Originally Posted by
kewlJ
You want to discuss something AP wise, here I have something. It probably belongs in the WoV thread but I am going to stick it right here.
A couple - 3 years, before covid so maybe 3 years, my brother and I were playing a side bet blackjack game in Colorado that someone had shared with us. They were allowing players to place a side bet up to the amount of their regular bet, which when placed at the right strategic times, made the game very profitable. So after a couple weeks of camping out in crappy motels in Colorado and more and more AP's joining the hit parade, Shackleford revealed the play at WoV and how to beat it, complete with all the math, the way he does. Within like 2 days the sidebet limits were reduced to 25% of your main bet, which all but erased the profit margin. It was just barely +EV. I left, my brother stayed for another few days.
I was pretty pissed at Shackleford, but didn't make a big deal of it. He has done this type of thing before. Well this week he did the exact same thing. I had just got wind of this play and my brother and I were discussing if we wanted to spend some time in Colorado when, Shackleford revealed the play and all the math....again! While it didn't effect me this time as far as yanking a play out from under us, I bet it effected some playing. Why does he do this shit? and why does he get a pass from the AP community?
Take a few seconds to think about it, and the answer presents itself. When people do this stuff (as Stanford Wong did with teaser ranges most professionals knew about, but the public did not), it's for a variation of one of the following reasons:
1) They get more value out of the exposing of the play than not exposing it. That value can be non-material value, such as reputation, vanity, more views, or it can be directly material as in garnering side contracts with casinos as a consultant.
2) They treat the entire AP game as some competition they want to "win." If they aren't exploiting a play and other people are, they expose it.
3) They lack the funding to directly exploit various plays, although they are aware of them. A combination of reputation-seeking, vanity, and treating other APs as competition leads them to expose the plays.
4) They may have funding, but they lack the psychological makeup, discipline, and possibly physical abilities to handle certain plays effectively. Or overall they are actually failed APs because they have the Fred Flintstone degenerate gambling thing going on. So they act as if they are APs in a sense, but they know they really are not, and they expose the plays.
I mean, really, do you see Michael Shackleford as an effective AP doing almost anything? That Burning Man style of persona is usually going to get you squashed in the long run. If you don't have some streetwise sixth sense, you're going to go down no matter your math skills.