Why do card counters sleep in their cars?
/For the last few months I’ve been casually following up on my long-time interest in learning to play blackjack. I’ve now sunk about 100 hours into learning more about blackjack and casino “advantage play” in general, including listening to podcasts, reading forums, and yes, playing for real money in one of our local casinos. While it’s safe to say the casino still has a healthy advantage over me, what has struck me the most dipping my toes into the advantage play community is just how much it resembles the one I’ve been immersed in for well over a decade now: travel hacking.
Introduction to card counting
For those unfamiliar with blackjack advantage play, it consists of three largely unrelated components:
The ability to master “basic strategy.” For every set of blackjack rules, each hand of blackjack has a corresponding ideal move that offer the highest expected value to the player. This move does not always increase your chances of winning the hand; sometimes the move with the highest expected value is to surrender your hand and half your bet, guaranteeing your defeat! Playing perfect basic strategy reduces the house edge in most blackjack rulesets to 1% or less.
The ability to accurately count cards. There are a number of different card counting techniques with various advantages and disadvantages, but they all share the requirement that you update a running count as the dealer reveals each card. The ability to count cards has no effect on your odds of winning any given hand.
The ability to make the necessary moves to take advantage of perfect card counting. The most important of these is changing the size and number of your bets depending on your running count.
Note that these three skills are essentially unrelated. Learning basic strategy is a form of pattern recognition. While there are technically 310 different combinations of dealer and player hands that must be memorized to play perfect basic strategy, these fall into just 6-12 “patterns” (depending on how you find it easiest to memorize them). It probably took me 10-15 hours practicing with the “Blackjack101” iPhone app to be able to consistently play perfect basic strategy. If you practice using an app, note that you should find out the most common ruleset at your local casinos in order to make sure you’re getting the most practice on the ruleset you use the most. Different tables at the same casino can also have different rulesets.
Counting cards is a completely different skill, since there are no patterns in the order of cards dealt from a well-shuffled deck. The only way to learn to count cards is through hundreds or thousands of hours of practice. Depending on how you’re wired, you may find it easy or hard, relaxing or irritating, but if you cannot count cards perfectly every time then you cannot play blackjack with an advantage.
Finally, you must be able to adhere to a system of play that maximizes the amount of money at stake when the deck is rich with cards that benefit the player and minimizes the player’s losses when the odds are in the casino’s favor. This is not a matter of math or intellect at all: the knowledge of the correct bet flows mechanically from the method of card counting employed. But the ability to act on that knowledge is a matter of character and circumstance.
Advantage play and travel hacking
Using this framework, the parallels to travel hacking are obvious.
Travel hacking requires you to learn and access with relative ease the details of, if not the entire loyalty universe, then at least the programs that are or might be relevant to you. For a casual US travel hacker, that means at least 4 or 5 airline loyalty programs, one or two hotel programs, and a bank rewards program. Serious travel hackers learn much more, including about obscure and foreign loyalty programs.
A completely unrelated skill is learning and monitoring the current state of travel hacking techniques. Here, just as in card counting, accuracy is absolutely essential, since older techniques are constantly dying while new ones emerge. There’s no point applying for a signup bonus that expired last week, or expecting bonus grocery store rewards for a promotion that starts next Friday. Just as the skill of card counting atrophies without constant practice, returning to travel hacking after a long break requires refamiliarizing yourself with the current state of play.
Finally, perfect knowledge of loyalty programs and travel hacking techniques is useless without the ability to make the moves necessary to take advantage of them.
Most people cannot play blackjack with an advantage or succeed at travel hacking
A common lie, the motives behind which I’ll return to shortly, is that “anyone can win at blackjack” or that “anyone can be a travel hacker” (the latter claim normally safely couched by affiliate bloggers as “anyone can save money on travel” or something equally mealy-mouthed).
This is, of course, false.
Most people can’t play perfect basic strategy or memorize a dozen airline sweet spots because it is boring and has no meaningful connection to their everyday life.
Most people can’t count cards or decide whether a potential manufactured spend technique is worthwhile because it requires tedious and unfamiliar calculations.
Most people can’t make large bets when the deck is stacked in their favor or go big when a one-of-a-kind travel hacking opportunity presents itself because they are loss-averse, bet too low and forego lucrative plays, locking in their losses while passing up the chance to win correspondingly big.
Successful card counters and travel hackers don’t last long
What struck me most while learning about the card counting community and the available resources is that the biggest voices for card counting don’t seem to actually do it very much.
The typical progression is that someone discovers card counting, has a rough introductory period full of endearing anecdotes, then goes on a winning streak of 6-48 months (the length is immaterial). After that, they start Youtube channels, record podcasts, write books, and launch websites to sell card counting content and merchandise.
This is the same progression we see in travel hacking. Someone discovers travel hacking, has a few big scores, gets involved in the community, then they launch a blog, a podcast, a Youtube channel, and an affiliate relationship with the credit card companies.
There are two major reasons for this. First, the money is better, certainly on an hourly basis. Most travel hacking techniques require at least some time and attention to implement on an ongoing basis. Even simple online techniques require you to sit down at your computer and actually click the necessary buttons to trigger your payout each time. Writing a blog post full of credit card affiliate links, on the other hand, creates a kind of passive, semi-permanent money-generating asset as new readers discover the post and click through to your payday.
The second reason is that most people, even skilled, experienced people, don’t seem to enjoy it very much. For a lot of card counters and travel hackers, actually putting their knowledge to work seems like an unfortunate chore at worst or a dead-end job at best. “Running a business” packaging bite-sized tips on Tik Tok while burnishing your reputation as a Respected Elder must seem like bliss by comparison.
Why do card counters sleep in their cars?
One of the questions posed in the original “Freakonomics” book was “Why do drug dealers still live with their mothers?” The answer they arrive at is that despite handling enormous amounts of money, most individual drug dealers make poverty wages, so they live with their mothers, like many people who don’t make any money and are on speaking terms with their parents do.
What you realize listening to professional card counters is that they live in a kind of self-inflicted misery, driven in large part by the fear of “giving away their edge.” This often takes the ironic form of ascetisism. A common boast is that during a gambling trip a player will play for 20 hours straight every day. When they travel in teams, advantage players will bunk up in a single hotel room like a high school marching band to save on rooms. One player described sleeping in his (heated and air -conditioned) Tesla over the summer as he drove from casino to casino counting cards.
Importantly, this behavior is not driven by anything inherent to the principles of blackjack advantage play. In blackjack (if the dealer is using a “shoe,” or box of cards that are shuffled only once and then dealt out in order), each shoe is a new randomly ordered sample of cards, so the player’s result from the current shoe cannot have any effect on the probability of winning the next one. That means the player’s advantage, if any, is the same regardless of the number of shoes played. In other words, the player can stop at any time without affecting in any way the expected value of the hours they do play.
And yet, people who claim they have an expected advantage over the house of $100 per hour are willing to work for 20 hours in a row before falling asleep in their cars, all in order to save a few hundred dollars on a hotel room.
Conclusion
Lest anyone suggest I’m being snobby when suggesting most people can neither play blackjack with an advantage nor travel hack successfully, nothing could be further from the truth. Neither requires any special aptitude or gift.
Most people cannot do it because most people do not want to do it. If you try to talk to them about it, they may pay attention for a longer or shorter period of time out of politeness, and then they will lose interest and seek to change the subject to something that interests them instead of something they find tedious.
This is good and proper, not because it “preserves the opportunities for longer” or any hogwash like that, but because people should go through their lives seeking out things they find interesting and rewarding, not be lectured to by pedants about how they’re leaving money on the table by not doing whatever that particular pedant happens to believe is best for them.
The flip side is that when a nice online personality tells you something is easy, fun, and profitable, there’s a good chance that it is: for the person trying to get you to participate, against your better judgment.
