Tax Rate Question for Big Winners

[kewlJ]

and walk away with about $500,000/yr....

….I mean an above average card counter makes this amount. In fact, a documentary movie just came out last year where a counter travels around in his RV playing blackjack. I forget how much he made in a year, but it was well over $500,000. And this was a very boring movie. Only a card counter could watch it, which I did.

Bob, there are NO card counters making 500k a year. Maybe some blackjack "teams" employing much larger edges than card counting....I don't know that is out of my league. jbjb, want to weigh in?

Here are the facts about card counting: It is a very small edge. Used to be they talked about 1-2%, but that was 30 years ago with much better games and getting away with large spreads. Now a days with worse games and conditions, if you can get up towards 1% edge you are doing well. It takes aggressive play and getting out of at least some of the negative counts to even get there.

So a good card counter can make about 1/4 of his large bet an hour. So lets think about that. $500 max bet is a threshold where your play begins to get noticed in most places. So if you are keeping your max bet below that you are talking $100/hr, maybe $120/hr at best. Now fulltime play for a card counter is NOT 40 hours a week. It doesn't work that way. For every hour you actually play there is at least a 1 to 1 maybe as much as 1 to 2 ratio of time that it takes to play, when you add in all the travel to and from casinos, travel within the casino, meals, scouting, even keeping records at home. This means 20-25 hours a week is a lot of play. And it is going to take 40 to 60 hours total to get that 20 hours of play.

So lets do the math. 20 hours a week at $100 an hour. That is just about 100k. that is pretty much the ceiling and I know someone that has tried to show that upper 5 figures to touching 6 figures is the range and ceiling and the only way to do that is to share what you make and that person gets heavily criticized for it.

Ok, so what if you bumped up to a higher max bet than $500. Went through that first threshold and say max bet at $800. Could you make double what I just said? Well, no because you can't get in the same hours. You are going to have to move around more and try to stick to more crowded times so your bets won't stick out and that means fewer hands per hour. You increase your hourly rate but reduce the number of hours (and total number of rounds) played and it just going to work roughly the same.

Now lets talk about $500k a year. Yes, I know there are guys and I am not going to name them, associated with that one website, that claim they make this amount. They have even been on GWAE. I don't believe it. That site is about promoting their seminars and boot camps or whatever they are called and I just don't believe it. But lets do the math. Based on my number that a good card counter can make 1/4 his largest bet and hour, lets say a top wager of $2000. So they are making $500/hr. $500 x 20 hours a week is $10k a week = $500k a year.

THAT is what it would take! 20 hours a week at max bet of $2000 to make $500k a year. Well nobody and I mean nobody is getting 20 hours a week in at $2000 max bet. At best maybe you can get a few hour on a busy Friday and Saturday night. Not 20 hours a week. And nobody would be able to do that for 1 year let alone every year. This isn't the early 2000's when there were many new casinos who didn't know what they were looking at, you could slash and burn through the country for at least a year or two. Anyone trying this now, gets a couple months at best, even if they travel all over the country.

So that is it, Bob21. Almost any way you slice it, from a grinder getting in 20-25 hours at just under $500max bet, to playing double that stakes but less hours, to attempting to play that high stakes slash and burn from 20 years ago and getting 2-3 months in, it all adds up to just about the same 75k to 100k on a good year. That really is the ceiling for a fulltime card counter. You can focus on finding and playing the best games with deep penetration, exiting negative counts aggressively (as I do), and maybe if you are lucky exiting right into a better game or opportunity, but none of these things including higher counts () is going to change much. 75k to 100k is the ceiling if you are trying to achieve any kind of longevity. Otherwise slash and burn for a very short 3 or 4 months and then run bootcamps and seminars.