No one's trying to make a living at gambling. But at the same time, if I lost money at it I wouldn't continue with it. I just somehow have managed to stay ahead, and the only dent they have made in my progress was when they banned (handicapped) my BJ play. To summarize, they got tired of my wild fluctuations between table min and table max at double deck BJ and that I was winning all of my table max bets including many double downs. Obviously the count alone could not have justified such luck, but after this went on for a number of days on yet another winning trip, the casino I was playing at, owned by Steve Wynn, stepped in and "handicapped" me - to a 3X spread.
"From now on if you bet $25. on a hand, you can't bet more than three times that, $75., on the next. No more $25. $2500. $25. $2500."
The limit at that time was $2500. This wasn't that long ago actually, about twenty or so years ago, but that was the limit at that casino at that time, $2500. This was when I was barely of legal age to gamble, but I had been playing blackjack and other card games since I was about eight years old, for fun, so I may have been relatively new to casinos but not new to playing cards.
After the BJ "ban" (handicap), I stayed away from Vegas entirely for almost two years, came back to the same casino, kept playing the same way, won for a matter of hours only, and got booted again from BJ.
Then I switched to Baccarat, and won even more at it than I had ever won at BJ. Eventually I became friends with the Director of Table Games who had set the handicap on me, who had since transferred to a different Wynn casino on the Strip, and he let me resume BJ play, and even laughed about how I liked to alternate between table min and max. But for whatever reason, I never really went back so hard to BJ, and have stuck with Baccarat. I just feel more comfortable betting big at Bacc.
I still play double deck BJ occasionally, but there is only one casino on the strip where they stand on soft 17 double deck BJ, so I pretty much play BJ at that casino only. There is one other casino, off the strip, where the double deck BJ is not only stand 17 but allows resplit aces and comes to a 0.14 house edge, but I am banned entirely from that casino - they fear me.
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