Professional Gambler

            While the life of a professional gambler does have its own mystique and glamour, the financial rewards in blackjack are often far less than some might expect. The reason for this primarily boils down to the fact that it is very difficult to play anywhere near as many hours as you might work in a normal job not because of fatigue or brain drain, but because the casino simply won't tolerate it. For example, if Caesars allowed me to sit peacefully at its tables from nine to five every day, and I could happily get in forty hours every week, I'd easily clear a million bucks a year and still be able to take a couple of weeks of vacation.

          Now, large casinos can easily absorb a loss like that, but they got to be big by plugging all the leaks. And it would be bad business for them to allow hordes of card counters to descend on their tables like locusts looking for easy pickings. Hence, there has evolved a cat-and-mouse battle between skilled players and the house. The casinos tolerate a certain amount of damage to their castle walls, but the boiling oil is sure to come out if you try and scale too high.

         This creates certain limitations on how much money individual card counters can scurry off with. Practically speaking, it is hard for solo players to get in long days at the tables. A full-time pro might only work three hundred hours over a twelve-month period. So instead of raking in a million a year and spending his vacations on a yacht in the Mediterranean, his expected return each year drops down to a much more pedestrian number. Therefore, many card counters are destined to spend their summers on the Allagash River in a canoe shooing away pesky mosquitoes rather than on a boat in the French Riviera fending off amorous Scandinavian blondes.

STANDARD DEVIATIONS

        A ballpark estimate of how much you can hope to make card counting is to take your top bet and multiply it by 25 to 30 percent. This is roughly what you will average per hour of play. That translates to about thirty bucks an hour with our benchmark $10,000 bankroll, which means a serious effort might only net $10,000 a year. Even worse, the recreational player (one hundred hours a year) might only bring home a meager $3,000. Hardly enough to quit' the day job.

        Yet thirty bucks an hour is still attractive enough to entice many people, especially when a few camped meals and shows are thrown in. If you desire a greater return for your labors, there is a simple solution to push you into a higher wage bracket-just start with a bigger bankroll and bet more. If you had $40,000 to work with, your potential hourly return should be over a hundred bucks an hour. And unless you're an attorney or a BMW mechanic, that's starting to sound like pretty good money.

        However, the problem is that unlike other jobs, you don't get paid by the hour. Your actual return will vary dramatically from your expected value (EV). These wild fluctuations are what drive many people out of the business and fall under the mathematical term "standard deviations" (SD).

        Here is an example to explain SD. If you were to flip a coin 100 times, the average results should be 50 heads and 50 tails. However, as everyone knows, there will be a certain amount of fluctuation in any short-term trial. Sometimes heads will clock in at 51 out of 100, and maybe the next test it will finish at 43 out of 100. However, there is an exact formula for predicting how often the results of these coin flips will land within certain parameters.