NEVADA | GAMBLING
Las Vegas: A winner's guide to blackjack
Winner takes all at the Flamingo, Rio, MGM, Four Queens and the Venetian.
Las Vegas — JUST inside the Flamingo casino a few steps off the Strip, a trio of pink-felted $5 blackjack tables attracts a raucous crowd of enthusiastic players. Booze flows freely, and the piped-in music rocks. As the dealers snap and slap cards out of the plastic table shoes, the players' chip stacks accordion up — and mostly down.
Losing in Vegas is often considered par for the course, but it's happening at the blackjack tables at an accelerating rate. And it's easy enough to see why. A simple, small-print banner on one of the tables reads "Blackjack Pays 6 to 5."
It's the sign of the times. Vegas casinos have taken to rewriting the rules, turning a relatively fair game into something less advantageous for the player. It begins with tampering with the payoffs — in this case, from the long-standing 3-2 to the far more skewed 6-5 — and not before too long, finding a straight-up, unaltered, unshaved game of blackjack in Las Vegas of all places will be a nearly impossible task.
"Wow. I had no idea. I mean, who reads the signs?" said player Rory Kane, laughing and shrugging.
Which is exactly what the casinos are counting on.
By fudging just a few of the standard rules — reducing the blackjack payout to 6-5, requiring the dealer to hit and not stand on what's called a "soft 17" (an ace and a 6), and not permitting the player to double-down on any two cards, casinos have radically skewed the odds toward the house.
For an unsuspecting visitor playing $10 bets, that one rule change of 6-5 will cost an additional $15 an hour in estimated losses, five times more than the traditional version of blackjack. Play for a weekend and do the math. It's as if you're nearly tied in a game of baseball and suddenly in the last two innings, you're told you'll get only two outs.
Trying to measure the depth of this change, I visited Las Vegas for a couple of weekdays earlier this month, spoke with players, pit bosses and the experts, and was staggered by what I found. Though the casinos didn't return my phone calls to explain this shift, a supervisor standing behind the Flamingo's tables made the point.
"Why should I play here when you pay only 6-to-5?" I asked.
She paused for a moment, then said, "Well, we call this the Party Pit," pointing out that the Flamingo's new theme is that of a Cancún-like tropical beach party. In other words, sit down, have a drink and let the good times roll. Leave all that odds making to the house.
Cruising the maze of Strip casinos, I found numerous instances of blackjack tables where the odds aren't in your favor. At Rio, another "fun"-oriented casino, the blackjack pits had a proliferation of "carnival games," which might be more at home in a carnival than in a casino. The Rio's big come-on was a bevy of stacked "single-deck" games advertised with brightly colored electronic signs.
Edge to the house
SINGLE-DECK blackjack was the most advantageous game for players when played by traditional rules, offering a microscopic .18% house edge, which means a player's estimated loss will be 1.8 cents for every $10 wagered. At the Flamingo's Party Pit, a player is estimated to lose more than 10 times that amount, nearly 20 cents for every $10.
Although 1.8 cents or even 20 cents doesn't sound like much, stretch these numbers in a four-hour blackjack session and you're looking at nearly $50, and that's if you play a perfect game.
When my search for an old-fashioned 21 table took me to the upscale Venetian, I found a couple of high-stakes tables offering a decent game of double-deck blackjack. But with a $200 minimum bet -- and figuring that a blackjack bankroll ought to be 50 times the basic wager — $10,000 seemed like an excessive amount to risk for a few hours of honest fun.
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