You gotta be careful with the golden goose. Eventually, the side bet disappeared from Caesars as well. That was another problem: as soon as you started making regular over/under bets, you began to 'stick out like a sore thumb, ' as a dealer friend of mine explained it to me later. Not that much subtlety on the Strip, then or now. The pit bosses there loved to stand in front of the table and stare at you as if they had just returned from some master intimidation class. I started playing at the Caesars 6-deck games, but the heat was more immediate. I'd tried to keep it to 20 minutes or less per visit, but the winning was so easy and so big that I had stretched it to 40 minutes and then to an hour. What had I done to cause this? Was it something I'd said? Could I have done something differently?īasically, I had played too often and for too long. I kept walking past the table and headed back out into the parking lot and experienced the same sort of heartbreak you had when your girlfriend abruptly became your ex-girlfriend. The table lasted for about a year and then one night, I entered the place and discovered that the over/under 13 side bet had disappeared from the green felt -nothing but straight-up blackjack. The cards came out slowly and so it was easy to count them and do the math in your head. The best time to play was 3 in the morning when they were training the new dealers. The best table for the over/under 13 side bet sat in an off-the-Strip resort popular with locals but close enough to I-15 to grab substantial California tourist traffic. You could lose a little or just break even on the 21 game, as long as you stuck to the process. The odds were so good that basically you focused almost entirely on winning the over/under 13 bet. If you played correct basic strategy and counted the cards in a way specific to the side bet, then the actual blackjack game didn't matter. Emphasis on the 'kind of.' At some point, someone begins to notice. Kind of like when the SEC notices that too many call options were purchased in a single account just prior to a buy-out or merger.

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