Blackjack Best Quotes

My great-great grandfather and I were best of friends, although we never met. Fire and shipwreck orphan us – 140 years apart. We escape to imagination to survive our fate. There, midst flights of whimsy we find one another. Companionship quells our loneliness. We create fables and tales, shields against a harsh existence. We must battle animals and humans of prey. Together, he, the future abolitionist-publisher James Thaddeus ‘Blackjack’ Fiction, and I vault from glory-laden adventures to tragedy and then to triumph. I am Raji Singh and this is my story.

Well," Eddie said, "I don't know how hard it'll seem to you, but it struck me as a toughie." Nor did he know the answer, since that section of Riddle-De-Dum! had been torn out, but he didn't think that made any difference; their knowing the answers hadn't been part of the ground-rules. "I SHALL HEAR AND ANSWER." "No sooner spoken than broken. What is it?" "SILENCE, A THING YOU KNOW LITTLE ABOUT, EDDIE OF NEW YORK," Blaine said with no pause at all, and Eddie felt his heart drop a little. There was no need to consult with the others; the answer was self-evident. And having it come back at him so quickly was the real bummer. Eddie never would have said so, but he had harbored the hope-almost a secret surety-of bringing Blaine down with a single riddle, ker-smash, all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put Blaine together again. The same secret surety, he supposed, that he had harbored every time he picked up a pair of dice in some sharpie's back-bedroom crap game, every time he called for a hit on seventeen while playing blackjack. That feeling that you couldn't go wrong because you were you, the best, the one and only. "Yeah," he said, sighing. "Silence, a thing I know little about. Thankee-sai, Blaine, you speak truth." "I HOPE YOU HAVE DISCOVERED SOMETHING WHICH WILL HELP YOU," Blaine said, and Eddie thought: You fucking mechanical liar. The complacent tone had returned to Blaine's voice, and Eddie found it of some passing interest that a machine could express such a range of emotion. Had the Great Old Ones built them in, or had Blaine created an emotional rainbow for himself at some point? A little dipolar pretty with which to pass the long decades and centuries? "DO YOU WISH ME TO GO AWAY AGAIN SO YOU MAY CONSULT?" "Yes," Roland said.

This is the best book ever written on its subject. Granted being the only such book takes a lot of the steam out of that accomplishment.

we also have a few bottles of sixteen-year Lagavulin we keep aside.” “You mean, like, actual scotch from Scotland?” “From the island of Islay, to be precise,” the waiter replied. “It’s twelve hundred a bottle.” “I want that.” “Yes sir, and four glasses.” The waiter tipped his head and headed off to the bar. “We’re going to play blackjack now,” Naomi said, laughing. Amos was pulling a stack of chips out of his tray and pushing them across the table to her. “Want to come?” The band in the next room stopped playing, and the background noise dropped to an almost tolerable level for a few seconds before someone started piping Muzak across the casino PA. “Guys, wait a few minutes,” Holden said. “I’ve bought a bottle of something nice, and I want to have one last toast before we go our separate ways for the night.” Amos looked impatient right up until the bottle arrived, and then spent several seconds cooing over the label. “Yeah, okay, this was worth waiting for.” Holden poured out a shot for each of them, then held his glass up. “To the best ship and crew anyone has ever had the privilege of serving with, and to getting paid.” “To getting paid!” Amos echoed, and then the shots disappeared

We had special moves like Pretty Poisons, Sleepy Eyes, Shark Attacks, and Biggie Fries; Bottle Caps, Bus Stops, Double Touches, and Bunny Hops; Death Rallies, Dot-to-dots, Best Friendsies, and Mystery Spots; Lumberjacks, Passbacks, Blackjacks, and Hackysacks. It sounds more like something out of a Dr. Seuss book rather than a sport.

If I lose the best out of three, I’ll go to Magie Noire with you.” I pause for effect, slanting my head to the onyx-haired gentleman at the table. “And Maddox.” “And me.” Jax raises his hand. “That’s how we roll.” “Fine, Magic Jax. And you,” I allow. His pierced lips flourish into a boyish grin. “You’re on, pretty lady,” Cash says, shuffling the cards. “Three rounds of blackjack to determine the winner.

The Baldwin strategy was the best way to play the game when nothing was known about which cards had already been played. Their analysis was for a single deck because that was the only version played in Nevada at the time. The Baldwin group also showed that the advice of the reigning gambling experts was poor, unnecessarily giving the casinos an extra 2 percent advantage. Any strategy table for blackjack must tell the player how to act for each case that can arise from the ten possible values of the dealer’s upcard versus each of the fifty-five different pairs of cards that can be dealt to the player. To find the best way for the player to manage his cards in each of these 550 different situations, you need to calculate all the possible ways subsequent cards can be dealt and the payoffs that result. There may be thousands, even millions of ways each hand can play out. Do this for each of the 550 situations and the computations just for the complete deck become enormous. If you are dealt a pair, the strategy table must tell you whether or not to split it. The next decision is whether or not to double down, which is to double your bet and draw exactly one card to the first two cards of a hand. Your final decision is whether to draw more cards or to stop (“stand”). Once I had figured out a winning strategy, I planned to condense these myriad decisions onto tiny pictorial cards, just as I had with the Baldwin strategy. This would allow me to visualize patterns, making it much easier to recall what to do in each of the 550 possible cases.

I could see from the beginning how our wealth could grow. But when I told friends and colleagues what I was up to, Vivian was almost the only one who got it, despite what I had already done in gambling. Although she wasn’t a scientist or mathematician, she shared two qualities with the best of them: She asked the right questions, and she grasped the essentials. She had spent hours helping me film spinning roulette balls so I could make a machine to predict which number would come up, just as she had dealt thousands of blackjack hands so I could practice counting cards. And she helped me edit my books about gambling and the stock market and negotiate the contracts.

Bill Walden and I proved what we called the Fundamental Theorem of Card Counting, which says, in a precise mathematical way, that the advantage from card counting becomes better as more cards are seen. This means the best situations come toward the end. We found that even those were tiny and rare. The reason baccarat does not have enough opportunities is because the impact of removing one card from the pack in baccarat is about one-ninth what it is in blackjack, so the effect on the house edge is correspondingly smaller. Also, the house edge to be overcome is greater, being more than 1 percent.

I never wavered from the mission: getting the best possible number and price on every game. And no matter the obstacles, via trial and error, I became the best in the world at finding that number and concealing the source. The business of sports betting might seem like quantum physics to the general public. At the highest level, it is closer to psychological warfare between bettor and bookmaker—cat and mouse, hunter and prey. The posted line is just a way to trigger the game. Some cynics assume that my goal was to put every bookie out of business—but nothing could be further from the truth. Bookmakers strive for balance. They never want to tilt too far on one side of the action. Bookies breathe easiest in the middle, taking equal money and profiting off the 10 percent juice. If a bookie was destroyed, it meant he either closed his shop or reduced his limits. Neither scenario did me any good. My goal was to keep the bookmakers in business and expand their limits. This served to increase the size of the market, which meant more potential profit for me. The smartest bookies had solved this riddle and wanted to do business with me directly. They wanted to know straight from the horse’s mouth what games I liked. If they were smart, they took my information and profited by shading their line and forcing customers to the other side, extending limits. A smart bookmaker knows there will be winners and losers. They also understand that there is no business if there are no winners. Translated: the smartest bookmakers are open to all comers—just like baccarat, blackjack, and craps. The brightest bookmakers know they can use smart money for their own benefit. Early in my career, the major-league bookmakers were Bob Martin, Johnny Quinn, Gene Maday, and Scotty Schettler. Following in their footsteps are Nick Bogdanovich, Jimmy Vaccaro, Richie Baccellieri, Matt Metcalf, and Chris Andrews. They are grand masters of the art. They know how to book. How smart are they? Well, Nick ran the William Hill U.S. sportsbook operation and then oversaw Caesars Sports trading for nearly a decade before being hired as sportsbook manager at Circa. Jimmy is the senior linemaker at the sports-betting network VSiN and vice president of sports marketing at the South Point Hotel, Casino & Spa. Richie B., who ran the counter at the MGM, Caesars, and the Palms, now works as the director of product development at Circa alongside Nick. Chris Andrews, legendary oddsmaker Jack “Pittsburgh Jack” Franzi’s nephew, is the sportsbook director and Jimmy’s sidekick at the South Point, owned and operated by Michael Gaughan, another Las Vegas legend. In 1992, Jack Binion was Nick Bogdanovich’s boss at the Horseshoe. I could bet $25,000 on a game of college football at eight o’clock Monday morning, and $50,000 on a pro football game.