| But if your only poker experience is your weekly Thursday night outing, and most games feature wild cards or bizarre poker variants where the average winning hand is four of a kind, stay out of big time poker tournaments until you have some experience. I suspect that any beefsteak mine steak would need quite a bit of seasoning, and so do you. So we now have to expand Rule #3. It's still important—critically important—to identify situations where you're a big underdog, and to swim away before the sharks can gobble you up. But we need a codicil: If you do spot a fish in the game, don't wander too far from shore trying to catch him. If you wade in too deep, you just might find one or more of the other sharks taking a bite out of your wallet, your pride, or both. (By the way, if you spotted the fish-pun in "codicil," you're either brilliant or you're reading this article WAY too slowly.) If you do find a shark bite-sized hole in your wallet or pride, don't go home angry. Go home and figure out what went wrong. After all, Gambling Rule #1 is "If you can't (or won't) be honest with yourself, sooner or later your gambling is going to lead to trouble." I made a mistake today; that honest self-appraisal will probably mean I won't make this particular mistake again. If you can keep your mind open to learning from your mistakes, you'll usually find The Big Casting Director in the Sky selecting you to play roles as a fisherman, rather than as a fish. With the lesson learned, the next time you run into your local version of the Worst Player in the World, you'll know just what to do, and well you should. Unlike blind dates with brilliant, heartful supermodels, good fishing opportunities come along all the time. "Oh yeah?" he said (thank goodness we didn’t agree to a battle of wits—how could I have stood up under such a withering display?), "I didn’t think so." Meaning he didn’t think I was brave enough to fight him. I laughed again, the other folks in my section laughed with me, and Musclehead decided to move on. What the heck happened here? Can you figure it out? It’s pretty easy, actually. Most of the people who go to Vegas are losing, and given the high IQ that Musclehead was displaying, it’s obvious he wasn’t a card counter or poker pro. He was probably in the middle of losing a small fortune, in a mean mood, and since his efforts at taking it out on the casino weren’t working, he was looking for another target. So there’s the lesson. When you’re in Vegas, there are all sorts of things you need to be careful about, and now we have another one: losing players. With the exception of inner-city ghettos, I doubt you’ll ever find a place with a higher percentage of angry, upset people walking around than Las Vegas. The simplest thing can set them off, because the casino has been kicking them around, and they’re looking for someone to kick back. Don’t give them a reason, and if you do, make sure you do it in a secure area. Musclehead wasn’t going to try anything in the middle of Caesars, with a ton of witnesses and all sorts of security just seconds away. In a parking lot, in the middle of a street, it almost certainly would have been a different story. And while part of me would have enjoyed stuffing his feet even further into his mouth than he already had them, who’s to say he wasn’t carrying a knife, a gun, or had two nasty friends lurking nearby. That kind of trouble you don’t need on your gambling vacation. Feel sorry for them, laugh at them (out loud if the area is secure), but don’t sink to their level. Save your teeth and your pretty smile for your arrival back home, when you tell people about your winning trip. I stuck around for a little while to see if my surmise about house suspicions was correct. Sure enough, the next time the first round brought about a favorable count, the cards were re-shuffled. Since I was just having fun, trying a little experiment, and since I didn’t want to ruin the game for the recreational non-counters, I left. No big surprise, but it was strangely fulfilling to see that my old paranoia had a factual basis. Like they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t necessarily mean someone isn’t out to get you. So, for you recreational blackjack players out there, understand that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Be careful about wishing for one-deck blackjack action, because if you get it, you might find yourself in a much less favorable game than that four-decker right next door. As long as the shuffle point stays the same, your one-deck game is probably the place to play. But if you find that sometimes the dealer shuffles early, and sometimes late, your one deck game is no bargain. |
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