The rollercoaster that is professional card counting.

[Dan Druff]

I'll be honest.

The thing I hate about blackjack is that you can never play long enough to smooth out the variance.

You can get destroyed at the beginning of a session, and you know you're never coming close to breaking even, and in fact it will take a number of future sessions at average luck to get back to even.

It's soul crushing.

There is some voodoo-ism in your statement Dan Druff. I expected a little more from you. Your post sounds like something Alan would say.

I don't play poker Dan, so I can't make a comparison to that, but we both play VP (although I am getting a way from it). So in VP, you can have that same "get destroyed" early on. But you know if you keep playing, you will hit some big hands and eventually a royal or two and results will come in line with expectation. It is long-term thinking. Same with Blackjack. Why would you even make that kind of silly Mendelson-like statement?

Almost anything in the casino, short term results can reak havoc.

I'm not really talking about short term results.

I'm talking about how the control to play a longer session is taken out of your hands.

Let's say I found a 101% return VP machine and was playing it close to perfectly.

And let's say I was still running bad and losing (which is quite possible) for the first hour.

I can say, "Well, this is a 101% machine, so I'll just keep pressing through, and eventually it will probably turn around."

I can't with blackjack. All sessions have to be short. So you get off to a terrible start, ad you know you're not coming back from it.

It's very frustrating.