Hold'em Vs. Blackjack

[Cincy Peach]

Having been blackjack player for years, I just converted to poker a few months ago. So, I feel qualified to give you a complete answer . . .

Blackjack is relatively easy to learn. Card counting is not really all that complicated and with practice you will be able to count cards, ogle the cocktail waitress, and keep up a banter with the dealer. You will also get to experience massive swings in your bankroll, because the most you will get is about a 1% edge. This means that you will need a bankroll of about 100 times your large bet, minimum several thousand dollars. Like poker you can't bet effectively at BJ if you bet fearfully.

You will note that all my BJ observations are based on live casino play. Simply put, I don't trust online blackjack. It is well known that cheating software exists, normal software with a 'cheat mode' exists, and (most important) an online casino has a motivation to cheat that an online poker room does not. If you choose to ignore this peril and play online anyway, I suggest you visit the wizardofodds.com and review his blackjack section and his blacklist of online casinos. Another valuble resource online is a blackjack site similer to this, called Greenchip. It is hosted by Sanford Wong, who is to the blackjack community what Sklansky et el are to the poker world.

The achilles heal of BJ is the need to spread bets (small most of the time, huge in rare +EV situations). This makes it obvious that you are counting if someone knows what to look for and cares to watch. Luckily, a shocking number of pit critters seem genuinly clueless. I think they get an hour or two of 'how to spot a counter' in their pit critter training class, and then they forget it. If and when you spread to a big bet and happen to hit hard, you will see it in their eyes as they try to remember the warning signes of cardcounting.

Now, I speak from the perspective of Midwest casinos, not Vegas. LV not only has tougher pits, it is almost completely overrun by 6:5 blackjack, which is unbeatable.

Like poker there are a zillion blackjack books. Be warned, many of the are just flat-out wrong, including such shockingly false logic and math that it is amazing that they got published. I recommend Professional Blackjack by Wong, and the World's Greatest Blackjack book, by Humble & Cooper. If you are considering which counting system to use, I would suggest -

If you have a 10K bankroll and the ability to bet $100 per hand in positive EV situations, KO is an easy and effective counting meathod. There is a book called KO blackjack that teaches this.

If on the other hand, you have a smaller BR and are going to try to make do with something like a $5-$30 bet spread, I suggest Hi-Opt 1, which is found in Humble & Coopers' book. Hi-Opt 1 has a higher degree of playing efficiency (i.e., how to play hands) than most systems, and still has high betting efficiency.

Besides the need for a large BR, the other negatives to blackjack are that it seems to be in it's decline as a beatable game (If 6:5 BJ spreads card counting will be officially dead.), and -

as a blackjack player, you have to act stupid. Many counters enjoy the cat and mouse game with the casino and the subterfuge of blending with the ploppies, but I find it frustrating. If you are at all a social creature with any amount of ego, you will find it trying to spend hour and hour acting like a moron. {ploppy: "that was a bad double, you sure got lucky!" Counter, stifling the urge to explain counting: " . . . yeah, i dunno, just had a feeling . . ."

Poker, I was surprised to learn, is actually more social, because there is no need to act like a bafoon. (On ocassion I have seen a poker player act like a bafoon, and have wondered if it was an act to generate action - but no, they have always turned out to be actual bafoons.)

The downside of poker is that (at least for me) it has a much longer learning curve. Whereas I was able to learn counting and play profitable BJ quickly, I have endured a long learning process with poker. I recommend starting at a site like Pokerstars that has games you can play for bets like two cents or five cents. Expect to lose at first. After several months of playing 20-30 hours per week mostly online, I am only now slightly profitable.

Blackjack is good training for poker, because successful blackjack depends on the discipline to do the mathmatically correct play even when it is scary or counterintuitive. I think that lack of discipline in this regard is the primary cause of losing at blackjack and poker.

Another lesson I learned the hard way is to avoid tournaments if you want to make money. what is your objective? If you want to a high chance to make a moderate amount of money, play a regular game. If you want a slim chance to make big payday (and drain your BR until you do) play tournaments.

Hope some of this might be helpful & good luck.

[memphis57]

Well, everybody is saying poker and I have to agree with the overall conclusion, but I think there is one important factor that nobody has mentioned. In pure odds plays like Card-Counting and Advantage-Video-Poker, you can determine in advance and with certainty whether it is a +EV game. When you make this determination, provided you are correct and that you stick to the mathematical game plan, you can be certain you will come out ahead once the probability factor normalizes (i.e., you play enough hands). There is no such certainty in poker. In poker, once the odds normalize, you find out if your skill level is higher than your opponents.

Now, in today's environment, poker appears to be by far the most profitable game because the average skill level of the easily available opponents is so low. But if that ever changes, you won't know until it has been proved to you by busting your bankroll. In the plus EV games, you know as soon as you see the rule change come through that drops the EV into the negative, and thus you can quit with bankroll intact.

But I'm not preaching doom. I think live poker will have a long run at the top of the heap.

[Willluck]

Is KO anything like Omega 2 advanced?
It's funny, because I met Bryce Carlson at a poker table and he reccomended his book BJ for blood and told me BJ was much more profitable than poker.

[Cincy Peach]

KO is a single level unbalanced system, meaning that the cards all have a value of one or neg one (or zero), and there are more negetives than positives. I think - it's been a few years - that 2 thru 6 are +1 and tens and aces are -1, so that if you count a deck down you end up at -4. It's a pretty simple system. Omega, I am not familier with, sorry.

[Brash620]

The biggest thing about card counting is that once you can learn how to do it, and do it right, you can beat the game at any level. This also means that you can not beat the game until you learn. However with poker at the lower level if you can understand the basic principles and value bet every opprotunity you should be able to turn over some kind of profit.

[driller]

I would like to echo what CincyPeach said below. Most of his comments are right on.

I counted cards, after a fashion for years, and had some success. (I have a first edition of Edward Thorp's Beat the Dealer which was the original book on how to count and was published in the 60's).

Many of the success stories you hear about are fiction, but the ones that are true involve in addition to counting, shuffle tracking and team play.

While it's true that 6:5 single deck blackjack is becoming widespread, there are many 6 deck shoes with good rules and double deck shoes with good rules, in Las Vegas anyway. Also there are some casinos in Louisiana with good rules at higher limits. Many of the popular counting systems (like KO) are effective against a shoe, and you can usually get away with a larger spread against a shoe.

Stanford Wong's site is at bj21.com. The greenchip portion requires registration and $12.50 per quarter. Just as useful is Current Blackjack News, which gives monthly updates on playing conditions at every casino of consequence in the USA. It costs $25 per quarter. I agree with CP that Wong is to blackjack what Sklansky is to poker.

This isn't exactly an unbiased site to be asking which is best, but bj21 now has a poker section and many of those guys are converting to poker for all the reasons mentioned in the various posts here.

I converted because of online play (I would not play online bj for obvious reasons), because of all the cat and mouse bs with the casinos, and because ultimately poker is more +EV with the same effort to understand and learn the game.

If you are really new to bj and counting, unless you are truly gifted, it will take you a long time to get to that 1% advantage. Don't believe anything that says you can achieve more than that in the real world without shuffle tracking and team play.

[MicroBob]

Didn't read all the responses but they seem to be pretty correct.

I've done both.
I find some of the math behind the BJ card-counting interesting (Peter Griffin's Theory of Blackjack).

I have been playing online-poker as my sole source of income for 1 year.
You can't do that with blackjack (counting-cards is useless in online-blackjack because they shuffle after every hand...you can take advantage of all the bonuses the different places offer though but i don't even bother with that).


So...in terms of the long-run....it is VERY possible to earn a living playing online-poker (and I expect will continue to stay that way for at least a few years....beyond that we might have Nazi's take over the U.S. and make it illegal for all we know so I refuse to predict).


Making a living counting-cards at live casinos would be VERY difficult. I certainly wouldn't want to try it in today's BJ environment.

I also find poker more enjoyable anyway.

Also - you will never get thrown out of a casino for playing correct poker (assuming you don't get drunk and mis-behave or something).

Just sitting there and CORRECTLY counting-cards and spreading your bets can get you tossed regardless of the fact that you are abiding by THEIR rules.
In Nevada they can just decide that you are 'too good' for their games. If they don't want you to play there because they think you have the advantage then they will ask you to leave or bar you from playing blackjack there.

This doesn't happen in poker because you are taking money from the other players...not the casino.
EVERYONE is still paying the rake so the poker-room doesn't have as much interest in who is actually winning.



FWIW - to address something that Blarg mentioned. Not ALL games are paying 6:5 for blackjack. Just more and more of the single-deck games are. There are still plenty of 3:2 pay-out shoe games out there.

[The Monk]

Poker by far will be the easiest to make money in, especially with the new influx of players.
Having said that you can still make a buck at blackjack. I would just target 2 deck games with the most favorable rules after you learn a simple +- count system and keep a side count of aces. The Peter Griffin book will show you the best count systems for that. Why I no longer target a single deck game is obvious-99% are ruined with crazy rules or a payout of 6:5 for blackjack.
Surpringly I still find a couple 2 deck games with very good penetration on my trips to Vegas even though many write just the opposite. Maybe they don't want a good thing ruined? If the 2 deckers go by the way side of the 1 deck game I will stop playing blackjack except for tournaments.

[PilotMatt]

What about the comps? Would it be worth learning to play a couple of hours a day to earn free rooms/tickets/meals, using the rest of the time playing poker?
Personally, I am usually in vegas at least every other month, which would give me a chanse to play quite a bit

Matt

[PokerCat69]

I was a card counter but made the switch to poker.
If you could sit at a BJ table ALL day long and play blackjack then obviously you would make huge amounts of cash, but you simply can't do that. Casinos watch for counters, and after awhile they figure out what your doing and give you the boot. Unless of course you only play short sessions. If you play short sessions, and rotate between casnos (meaning you live in Vegas) you probably won't be caught, but you won't make alot of money either because your sessions are short.
Also the casinos worldwide are slowly changing the BJ rules to crap. 6:5 BJ payouts and CSM are some.
The bankroll requirements for BJ are HUGE, it is recommended to have enough cash to cover 100 large bets, and you should use a 1-12 bet spread. For example: Betting $5-$60 requires a $6000 roll.
I would ONLY recommended blackjack if you have a large bankroll of at least $50,000 - $100,000.
If your max bet was $1000, you would average $10/hand with the bet out.
Basically the days of blackjack are over.
Poker requires a much smaller bankroll, you can play as many hours as you want (both online or real) casinos don't care your not taking their money.