I felt a bit intimidated playing blackjack for the first time in a real live casino. $400 would have been a more adequate bankroll for that limit, but at the time I didn’t want to risk $400. Plus they offered a $2 minimum, so my $40 had a chance of lasting.
That turned out to be the Barbary Coast on the Strip (across the street from Caesar’s Palace), which had a nice double-deck game with liberal rules (the fewer the decks, the better for the player, all else being equal). Since there are many variations on blackjack rules, I scoped out the nearby casinos to find one that had the best player-favorable conditions.
My friends and I stayed at the Aladdin Hotel (before it was demolished and rebuilt). Then I was off to Vegas to try my luck with a whopping $40 of gambling money. It took a heck of a lot of practice and was tedious to learn, but I eventually felt comfortable with it. So I bought a book on blackjack, learned the rules of the game, memorized the basic strategy, and then studied a simple +/- card counting system.
I quickly learned that most of the casino games were skewed to give the house an advantage - how unfair is that? - but blackjack was supposedly beatable if you learned a technique known as card counting. I decided to read up on some of the casino games before I went, so I could be prepared. When I was 21 years old and living in Los Angeles, some friends and I decided to take a weekend trip to Las Vegas, my first trip there as an adult. This part simply provides some background info for the curious. Having played a fair amount of blackjack (I learned card counting when I was 21), I’ve noticed some interesting patterns in the way people play the game that seem to reflect larger life patterns.įeel free to skip ahead to the “Interesting Observations” section if you just want to read the lessons.
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