After a decade of inconvenient truth-telling, Eliot Jacobson moving on from gaming.

Very good article on the retirement of our own Eliot Jacobson (teliot on the forum), After a decade of inconvenient truth-telling, Eliot Jacobson moving on from gaming. The writer did a great job of getting at Eliot's personality and impact on the industry. I too have a philosophy of just telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may. However, I have tried to have a policy of not delving deeply into advantage play and letting the casinos and advantage players have their cat and mouse game. I do share in Eliot's frustration with the general low level of math in the industry and latent old-school thinking.

I would like to correct this sentence from the article, "That informal interest turned formal in the mid-2000s when he developed a relationship with “Wizard of Odds” Michael Shackleford and, eventually, Jeffrey Compton, and began doing consulting projects for both."

Eliot never did consulting projects for me. I did send some consulting work his way that I thought he was better suited for.

With Eliot's departure, there will be a big void to be filled. For any APs thinking of switching sides, this would be a good time.

Hopefully Eliot will still come to visit us here at WoV once in a while.

The question for the poll is what are your thoughts?

Quote: Wizard

Very good article on the retirement of our own Eliot Jacobson (teliot on the forum), -, Eliot Jacobson moving on from gaming. The writer did a great job of getting at Eliot's personality and impact on the industry. I too have a philosophy of just the truth and letting the chips fall where they may. However, I have tried to have a policy of not delving deeply into advantage play and letting the casinos and advantage players have their cat and mouse game. I do share in Eliot's frustration with the general low level of math in the industry and latent old-school thinking.

I would like to correct this sentence from the article, "That informal interest turned formal in the mid-2000s when he developed a relationship with “Wizard of Odds” Michael Shackleford and, eventually, Jeffrey Compton, and began doing consulting projects for both."

Eliot never did consulting projects for me. I did send some consulting work his way that I thought he was better suited for.

With Eliot's departure, there will be a big void to be filled. For any APs thinking of switching sides, this would be a good time.

Hopefully Eliot will still come to visit us here at WoV once in a while.

The question for the poll is what are your thoughts?

WHY CAN'T I FLAG THIS POST?

The best things I learnt, which I now use, concerns counting and how a game designer (or casino thinking of using a new game) should perform some "vulnerability to counting" analysis.

The idea was that some card games dealt from a shoe (or in most of his cases, side-bets) could swing back and forward and sometimes even into the player's favour. The player had to develop an efficient counting algorithm based on the effect of removal - i.e how things changed when you removed particular cards - to detect this.

The assumption was that an AP would watch 100 hands and bet $100 on every occasion with an advantage, otherwise sit out. His measure was how much an AP might be able to make (by wonging in and out) per 100 hands observed.

For instance some figures I did many years ago showed the following for UK Blackjack.

Six decks	66% pen	$18.36
Six decks	83% pen	$27.20
Six decks	CSM	$1.75
Four decks	66% pen	$21.75
Four decks	83% pen	$39.21

I am guessing most casinos subconsciously accept games with low figures - as it's not worth an AP playing the game - and avoid situations with higher figures. What Eliot identified was vulnerable side-bets, which had numbers in the hundreds!

One day I hope this measure becomes an industry standard.

I hope he enjoys his well earned retirement. Hope he takes up BioStatistics. Some honesty and forthrightness could do wonders in that field.

AP is a myth 😉

I read the Blackjack Zone early in my BJ education and it was tremendously helpful.

Via con Dios, and enjoy every sandwich!

I would have lost my prop bet that ZenKing would retire before Elliot.

I had a few thoughts when I read the article and I am limited to knowledge of teliot through the postings he did here.

First, I think there are two industries where math is the only product: casino gaming and insurance. Insurance relies on math to determine prices and to get profit from a group of people. The two industries are very similar, except there are less plays in the insurance industry before you get caught.

Posting publicly about advantage plays likely got both players and casino surveillance smarter. However, it has not improved conditions for the player. While he was in the industry we saw the propagation of 6:5 Blackjack and the expansion of poker, both big winners for the casinos and the biggest games for table players. We saw odds on 3 card go from 1-4-6 to 1-3-6. The game has not died off. Meanwhile side bets that were exploitable were exposed and APs smart enough to figure them out before the casinos and teliot posting about them saw their advantages disappear (if possible).

Congratulations on the reitrement.

In any endeavor it is hard to exclude others. Even in Jai Alia or however its spelled, one burger flipper noticed some jerk coming in with a suitcase of cash and making bets that were always large and always won.

Now yeah, something was 'rotten in the Fronton' as they might say in a Hamlet spoof, but what sharp gambler smart enough to evade cops and cameras and other gamblers would be on the lookout for a dumb burger flipper who turned out to have sharp eyes and an agile mind.

It was the same way with the roulette wheel computer geeks who got warned off by a different university's physics department who had been sending graduate students to Vegas for two years of "faculty retirement fund enhancement" at the roulette wheel. The other university didn't care what other physicists did they just did not want them to speak about or publish their activities and thereby ruin the situation.

Its either a brave man or a fool who first opens his mouth.

Teliot, as I know him, seemed straightforward in his posts and honest as well as equipped with a good dose of realism regarding other people's tendancies regarding honesty in a casino.

I admire the courage to stand up and be the first to tackle thorny issues. I always admire the inconoclast.

Campaigning against 6:5 is admirable, but of course it did appear to be futile and it certainly turned out to be futile. Being honest about 6:5 is the important thing. Edge sorting is a question of casinos being cheap and lazy in the purchase of their cards. Shame on the casinos for resorting to the courts to rectify the casino's laziness and management mistakes.

In a world where experts are either Plaintiff's Experts or Defense Experts, Teliot was the old fashioned expert who came in and told the truth no matter who paid him. That was a refreshing breath of fresh air.

I hope Teliot does not retire from this forum nor from the active use of his skills in other fields that may interest him.

I just ordered two of Teliot's books from Amazon as a tribute. Advanced advantage play and contemporary casino table game design. Can't wait to read them!

I was a regular on his forum at cardcounter.com over a decade ago. I always felt that Eliot was knowledgable and had integrity.

Many of the on-line poker scandals, gimmicks, and black-hatting were in part discovered, or proven by teliot (and others such as the Wiz) at the request of the fleeced. That particular industry (OLG) may never fully recover. So yeah, there's bound to be haters, but the the Gen. Public owes him and the others involved a debt of gratitude for the expositions.

"If ya ain't cheatin' ya ain't tryin'."

Regards
98

I have mixed feelings about T. Eliot Richardson. Let me say that I have never met him I know him through his writings and posts.

1. I do use his Advanced Advantage Play book as a reference.

2. I feel he was a good gaming mathematician -but not a creative one. He did a lot of original analysis of games and side-bets and he seems to have been careful and fairly comprehensive - which is a strong praise for a mathematician. Generally, his methods were not original - in particular, he took a couple of mathematical methods and just applied them over and over. He offered some new ideas on "counting systems" but most of his "original counting systems" were impractical.

Example: I have seen him calculate "Effect of Removal" coefficients for card ranks on dozens of games and sidebets. But, I have never seen him wonder (in his writings) about any concerns with the EOR method. Are EOR coefficients still valid when applied to the removal of large multiples of cards? What about games where the importance of one rank is dependent upon another rank? Eliot never seemed to be curious about those kind of issues -at least not in his writings.

3. Whether its physical security, cyber security or game protection security, there is a concept called the "design basis threat" -its a defined threat which security professionals use to assess vulnerability and to design protective systems.

Eliot seemed to fall into a trap that many security professionals fall into - they exaggerate the threat to security, presumably in order to keep themselves employed. In physical security for facilities, I've seen unrealistic design basis threats be defined like something out a James Bond movie - terrorists coming over the ridge with combat helicopters and coordinated SWAT-teams, with help from the "insider threat." Aww, c'mon.

Eliot fell into this 'Aww, c'mon' trap. He exaggerated the capabilities of APs. He quoted unrealistic return rates for computer-perfect counting systems that would be impossible to implement, and the effects of a dealer flashing all three hole cards in Mississippi Stud and silly stuff like that. To his credit, he usually admitted it was "silly stuff" in the fine print- but he tended to enflame fear and hatred of APs in order to enrich himself. But I concede that Eliot is human and that all humans do that to some extent - so, like I said, my feelings about Eliot are 'mixed.'

Quote: gordonm888

I have mixed feelings about T. Eliot Richardson. Let me say that I have never met him I know him through his writings and posts.

1. I do use his Advanced Advantage Play book as a reference.

2. I feel he was a good gaming mathematician -but not a creative one. He did a lot of original analysis of games and side-bets and he seems to have been careful and fairly comprehensive - which is a strong praise for a mathematician. Generally, his methods were not original - in particular, he took a couple of mathematical methods and just applied them over and over. He offered some new ideas on "counting systems" but most of his "original counting systems" were impractical.

Example: I have seen him calculate "Effect of Removal" coefficients for card ranks on dozens of games and sidebets. But, I have never seen him wonder (in his writings) about any concerns with the EOR method. Are EOR coefficients still valid when applied to the removal of large multiples of cards? What about games where the importance of one rank is dependent upon another rank? Eliot never seemed to be curious about those kind of issues -at least not in his writings.

3. Whether its physical security, cyber security or game protection security, there is a concept called the "design basis threat" -its a defined threat which security professionals use to assess vulnerability and to design protective systems.

Eliot seemed to fall into a trap that many security professionals fall into - they exaggerate the threat to security, presumably in order to keep themselves employed. In physical security for facilities, I've seen unrealistic design basis threats be defined like something out a James Bond movie - terrorists coming over the ridge with combat helicopters and coordinated SWAT-teams, with help from the "insider threat." Aww, c'mon.

Eliot fell into this 'Aww, c'mon' trap. He exaggerated the capabilities of APs. He quoted unrealistic return rates for computer-perfect counting systems that would be impossible to implement, and the effects of a dealer flashing all three hole cards in Mississippi Stud and silly stuff like that. To his credit, he usually admitted it was "silly stuff" in the fine print- but he tended to enflame fear and hatred of APs in order to enrich himself. But I concede that Eliot is human and that all humans do that to some extent - so, like I said, my feelings about Eliot are 'mixed.'

Eliot was crushed for things like this from people inside the industry during a webinar of his recently.

Threats are often overblown. Stealing chips from a blackjack tray is often considered, but how many casinos ever thought in advance about someone waltzing in and telling a dumb dealer to turn the 8s and 9s around in Baccarat? No one ever planned for that threat.

I was very disappointed in the poll options, nowhere did I see: He should be tarred and feathered. (-;