Beating the Online Dealer or Milking the Match Plays by Yikes This is an article about how one smart player is currently cleaning up on the Internet blackjack games, hundreds of which are available online. It is against the law to gamble in Internet casinos if you live in the U.S. We do not wish to encourage anyone to break the law. Many of our subscribers do not live in the U.S., and many who do live in the U.S. travel outside the U.S. frequently, and may legally play in Internet casinos when they are outside of this country. In my opinion, gambling over the Internet is a high risk venture that I would not try. Yikes, however, does seem to have found a system that has been working for him so far. We offer his insights for your edification and amusement. -- A.S. People, there is money to be made from internet casinos. Not by counting cards, but by systematically collecting match-plays and sign-up bonuses. Although it is technically illegal for North Americans, numerous off-shore computer sites are catering to them. To compete in the market and reassure customers, online casinos are offering $25 to $50 just for signing up. You bet enough to qualify for the bonus, a little more for discretion, then cash out. From Omni casino, I collected $900 on a fluke winning streak, parlayed up from a $20 buy in. Yes, the check cleared. Some bonuses are true match plays � you have to bet $25 for them to match it. With others, the bonus appears along with your deposit. The match-play crumbs may not tempt the professional blackjack player, but for grinders, it is more profitable and far less variance than what they are used to. A different class of opportunity (and risk) are the casinos that award new players a percentage of their first buy in. For the advantage player who knows how to be disciplined and play basic strategy, this is a practical way of making money. If you have the nerve to deposit $500, $1,000 or more via credit card, you can get bonuses of 10% and more. Bonuses on bankwires go higher. Casinos that reward 10% of a deposit routinely require the full amount in action to qualify. Playing blackjack with the claimed rules, the expected loss is below 1%, often much less. Not bad when the bonus expectation is 10%. At this writing, I have collected about $3,500 in profit from 30 casinos and have yet to be stiffed. About half that amount is the EV, the rest was luck during qualifying play. There is also money to be made from referrals (http://www.sportbet.com will give you 10% of a friend's buy in) and miscellaneous promotions. For Christmas I got $25 from http://www.firstlive.com just for being me. Some outfits have email newsletters listing new opportunities � one advertised a weekend-long 20% offer for returning players. You might also experiment with hitting the same places more than once by using the credit cards of cooperative family members. Be careful, however, if substantial amounts are involved. You don't want a casino holding a big deposit and then noticing different players from the same street address. (The address you give them must match that of the credit card.) At least one casino's software will not allow different account holders to log in from the same computer. When installed on your computer, the program carries a unique registration code that identifies it to the server, which knows to whom it was originally downloaded. All casinos know the net address of your internet provider. Some include grave warnings about what they'll do to people who commit fraud. Maybe that means they are getting hit a lot. Or that they are tempting you to play by hinting that it is easier to wiggle out of losses than it is. I have not heard how the credit card companies are treating disputes over illegal Internet gambling. The casinos worry about you, but you should also worry about them. No doubt about it, giving money illegally to offshore enterprises is inherently risky. If an operator decides to rip people off, there is no reliable recourse other than sputtering to the net news groups. Not only are you totally at the mercy of an enterprise, you also maximize your exposure to potential scams by hopping from casino to casino. However, there have been surprisingly few complaints posted on the net. Fortunately for us, once a site is up and running, there is more money to be made by grabbing money slow than fast. For the most part, they pay. It is the collecting on the wins that gets people hooked on gambling. To reduce risk of being openly ripped off, you can restrict yourself to casinos that have paid ads on gateway sites like http://www.gambling.com. Presumably, the established industry would not welcome the company of blatant thieves for long. You might also make a list of casino websites, then check back in six months to see which ones still exist, under the theory that longevity equals legitimacy. (I was too impatient to try this.) With most net casinos, it appears that the risk is not blatant stealing of the drop, but the possibility that the offshore company could collapse while holding substantial deposits. It has happened. Consult the "Dog Doo" web page at http://www.rgtonline.com/links/casinos/dogdoo.cfm. There are several websites mentioned below that carry reports of bad experiences. One can also plug a casino name into the Deja News search engine (http://www.dejanews.com) to see if it popped up in a news group. Virtual gambling requires little more than a computer, time, and the ability to maneuver on the world wide web. To play, you typically have to download software from a website, which takes from 20 to a zillion minutes. Once the downloading is complete, expect to spend a minimum of one hour per casino filling out credit card forms, figuring out the rules, laying down the bets, and then trying to find the virtual cashier. (Like physical casinos, they don't make the exits convenient.) A few sites require no downloading, but the play is slower. Before buying in, be sure to write down the precise procedure for collecting the match play. Sometimes it is automatic, other times you have to email the proper info to the proper address. Caribbean Cyber Casino (aka C3i at http://www.ccasino.com) gives a bonus when you answer one net ad, but not another. Save all your email correspondence, the promos change and sometimes they screw things up. Web casinos generally have 800 numbers to call for assistance. Yes, I have gotten breathing and sentient humans on the line with no waiting. If you have an older computer, one of the biggest obstacles to aggressive match play is hard-drive size. They make the software pretty, so it takes up four, eight, and more megabytes of space. Although the casinos all use much the same software, you will have to download anew each time because the login configurations are unique. Presumably you will keep a given program at least until the check arrives, so virtual casinos will proliferate on your disk as fast as real ones on river boats. If you have the space, keep the programs. You may be back for a new promotion. Blackjack games on the net vary considerably, but the claimed rules are often very attractive. Single and six deck games are common, but assume a shuffle after every hand (some say as much, others tempt you to count by not saying so). The Acropolis is said to deal two of six decks, and Winward casino shuffles its six decker randomly, so one can play quite a few hands before a shuffle. If they are shrewd enough to know how to tempt counters, do you think they're dumb enough to let them win? Although counting is out, you will still want to use the appropriate basic strategy, so be sure to note the rules when you stumble on them in the web site, because they are never convenient when you get a pair of twos against a two. Rigged games are less of an issue for match-play hustlers, since we generally play only a short time for a specific bonus. Net games are also uniquely open to scrutiny by many smart people, so it should not be assumed that they are all rigged. Besides, why rig a game that is already fixed? The routine for cashing out varies, but typically they will credit your Visa card for only the amount of the original buy-in. Any excess is mailed as a check. Some places will not pay anything until you receive a special pin number by snail mail. Be prepared for some suspense until you actually get your money. In your calculations be sure to allow for the cash advance fee on your credit card. Some places count your buy-in not as a loan but as a purchase, bless their hearts, others do not. Other than tolerating the risk and maintaining self-control, the most demanding part of net match play is the record keeping. Your credit card bills become a chaotic list of debits here, credits there, all grouped by date, not vender, and spread out over two statement periods. The names of the casinos never appear on the bills � instead you find entries like Innocuous Sounding Financial Consultants, Ltd, which somehow must be matched up with your play-log to know if you got paid. At first, I'd hit more than one casino on the same date. I don't anymore. It gets confusing even with meticulous records. At a minimum, record the website, date, your user name and password, account number, pin number, buy-in, match-play amount, cashout, total action, which credit card you used, which email address you gave them, tech support phone and email, and date the check arrived. Also, if they give it, the merchant name that will appear on your credit card statement. The casino names quickly start sounding all the same, so alphabetize them in order to know quickly if you have visited already. I'm a believer in not antagonizing the industry and burning out opportunities, so as a rule, I never cashed out without making at least a few bets, even when possible. It does not cost much to bet more than what the match play requires � 20 $5 bets should lose you less than fifty cents. This is probably unnecessary when you've deposited only $20 to get a $20 match play. But the automated systems are still supervised by humans, and if you've deposited several thousand to get a percentage bonus, then discretion might be in order. English Harbour casino states that it tightened the rules on its incentives because of abuse. Buy-ins eligible for a 20% bonus were capped at $5,000 and the full amount had to be put into action. They promised to monitor the accounts carefully. There is at least one report of net casinos cooperating on a blacklist of undesirable players. A poster on RGTonline states that several casinos refused his action, apparently because he had been cashing out bonuses with little action. When playing for ambitious bonuses, disguise your play. When you are ahead, be more liberal with your action. To reduce the variance, decrease the size and increase the number of bets, that way you are more likely to actually walk with the value expected. Bet by the Kelly criterion. Table minimums are usually $5 but as low as $1. You also might experiment with schemes like playing until you lose or double your buy-in, knowing that losses at one place are won back at another. And there is no law saying the buy-in, play, and cashout all have to be the same day. Don't be vulgar, wait a decent interval before cashing and running. How is that there's any free money to be had on the net? For one, we can assume that they never have to pay many of the bonuses. The hold percentage is undoubtedly higher in virtual space than on land. More importantly, I speculate that the bonuses help meet the challenges of markets and marketing. Since virtual casinos are cheaper than corporeal ones, there are an awful lot of them. Not only is the market extremely competitive (customers can switch casinos without switching chairs), but the online industry has to get people to trust them. Consumers are naturally skeptical of giving credit card numbers to unaccountable strangers overseas, especially when it is not even legal. Net casinos build trust by paying off one player at a time. Following through with freebies convinces people that their larger deposits are safe. (Hey, it worked on me.) You will find the online experience very different from playing in a casino. There is no racket from slots or jerks, and the virtual casino on the desk in your den always beckons, even to fill just a wee empty spot in the day. Having never played blackjack before becoming a counter, I was surprised to suddenly discover what gambling is all about. Since the mind is not preoccupied counting cards, you experience the full seduction of gambling, the living of a life-time with each turn of the card. What's especially enticing is the desire to walk away with the full match play. If you get a bet behind, you want to get back up. Why not? The $20 match play means you are still ahead after a couple losses � go for it! Web blackjack has the potential to train you in bad habits. My single biggest score involved tens of thousands in action � an awful lot of mouse clicking. This gets boring. You start hanging on the bankroll swings, fiddling with dopey progressions, parlaying streaks, chasing losses, and pretty soon poor Kelly flies screaming out the window. The most tempting thing about chasing loses is that it succeeds with such regularity. There's nothing like being down a grand, then winning it back. The danger is not so much the initial qualifying play, but what happens when you get ahead. There's a cushion, so you relax and try to bet up some real excitement. Pretty soon, you lose the buy-in as well as the big win. In the first draft of this article for BJF, I bragged of losing only one $20 buy-in. At press time, however, I am embarrassed to admit to having completely lost control and $500 in a session. I learned my lesson, then did it again a month later. Online advantage play requires a whole new level of discipline and self-awareness. For me, it is important to keep in mind that I haven't really learned my lessen and am entirely capable of losing control again. Find the mental game that works for you. I strive to play like a Kelly robot, barely noticing the outcomes. Keep it boring so you do not get caught up in the drama of fortune. If you milk the match plays seriously, there will be many hours of playing time in which to learn vice. More virtual casinos are popping up all the time, and outfits with big bonuses are still offering them months later. Perilous or not, the online opportunities are there. Compulsive gamblers used to have to leave the house to find a game, now every room with a computer offers a chance at a life-time in debt. Internet casinos are truly an insidious phenomenon, and it is right that they pay penance. 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