Quit Your Job & Play Blackjack?

Then s/he asks if it is possible to make enough money playing blackjack to support oneself. The writer finishes by saying that s/he is considering playing blackjack full time and wonders what I think of that idea. One such letter comes from a lawyer who is earning $40,000 a year. He is thinking of quitting law for a year, to play blackjack.

My answers to those letters also follow a pattern. I say yes, blackjack really can be beaten. I cannot predict the future myself. Prophets knowledgeable about the casino business have been predicting the demise of beatable blackjack since publication of Ed Thorp's Beat the Dealer in 1962, and what has happened instead is that blackjack has been one of the fastest-growing casino games. Sure some casinos that were easy to beat have toughened up their blackjack, but the opposite seems to happen just as frequently — other casinos liberalize their games and become easy places to win at blackjack.

And yes, you can make enough money at blackjack to support yourself, though it is not easy. You will have to patronize many different casinos because you will wear out your welcome if you stay too long at one. There are so many casinos that you will not run out of places to play. Of course your time is worth considerably more per hour at some casinos than at others.

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However, I think you are foolish to play blackjack full time, even for a year. You are probably aware of the problems of financial risk and boredom. A major problem you may not have considered is that as a full-time professional blackjack player you tend to cut yourself off from the world. You need social contacts to enjoy yourself, and you need business contacts to make money at something else besides blackjack. You do not make enough of either of those contacts while playing blackjack.

The big advantage to playing blackjack part time instead of full time is you can get by with playing only the very best games, the games that give you the highest expected win per hour.

So this is my advice to the lawyer and to anyone else who asks the same questions. Make no more than one blackjack trip a month, and play only the best games. Keep your job, keep up your social contacts, and otherwise lead a normal life away from blackjack. You will be happier and wealthier than if you were a full-time professional blackjack player.

Another reader says:
I am thinking of quitting my job and taking up playing blackjack as a profession. What advice do you have for me?
Do not quit your job. Everybody knows that to win money at blackjack you just count cards and use proper playing strategy; and that you must have an adequate bankroll. These things, however, are not the only requirements.

The most important requirement is that you must be very stable emotionally to be able to handle the monetary swings and the inevitable barrings. Do you ever feel any emotions? That is, do you ever feel anger or fear or love? My encyclopedia says, "A normal, healthy individual shows reasonable emotional responses to the situations of everyday life." If you are this sort of normal, healthy individual, you will never make it as a professional blackjack player. If you feel emotional responses to the situations of everyday life, you are too emotional to be a professional blackjack player. If it takes an extreme situation to provoke an emotional response in you, then you might be stable enough emotionally to survive as a professional blackjack player.

A professional blackjack player experiences big wins and big losses. Though you have an edge, your bankroll seems to go down fast and build up only slowly. Some losing streaks last for months. You must be able to cope with the losses that inevitably will occur. If you get upset when you lose, if losing makes you suspect that you were cheated, or if losing leads you to suspect that authors of blackjack books have explained playing strategy backwards, then you had better find another way to keep rice on your dining table.

I particularly enjoyed your advice to the fellow who wanted to quit his job and make a living playing black-jack. I had to laugh — more at myself than him — because that is more or less what I did.
I did not have a job to quit because I have always been stubbornly independent, but I did put all my eggs in one basket, which amounts to the same thing. Two years ago I was a normal, healthy, emotional individual; today I am an abnormal, unhealthy, cold-blooded winner.

I always set aside enough money to live on for three months. If I get behind, I play harder and longer each day to pull out. I find it very hard NOT to double my money in a three-month period. I have never lost in that amount of time. More often than not, I can double a given sum in less than one month. It would be difficult to give a long-term hourly win rate. But an average day is around four to six hours, and some of mat is spent looking for advantageous situations. When I get behind I become a marathon player. I usually do nothing but eat, sleep, and play blackjack until I get back what I have lost. When I am behind, I also play only in very good situations. I look for head-up, one-deck games sometimes, and sometimes I table-hop, playing only high counts.

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