This was amazing. Hey VL, is this guy a relative of yours?
I think I won around $80 on Blackjack one time in Central city. Whohoooo!
ATLANTIC CITY - He took Caesars for more than $4 million, burned Borgata for about $5 million and then topped it off by beating Tropicana out of $5.8 million.
For Don Johnson, it was an incredible streak of good luck at the Atlantic City blackjack tables.
He confirmed in two interviews with The Press of Atlantic City that he is the blackjack player who has been single-handedly scorching the casino industry in the past six months.
If you want to be, press one. If you want not to be, press 2
Republicans are red, democrats are blue, neither of them, gives a flip about you.
The story doesn't really give enough information to figure out what this guy is doing.
Casinos watch you like a hawk, especially if you bet big and are winning. If you count cards, they'll figure it out eventually. In the past I counted cards and was tossed from a couple of Nevada casinos after just winning $100-$200 (and I didn't bet big either). Then again, maybe I wasn't that good at it. But that's one reason people switched to playing with teams in the 90's. The individual counters were not making it much any more once the casinos learned what to watch for.
This guy admits he's had his share of losses too, but he won't disclose it. I just don't see any casino letting you bet $100K a hand, unless they are convinced you are not a very good player. The guy does run a gambling related company, so maybe he had some optical recognition card counting software running on an Ipod or something with him while playing? But I still think the casinos would eventually figure it out based on how you vary your bets depending on the cards played.
The big thing mentioned in the article was that some casinos would forgive 20% of his gambling losses. That makes no sense to me. If you just play correct basic blackjack strategy, the casino only has about a .5% advantage (depending on the rules). You don't even have to count cards. So if they forgive 20% of your losses, how can you lose over time? All I can think of is that he deliberately played terrible a few times and took a big loss to convince the casino he didn't know what he was doing. Then, if he got an offer to forgive 20% of losses, he suddenly played correctly? Anyway, I've never heard of such an offer. Maybe it was after the fact, once you lost over $1 million?
Anyway, that sounds like the kind of story casinos love to have reported. Make people think they can win big in the long term. It's just not that simple.
