They are an interesting bunch. I know the ring-leader.

Heard them on NPR, interesting group of folks

The whole thing is really good

OK Enjoy, it's story time.

The leader is a guy named Ben Crawford who I got to know through mountaineering. He is hilariously creative with his exploits (and this is just one of his adventures). Look at some of his disguises he used in casinos after he had to start hiding. They tell you everything.... scroll halfway down:

http://bit.ly/1lm1G35

also, look at his Christmas card from a few years back. Still makes me laugh:

http://bit.ly/1hzE4TD

That is amazing, thank you.

Nowadays the whole point is to stop them before they've made enough money to actually hurt the casino. This guy was being blatant to get their attention - CCTV + computer maps how hot a shoe is, and tracks the betting. Once it crosses a certain confidence threshold they call down to the pit boss to tell them to pull the plug. Why break fingers when you can legally tell them to stop playing?

Dude must have been working hard to stick out - never seen a pit boss take an interest in someone before sitting down, or at least not at a table with a minimum.

Also, serious card counting operations are usually more elaborate than this. In "Bringing Down the House", for example, the MIT card counting team used a bunch of sentry players who just bet the minimum the whole time. There were one or two people who would get a signal from a sentry that the deck was hot, sit down for a few hands and bet a lot, then get up and leave. Nowadays I'm pretty sure casinos can catch that pretty easily, too.

They don't need to figure it out. Your bet sizing changes when the deck is rich in tens+, so when you start betting big after betting small its obvious. The only time you can card count without getting spotted is when the casino is packed for a big event.

See, gambling on cards has always bored me. I love the ponies. Then again, I just gamble a few bucks at a time and consider it the price of admission rather than an investment.

I'm kinda amazed they weren't doing that automatically, except for some extra scrutiny. Card counting monitoring a computerized game is trivial - most of it is correlating shoe value to player bets and picking your p value since card counting is more about betting amounts than changes in play style. Alternately a test on losing versus winning hand bet value can reveal the same thing. Seems silly to have a person doing basic card counting when a computer does it perfectly.

This was back when the whole Offshore Online Gambling thing was taking off (above I wrote "about 10 years ago", but it's actually more like twenty + years ago). Bunch of mobsters came down to Costa Rica and paid local talent some (relatively) very low prices to custom design the software for them, so these kids with very little gambling experience started designing these platforms to run the games on, but there was no such system in place to pick these individuals out automatically. Hence a couple of us got trained on how to do it.
Most of these companies don't exist anymore; the one I worked for certainly doesn't: one day the staff arrived at the office and the building was empty. Fortunately I had left the ship some time before after the Manager refused to pay me some benefits I was legally entitled to.
I'm sure those automatic systems are well in place for the few surviving online gambling companies out there, although I really haven't had much connection to the business in a long time.

Sorry, 15-17 years ago, I'm retarded tonight and math is hard. BUT I'M A CARD COUNTER!

Gambling isn't a rush for me either, that's why I mug strangers.

Professional gamblers don't care about one session. They are rolled for enough sessions to survive the swings and they grind out a living at whatever game they have an edge in.

My dad took the local casinos for an extra paycheque every month. He kept all of his gambling money in a separate account and never dipped into the family account. We would also go to the local fair (a big one) and he would clean up at the blackjack booths. He would pay for the day plus a couple hundred extra. Once he was up, he just walked away.

There are way more degenerates than pros, of course.

Well yeah. Gambling is so boring that the only way I saw it being worth bothering with was if you had a system to sit down and grind out some liveable scratch like it was a second job, because you know it was about as fun as a second job.