Geeze, no updates in about a month, let's see... *consults log*...
I had some Real Life keeping me away from gaming venues, but I did get in some sessions at the various local Indian wagering houses over the last few weeks. It turned into an emotional roller-coaster.
I treaded water in a negative direction for a few sessions, then a had a medium size, ($2700, or 50 "units" of $50) loss. Not like I've lost more or anything, but it really weighed down on me. First, I was getting close to the self-imposed $30k bankroll where bet ramp modifications were going to kick in. But second, for angsty reasons I cannot fully comprehend, my idle thoughts for the next week or so were consumed with planning out the eventual demise of my blackjack bankroll.
Next time out, I had a nice session win of over $3k. That was refreshing, to say the least, it was nice to know that large wins are still possible in the universe... that the big swings are not reserved exclusively for losses.
This rosy feeling lasted for 48 hours, when I was hit by two unpleasant losing sessions back-to-back, with a cumulative loss of $4900. This dropped the bankroll to a level of $29.5k. I was back to operating under my old "max bet = 1% of bankroll) rule, and this mean that that the big yellow warning light of mandatory bet resizing was flashing in my face.
It didn't help that over this time, I also lost a couple grand from my online e-wallet with a huge losing streak of fairly small deposits on "all-or-nothing" bonuses. Strangely, I wasn't as angsty about my new bankroll low, it was more of a resigned feeling of "well, let's see what happens next," and just let where the chips fall where they may (so to speak).
And something ridiculous happened: I had four winning sessions in a row; $1600, $600, $800, and almost $4500. I'm pretty sure the last one was my largest winning session to date. And it was especially ridiculous, as I was so damn lucky that I think you could have replaced me with a Golden Retriever, and he would have won about as much. Due to table minimums, I was only working a 2x4 spread, but I was so lucky during the neutral/negative counts that the high minimums actually helped me. And while I didn't get that many high counts, when I did manage to raise my bets to the max, it worked spectacularly, even though the wins were often pure luck, like getting multiple stiffs vs a dealer ten upcard, but still winning after the dealer busted.
After all this mess, my bankroll snapshot is currently 37.5k.
A few anecdotes:
- I mentioned my play being a bit more aggressive at local joints with mediocre games. Because, if I do get backed off... no big loss. Meanwhile, I've got significant time, money, and opportunity cost in just getting out there, so I might as well make it worthwhile. One night, I found myself at a place that is usually very crowded, but I was heads-up with the dealer, or had only one other person at the table. Not only that, this dealer was delivering the best pen in the house that night. I said to myself "F*** it, I'm not leaving," and preceeded to play at that same doubledeck table for two hours with a 2x8 spread.
- Ended up sharing a table with a couple of drunk middle aged women who were severely annoying the dealer. It was incredibly entertaining.
- At one place, due to crowds I did something I hadn't done in a while: blatantly backcounted a shoe and wonged in. 3 other players at the table, and I started playing two spots immediately. Starting at the 3 deck point, count started off medium, dropped to neutral, and then launched to stratospheric. I ended up with max bets out for several hands, and won a little bit. But even though the penetration was good (little over a deck cut off on a 6D game), the count kept increasing until the cut card, meaning that, for that brief slice of time, the winnings were, of course, just dumb luck.
- I bumped into another counter, and it was at a joint where I'd never seen another counter before. Real young guy, kind of stereotypical college kid type. He was betting about as much as me, so I'm not sure where he got the money from. The thing is, there was some weird non-correlation in our bet spreads (before I finally abandoned the table). There's a possibility it was just from using different counts, but I suspect that he was using a betting "system" that resulted in strange bet jumps, or he was being kind of sloppy in his count. Some of his plays also seemed irregular. Part of me wanted to just kick back and hawk his game and figure out what he was up to, but that didn't seem very polite.
- I bumped into a dealer that could count, too. Not only that, but he used to ply his trade at other places. He was even offering advice to the table like "hey, you might want to spread to two hands now". Geeze, how... considerate? I wasn't exactly sure how to handle that part of the conversation. This is at a joint where dealers keep their own tokes, so he didn't seem to have a financial incentive to narc on anyone.