Is Blackjack Poker

For nearly a decade, I made my entire income from card counting at blackjack. More often than not, people who knew about it would mistakenly ask, “How’s poker going?” I’d usually just reply, “Well, it’s blackjack, but it’s going fine.” With the popularity of Texas Hold’em and the World Series of Poker, every housewife knows about poker pros, but very few people know that there are some of us out there . For those interested in making a living at either game, let me breakdown five of the top differences between the two professions.

1 How Other Players Affect EV (Expected Value). Beating poker is primarily dependent on your ability to extract more money out of your competition than they will extract from you. It does not matter how good of a poker player you are if the other players at the table are better than you. Conversely, you don’t have to be all that great at poker if you consistently find poorer players to give you action. When you are playing blackjack, you are solely playing against the house. There is a common misconception that players can affect your odds at blackjack. However, the only measurable impact they have on a professional blackjack player is by impacting how many hands you will be able to play. This causes me to avoid crowded tables so I can generate as many hands per hour as possible. But there is no concern on whether the other players will help or hurt my pursuit of crushing the tables.

2 How Limits Affect EV. One of the factors that most fascinated me about card counting was the scalability. I started with $2, 000 and was probably expecting to make $2/hr. However, I didn’t need to spend any of the money, so as my bankroll grew, so did my betting and my expected profits. I quickly teamed up with a few friends, and as we won, we continued to be able to increase our betting, finding higher limit tables to fit our growing bet spreads. At one point, I co-managed a team with $1M in cash, allowing us to play some games worth over $1, 000/hr while knowing the exact mathematical calculations of our risk of ruin. You can absolutely scale your poker play, but it’s not as linear, nor is risk as measurable. As I pointed out above, you must always be aware of the skill level of the field in poker. To be honest, I’m perfectly comfortable betting thousands of dollars a hand at blackjack because I know that if I do the same thing at a high limit game as I would at a lower limit game, the math will work out the same, just with a higher return. I’m in the positive for my career at poker, but I know that if you throw me into a high limit poker game, I wouldn’t expect to make the same number of bets per hour as I’ve won at lower limit games. I would most likely get eaten alive at a high limit game. This doesn’t make one game better than the other in my opinion, but I have found that different types of people tend to gravitate to each profession.

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