When I hear Don Johnson, I still think Miami Vice, but maybe that’s because I’m a child of the 1980s.
Johnson says he won more than $15 million playing blackjack at Atlantic City casinos in 2011. His blackjack success has generated a great deal of publicity, but it also got him banned from several casinos, which generally protect themselves by limiting or banning the action from skilled professional gamblers who tend to win more than they lose. Breaking Vegas is an authentic, no-frills recreation of the infamous real-life MIT student blackjack teams, showing some of the methods they used and the maths behind them. The Player: Secrets of a Vegas Whale. Also inspired by real life events, this documentary recounts Don Johnson’s amazing yet true story. The Player: Secrets of a Vegas Whale. Another documentary inspired by a real life story, “The Player” tells the story of Don Johnson, one of the best gamblers in the history of Vegas. Johnson managed to walk away with $15 million in a single winning streak. Johnson is known for.
This post isn’t about the actor, though.
It’s about the high roller who won so much money playing blackjack.
Don Johnson is a high roller who beat casinos in Atlantic City for $15 million dollars in 2010 and 2011.
And he did it without counting cards. (In fact, you can’t count cards in Atlantic City, because they shuffle the cards after every hand.)
Here’s how to win at blackjack like Don Johnson did:
Get a Huge Bankroll
Almost all the steps on this list presuppose that you have a huge bankroll. The casinos allowed Don Johnson to play for $100,000 per hand. Getting the casinos to offer betting limits that high is the subject of another step below.
But before you can play for $100,000 per hand, you need a large enough bankroll to handle that action. I don’t have $100,000 lying around to bet on a single hand of blackjack.
But Don Johnson was playing head-to-head versus a blackjack dealer, which means he was getting in probably 200 hands per hour. Of course, you don’t lose every hand you play. You don’t win every hand, either.
But you have a reasonable chance of losing one or two hands in a row early, so you need a minimum bankroll to handle that kind of action.
If you’re an aggressive gambler who’s willing to accept a reasonably large risk of ruin (going broke), you can probably get by with a bankroll of $20,000,000.
If you’re more conservative, you might want to have an even larger bankroll—say $100 million.
How many people reading this blog post can come up with that much money?
I’m not sure, but I am sure that you can take these principles and use them to improve your gambling.
Even if you’re a low roller, you’ll benefit from making sure you have a reasonable blackjack bankroll. Even if you’re playing for $5 per hand, you can draw some lessons from this bullet point.
If you’re playing for $5 per hand, you should have a minimum bankroll of $1000. $5000 is much safer.
Take whatever stakes you’re playing for, multiply that bet by between 200 and 1000, and that’s the recommended size of a bankroll you should have before sitting down at the blackjack table. The larger your bankroll compared to the amount of your average bet, the less likely you are to go broke.
Unless you can find a way to get lucky, though, it doesn’t matter how large your bankroll is. If you’re playing a negative expectation game, you’ll eventually go broke. The only question is how long it will take.
The rest of this post details how Don Johnson improved his chances of getting lucky.
But you can’t get lucky if you have an insufficient bankroll.
Also, when I talk about a gambling bankroll, I’m talking about money you’ve set aside specifically for the purposes of gambling. You should be able to maintain your current lifestyle even if you lost your entire bankroll.
If you need that money for rent, mortgage payments, groceries, or anything else in your life, you shouldn’t be gambling with it at all.
Learn to Play Perfect Cards
Tony Rodio, the CEO of the Tropicana in Atlantic City, said this about Don Johnson:
“He plays perfect cards.”
What does that mean?
In blackjack, you have a finite set of situations. You know what all of them are when you sit down—you can have one of a limited number of hard totals or soft totals, and you’ll be facing a dealer who has an upcard that’s worth between ace and ten.
In every one of those situations, there’s only one correct decision.
That decision is correct because it offers the highest expected value.
What does that mean?
The expected value is what a bet is worth when compared to your chances of winning and losing it.
In other words, if you hit a hand with a hard total of 21, your expected value is negative. Any card you take will bust, which means you’ll lose your bet. That’s an extreme example, but it illustrates why your decisions affect the potential outcome.
Experienced blackjack players understand that the mathematically correct decision in every situation is called basic strategy. All those articles about blackjack that you read on the Internet which cite that the house edge for the game is incredibly low assume that you’re playing with perfect basic strategy.
Most players don’t use or understand basic strategy. Depending on how far these players deviate, they’re giving up about 1% to 3% to the casino.
A great blackjack game with a house edge of only 0.5% might only offer a house edge of 4% to an inexperienced player who’s making lots of strategy mistakes.
Here’s an example of a basic strategy decision:
You’ve been dealt a king and a 3. That’s a hard total of 13.
The dealer has a 3 showing.
What do you do in this situation?
The mathematically correct decision here is to stand on your total of 13.
This seems like a low total to stand on, but the dealer has a good chance of busting in this situation. You might as well let her try.
Any 9 or 10 will bust your hand, and keep in mind that there are 16 cards in the deck worth 10. That’s a total of 20 cards that will bust your hand.
You’re better off letting the dealer bust.
You don’t have to be a high roller to benefit from mastering basic strategy in blackjack. No matter what your goals are as a gambler, understanding and using basic strategy will improve your chances of achieving those goals.
Understand Which Rules Favor You
Blackjack is one game with some basic rules, but a lot of the rules vary from casino to casino and from table to table within a casino. Some of those rules improve the casino’s chances of winning your money, while others improve your chances of winning.
Don Johnson was intimately familiar with which rules favored him and which rules favored the casino.
Here’s an example:
Most casinos in Atlantic City use 8 decks, but Don Johnson got the casino to agree to playing with a 6-deck shoe. That’s a difference of 0.03%.
That’s not a huge difference, but Johnson knew that every 1/100 of a percent counted.
Here’s another example:
The casino allowed him to split and double down on up to 4 hands at one time. If this included being able to re-split and double down on aces, this reduced the house edge by 0.3%, which is significant.
In fact, Don Johnson negotiated game conditions where the house edge was only 0.25%, which is better than almost any blackjack game you can find. Often, your best case scenario is a blackjack game with a house edge of 0.5%, and Johnson cut that amount in half.
How does this apply to low rollers?
If you’re acutely aware of the difference that the rules make, you can choose only the best games, mathematically. If you don’t know what difference these rules make, you can’t choose the best games—you’re just guessing and hoping.
Guessing and hoping are not winning strategies for blackjack (or anything else, for that matter).
Find a Desperate Casino
This is where Don Johnson’s experiences got interesting. In late 2010 and early 2011, the casinos in Atlantic City were suffering financially. They were desperate to turn things around.
Most casinos have limits on how much risk they’ll accept from a blackjack player. They often won’t accept bets above a certain amount. Smaller casinos usually limit blackjack players to $500 per hand. Larger casinos might have limits in the $1000 to $5000 range.
The house edge in blackjack is low, which means that players can go on winning streaks almost as easily as they can go on losing streaks.
If the casino allows blackjack players to bet $100,000, $200,000, or even $500,000 per hand, they risk losing a larger amount of their quarterly profits. In the case of Don Johnson, they lost even more.
These casinos wouldn’t have offered Don Johnson the high betting limits and favorable rules they did if they weren’t desperate to get some extra money in their coffers that quarter.
You might not be able to find a “desperate” casino.
But you can compare the casinos’ games and rules to choose where you want to play. This doesn’t just apply to blackjack. Video poker players can find casinos offering great odds, too.
Negotiate with that Casino
This is where the rubber hit the road in Don Johnson’s situation. I already wrote about how he negotiated better rules for the game and how he got them to raise their usual limits.
But that’s the least of what he negotiated.
In fact, without negotiating this next item, he wouldn’t have pulled off these huge wins. Even if the house has an edge of only 0.25%, the casino will eventually win all your money if you play long enough.
Casinos offer high rollers “loss rebates”. These are basically discounts on the amount of money you lose. The slots club is a small-scale version of this practice.
High rollers can negotiate deals where they get back 10% of their losses in the form of rebates. If a high roller loses $100,000 at the blackjack table, the casino gives him back $10,000. His net loss is only $90,000 at that point.
This doesn’t turn the game into a positive expectation game, though. A 10% discount on your losses just means it will take you longer to lose all your money.
But you’ll eventually still lose all of it.
The casinos in Atlantic City were so strapped for cash that they started offering rebates of 20%.
Even then, most casinos offer these rebates as a lifetime discount. If you have a winning trip, you lose the benefit of those rebates.
For example, suppose a casino offered you a 20% rebate on your losses of up to $500,000 on a lifetime basis.
You spend a weekend at the casino. You win $100,000 that weekend.
You go back a few weeks later. You lose $200,000 that weekend.
The $100,000 you won the weekend before is deducted before the 20% is kicked in.
But Don Johnson negotiated a trip by trip rebate. His wins on previous trips didn’t affect his rebates on subsequent trips.
He’s playing a close to break-even game, remember, because he negotiated those good rules conditions for himself.
Now he’s only risking $80,000 every time he tries to win $100,000.
It doesn’t take a math genius to realize that a close to 50/50 shot at winning $100k when you’re only risking $80k is a profitable situation.
Normally, casinos use computer models to predict how well they’ll do against a specific player in a specific situation. The managers at these 3 Atlantic City casinos missed their opportunity with Don Johnson:
- The Borgata
- Caesars
- The Tropicana
How’d it turn out for Johnson?
He won $5.8 million at the Tropicana.
He won $5 million at the Borgata.
Don Johnson Blackjack Secrets Revealed
He won $4 million at Caesars.
His total winnings at the 3 casinos were close to $15 million.
Don Johnson is now one of the most famous gamblers in the world. He didn’t cheat, and he didn’t count cards. He just played perfect basic strategy and negotiated great rules for himself.
Conclusion
Most of my readers can’t duplicated Don Johnson’s achievements as a blackjack player. Most people don’t have the bankroll for it.
You can take several lessons from his success, though. It’s important to understand how the rules affect the house edge. For that matter, it’s important to understand the math behind the game, period.
You should always be willing to shop around. You should also always be willing to negotiate with the casinos for a better deal.
Can you win $15 million in Atlantic City?
Blackjack Secret Code
Probably not.
Even if you have the bankroll, the skill, and the temperament to do what Don Johnson did, you probably don’t have the temperament.
Don Johnson Blackjack Secrets
It’s still fun to read about someone who beat the casinos, though.