MindMatters hosts Sal Cordova for a second podcast. This one includes details of card-counting systems used in blackjack. The systems require considerable skill and give you at most a 1% advantage over the house. If you can maintain a 1% advantage and control your betting, you can compound a pretty good pile in one night. But the casino will recognize what you’re doing and won’t let you return, so you can’t continue the streak.

Overall the best advice is extremely simple. Don’t play.

Advice from 1930’s columnist Oscar Odd McIntyre:

The best way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your wallet.

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The only way to win in a casino is to own the house.

And it’s not easy to own the house. Casinos have a tremendous investment in buildings and machinery and personnel, plus a tremendous investment in legislatures and judges and governors and mayors. The latter is most important, and takes time to build and maintain. Twenty years ago when the tribal casinos were moving into Spokane, they bought a dozen state referendums that cleared the way for their activities. Many of these referendums didn’t mention casinos; they were obscure “tax cut” measures or boring technicalities of property law, advertised as “just fixing an inconsequential error”. Every step was carefully laid out and calculated and sold.

The same advice applies in the bitcoin casino. It may seem easier to own the house in a fake “decentralized” system, but the data-gatherers have shown that the ownership is highly centralized. All of the supposedly diverse and varied DeFis and DAOs and AltCoins are closely linked, all operated by a handful of super-rich fuckheads with long criminal records.

And the law-buying part of the investment is still the most important part. Gerard points out that the real bitcoin casinos operate like old-fashioned shipboard casinos, carefully placed just beyond the territorial boundary. The real casino is in a poor country where the legislature is easy to buy, and the websites in rich countries are like the speedboat that ferries the suckers to the ship.