The Great Casino Gamblers

In my view, it does not take a punter to win millions of dollars on casino games to be classed as a great casino gambler. By this viewpoint the only great gamblers around are those with tons of money who are rich, this cannot possibly be right. So what actually constitutes a great casino gambler and how can you define something as great from merely successful?

Well I have certain theories on this and most of it is based around the level of difficulty that the player had to overcome. For instance the great blackjack player Ken Uston was a great casino gambler. He set out to do something that had never been done before and created a team that took the casino industry for millions of dollars. His level of disguise to get around being detected was amazing in itself if you read his book Million Dollar Blackjack.

The act of card counting isn’t really that difficult today. The knowledge is so widely available that you can learn the very basics of it from many books and websites. But as usual the books and the blackjack articles never tell the full story. Because they don’t tell the full story, few people ever become good enough to beat the game over a period of time that is long enough to enable them to be able to make money and this applies to any form of casino gambling.

We first have what I call a Level 1 blackjack player, this is the player who is totally ignorant of any basic strategy or card counting system. They frequent the casinos in large numbers and make up around 99% of the players in the UK although this figure may be different now with the advent of the internet.

Then we move onto Level 2, these are the players who know decent basic strategy and can play against the house with only around -0.5% edge against them. It is still a rarity to see people who know accurate basic even today.

Level 3 blackjack players have taken the game seriously, they read books and know good basic strategy. They also know how to card count and have done it in actual casino conditions, they key thing here is that they may not be winning players or may actually get detected and prevented from playing the game.

These players represent the overwhelming number of players who can be classed as card counters. What they don’t realise is that there are several more levels above Level 3. The next level (Level 4) sees players starting to implement other critical factors like finding ways to escape detection and knowing how to find profitable game conditions not just on blackjack but on all online casino games.

These are rare birds indeed in the blackjack world. Players who also form teams could also be put into this category. Then we finally have Level 5 players, these are the people who not only know all of the fundamentals but who also know some of the more hidden skills of blackjack. Skills like shuffle tracking and have the ability to be able to execute this in real casino conditions.

Level 5 players also understand and know the other advantage play techniques as well that can get you an edge playing casino blackjack. In my mind, anyone who is a Level 4 or 5 is a great casino gambler. What category was Ken Uston? Well he was certainly a Level 4 player but I did not know enough about his operation to know if he qualified as a Level 5 as he may not have wrote about everything that he did.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson – author of Princes of Darkness : The World of High-stakes Blackjack