It's funny, but it also just reads like bad fiction to me. The dialogue doesn't seem natural, and the writing doesn't sound so much like someone describing something they actually experienced as it does like someone mimicking a storytelling style they've seen elsewhere. Add on top of it that almost every aspect of it seems ripped directly from the first half of "21" (the Kevin Spacey movie about the MIT crew) and it just comes across as an amateurish attempt to borrow someone else's story. The fact that these techniques she claims they used just don't work anymore seals it for me.
You can find the author and one of her teammates discussing their careers on a podcast from a couple of years ago here:
But I appreciate your commitment to upholding the proud HackerNews tradition of supremely confident snap judgments uncontaminated by actual knowledge.
"Carlo was betting stacks of orange chips we called “pumpkins,” up to $10,000 per hand."
"Our Big Players naturally drew attention with their wagers in the thousands."
No I didn't read every single story about this ever just the one linked. And yes it is a snap judgement from what I know that it is complete fiction. That doesn't sound like small casino action to me. Also, please let me know about the casino that allows 10k bets mid shoe entry.... I've never seen one.
If this was a story written about some struggling grad students that made small amounts of money on small action at small casinos as you claim on your throw-away account I would not have posted what I posted. But alas this thread is about the article posted and I stand by my claim that it is almost certainly untrue from what is contained in it. I don't need to know the entire history to decide that. The article contains information that is at best highly embellished.
Any customer that wins more than they spend over >50 games is probably doing something not great for business, ban them.
https://github.com/seblau/BlackJack-Simulator is an example of this. The house advantage of blackjack is under 1% for good games (for example 0.33% at Mohegan Sun). So to beat it you just need overcome that which IS possible by counting. But you can see if you play with that sim, decreasing penetration, bet spread and amount really starts to eat into your numbers.
But with the mitigation strategies listed like low penetration, heat gained by betting big, or wild swings in bet amount, and finally no mid-shoe entry it is not possible now to do it and make good money.
https://wizardofodds.com/games/blackjack/card-counting/high-... Michael Shackleford is an expert on gambling analysis and is employed by gaming companies to check out their games. He has loads of detailed information and statistics on his site about every casino game.
But yes. Mathematically possible, and possible in the distant past when casinos didn't know. Pretty much impossible now due to casinos detecting it easily. Not because it isn't mathematically possible.