Counting is the minimum level of what you can do in professional blackjack.
Then there's shuffle-tracking, there's all sorts of sequential tracking.
Lot's of things follow on from card-counting but you need the basis of card-counting to be able to do the other things that give you a bigger edge.
I was getting barrred everywhere. You don't even have to be winning to be barred. They know you're playing with an advantage. What happens is your name gets put around, your picture gets put around. I mean, I was barred out of the Vic at least four times. The last time we were marched out by the police...'
'..We went everywhere, everywhere there was a decent game. We would play
as high as we could possibly play. We had a very, very big edge. Card-counting, you may get 1-1 and a 0.5 per cent edge, but we were playing, when we had the big bets, with upwards of 20 per cent edge on the bet.
It was all about remembering sequences of cards...it's patterns of cards you're looking for. And to get this you have to have poor shuffling.
We were looking for casinos that weren't shuffling properly. Basically, in the eighties, that was all of them. None of them were shuffling properly. Now there's shuffling machines.'
'If you knew that the next card was an ace, you had a 52 per cent advantage. Even if it was going to be in the next three cards, then you played three boxes and you'd still got an edge.
'It's a good way of life when it's going well. But we kept getting barred just when we were really making money. The other problem was that I was losing a lot of it on the horses- not all of it, but a good proportion of it. Most gamblers, poker players, have some sort of leak, and horses have always been my leak, and a bit of sports betting as well. Cricket, I lasted on cricket for 3 weeks when spread betting was booming. I didn't know anything about cricket. Nothing. I did a fortune.
'I was trying to balance it with family life...'
'......My youngest daughter used to tell everyone I was a fireman!
'We then moved to the States. They were looking for people to do options trading on the Stock Exchange, who could manage risk around gambling, and that's basically all that options trading is, a form of gambling. So I went out there on '86 and had a fantastic year, brought everybody over, sold the house. Then came the crash of '87. I was making probably between $20,000-$30,000 a week that year, on the market, and we lost it all in a week. There was over half a million in the trading account and after the crash I was half a million the other way. So I had to get out of that.
'To give you and idea of the effect of the crash, before it I was paying $6,000 a month for the seat to trade. You had to rent the seat in the American Stock Exchange. After the crash, you could get the same seat for $200 a month. That shows you how much business had gone, just went out of the markets.
'So now we're broke, owed plenty of money. I spent eighteen months commuting to Atlantic City, gambling, but it was tough. So off we go to Vegas as a family....
'...we got a blackjack team going and I started winning, found some good games....
...We had something they had never seen before, the ace-tracking.
Then all of a sudden, we're barred everywhere. We had a lot of problems.
We got arrested. They thought we had computers, all sorts of things. We were just doing sequential tracking, but every time we were betting an ace was coming out and they were convinced we had some sort of computer device.
I was arrested a couple of times, never charged, but it became crazy.
I couldn't walk into a casino without somebody giving me a hard time. We were getting ground down.
'That is when I switched to poker....
And what's happened is that Jeff has become more and more a professional
poker player and less and less of a gambler. 'The gambler has gone. I would
say I'm a professional poker player now and probably a reasonably conservative one. I go about it professionally. I work an hourly rate. I keep records of every day....'
Taken from
Swimming with the Devilfish by Des Wilson (publ. Macmillan 2006)
Bloch well-versed in MIT blackjack tactics 
