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These tapes with a few remarks. What is it we're trying to accomplish with these tapes? I'd like you to think about blackjack players for a moment. There are players that consistently win, there are players that consistently lose, and there's everything in the middle. Our purpose with these tapes is to discover and reveal what these winning players are doing different from the rest of us. How are they winning? What are they thinking? What is on their mind when they go to a casino? What are the secrets of their play? Conversely, players that are struggling with the game, NBJ players, world-class players that are struggling with the game, what is it that they are doing differently? Why are they having a hard time? Why can't they win consistently? So we're going to talk about the good of it, and we're going to talk about the bad of it. We're going to be talking about things you should be doing. We're going to be talking about things that you should not be doing. One thing that I can tell you, I don't think it's in the card play for most of the mediocre players. For sure, we have the group that do not have the courage yet to make the NBJ plays. But I think, especially among world-class players, that it that is a relatively small group. The players that I'm talking about are players that know what it is they're supposed to do in a casino as far as card play is concerned, but are intimidated by the other players at the table, perhaps, and go ahead and make the basic strategy play instead of the play that they know that they should be making. This is a group of losing players, but it's not the group that I want to concentrate on in these tapes. Those players will come around as they gain more confidence with NBJ and with world-class play. The players that I want to concentrate on are the players that have practice. They do know what to do. They do make the right plays in the casino, but are nevertheless struggling with the game. They aren't consistent winners. They go home with too many losses. These are the players that I'm talking to. These are the players that I want to bring into the fold of consistent winning players. In my studies of my own play and of the play of other winning players, I have been able to isolate seven traits of winning players that I think spell the difference between winning players and mediocre players. These seven traits are, number one, they have the right winning attitude. Number two, they play the right games and avoid the wrong games. Number three, they have good game finding timing. Number four, they play the higher stakes games. They play on the average higher stakes games than the mediocre players. Number five, adaptation to the game they are in. Number six, they do not overplay their physical abilities. And number seven, they know when to go for the juggler. We're going to discuss each of these traits, and then I'm going to take you on an actual blackjack trip. Just you and I. I'm going to go down to the Indian reservation here in New York and play some cards, and I'm going to tell you exactly what is going through my mind on the way during and during the trip. I'm going to give you a practic practical use as much as I can, a practical example of all seven of these secret winning traits of winning players. Now let's go back to trait number one. They have the right winning attitude. Players that consistently win obviously know what it feels like to win. They like to put themselves in that winning groove. They like to avail themselves to what they know in the past has won. They never play a bad game. They're there for one purpose and one purpose only, to win money. Okay. Number two, they play the right games and avoid the wrong games. If we're to go and look at the different types of games in a casino, we can divide them up into four types as far as desirability is concerned. I don't want you to get confused with the game types that are in NBJ or the game types that are in world-class blackjack manuals at this point. I'm just talking about the desire the desirability. Okay, number one, we have full winning games. Number two, NBJ winning games. Number three, struggling or back and forth games. And number four, bad games. The winning player knows how to look over a game and determine which game type it is. Okay, let's go back and discuss these game types a little bit. Full winning games. Unfortunately, over the last few years, these games have become very rare. I believe that when I wrote the NBJ manual, I said that full winning games accounted for about 4% of the games in the casino. I would say now that full winning games, games that that anybody can win, regardless of whether they're playing basic strategy, no matter how they're playing, the players win and the dealer loses. Usually full winning games are really dealer unfavorable games. Today I believe that they account for less than 2% of the games in a casino. In other words, if a casino had 50 tables, you would be lucky to find one full winning game at any point of time in that casino. Winning games have been reduced by casino orchestration. The fact that casinos know enough to load up the tables now makes full winning games rare and rare. We used to see a lot of full winning games when we were seeing three and four and five player games in the casino. However, now when the casinos close down tables, a full winning game is going to draw players, it's going to load up to six or seven players, and it's not going to stay a full winning game very long. Okay, game type two, NBJ winning games. This is these these games are number two in desirability. They're the second most desirable type of game, and they account for a much larger percentage of games in the casino than full winning games. NBJ winning games are games that we can win the way we play, but the basic strategy or the common players will either struggle or lose in these games. They're a lot of fun to play because it's kind of fun to be the only winning player in the game. And we'll find that these games can account for as much as 50% of the games in the casino. It's usually not quite that high, but it can be that high, especially when the casino is not crowded. One of the benefits of playing NBJ is you have access to NBJ winning games. This gives you a much wider choice of games than basic strategy players who must only look for the full winning games. Okay, number three, struggling or back and forth games. These are also usually NBJ sensitive games, and they're games where we win a few and we lose a few. Hopefully, when we win, we win more than we lose when we lose. These games we have to work hard in to make some money. And we're going to avoid these games unless it's the best game that we can find in the casino. We're only going to play the struggling or the back and forth games when we can't find anything better. And fourth, bad games. By far, bad games account for the majority of games in the casino. Bad games may be bad because of clumping, or they may be bad because of dealer biases, dealer favorable biases. Usually it's a combination of both. And bad games have become much more plentiful over the last two or three years in the casinos. We've seen games where dealers get far more than her fair amount of first card tens, ten ops. In other words, a dealer should get four out of thirteen first card tens statistically, but we'll see games where dealers get five and six first card tens consistently out of every thirteen hands. We've even seen games where dealers will get as many as eight out of thirteen first card tens. We call these cyclical biases. We believe that they're created by the fact that players play one strategy, let's call it player strategy, and dealers play another strategy, let's call it dealer strategy. These two strategies being played in the same game tend to set up cycles in the cards that can favor the dealer and can favor the dealer very consistently and very greatly. The winning player is going to avoid these games at all cost. The winning player does not sit down in a game just to play blackjack. He's looking for a game that he can win. He's going to first look for full winning games. If he can't find any, he's going to look for NBJ winning games. Now the NBJ winning games are harder to detect than the full winning games. Full winning games are very easy to detect because we can strictly go by chips on the table. If the players are winning, it's a very obvious fact that the players are winning. We're very careful about our entry into a full winning game because of the fact that when we enter the game, we're going to change the player number, which may destroy the full winning game. So even when we enter a full winning game, we're still going to test the water. If we can't find a full winning game, we'll settle for an NBJ winning game. Now the problem with finding an NBJ winning game is they're not obvious. We won't see players winning these games. We won't see a full table of winning players. Sometimes none of the players will be winning in the NBJ winning games. What I look for in these games is games where players are holding their own. They're not necessarily winning a lot, but they're not getting killed. And of course, I'm looking for three and four and five player games. Struggling and back and forth games. We usually can't identify these games from the aisle, but we can identify them after a few rounds of play. Struggling or back and forth games are games where the NBJ play is usually the right play, but not all the time. It isn't consistently the right play. There is a good tens distribution throughout most of the deck, or most of the shoe, but not in all of it. And the outcome is that we win a few and we lose a few. And over the long haul, we come out ahead, and we we're gaining in this game, but we're not gaining at a fast pace like we do in the full winning games or in the NBJ winning games. Struggling or back and forth games are good games to play, but only as a last resort. We only want to play these games if we can't find either of the first two types, the full winning games or the NBJ winning games. And then of course the last game, bad games, we want to avoid altogether. Our motto in world-class play, world class blackjack, is avoid bad games. Okay, winning player trait number three. They have good game finding timing. You know all casinos have a preferable time to play them. It used to be that we could say after hours was the best time to play, but more and more casinos today, the majority of players play them after hours. We don't have that window of opportunity as clear after hours as we used to. Many casinos are becoming afternoon casinos. Look at it this way. As cards develop from brand new cards through the day and into the evening, they go through several stages. Sometimes we can start out with new cards and do quite well, particularly at first base. It depends on the wash that they use and the shuffle they use and a number of other things. And we know that some casinos are susceptible to first base play on new cards. But generally speaking, new cards will be significantly clumped because of the box card order of cards. So it's one of the things that we need to test, we need to know in each casino is that casino conducive to playing first base or even third base or uh advantage betting against brand new cards. Winning players will tend to know which casinos are susceptible to NBJ play against new cards and which casinos are not. They will have run those kinds of experiments. But as the cards develop through the day, we tend to say that it takes about two hours to satisfy the ill effects of new cards. Of course, that depends on the amount of play. If in the morning, usually when new cards come out, most casinos come out with new cards sometime in the morning, there aren't enough players to play these cards out. It can take quite a bit longer to turn new cards into good games. But eventually the cards will go through a window of good game activity. And then usually, as players come into the casino and so forth, the cards are become overplayed. Too many players, too many games, and the cards become clumped and the cards become biased. Now, once cards become clumped and they become biased, it doesn't mean that they're going to stay that way. There may be periods in the casino where the casino is slow, the dinner hour, for instance, or the lunch hour, for instance, where the casino uh becomes less crowded for a period of time, they do not close tables because they know the players are going to be coming back. And so there tends to be a lot of unfold tables in the casino. Two and three and four-player games can reduce the amount of clumping and bring these cards back into a very good playable situation. So cards go through windows of opportunity through the day. It probably doesn't pay us to keep track of all of this. It probably is a much better idea to just go into the casino and look the games over and see what is going on at that point in time. Are there full winning games? Are there NBJ games, and are there not? But the point is that winning players will know the casino that they're playing and they will know when that casino has historically produced good games. They'll know enough to play some casinos in the afternoon. They'll know to play other casinos in the dinner hour. They'll know to play other casinos on brand new cards. They'll know to play other casinos late night, for instance. They have good game-finding timing. They have a sense of good timing. They know when there's likely to be good games in the casino. Okay, let's go on to winning player trait number four. They play higher stakes games. Look, there's no doubt about it that winning players, on average, play higher minimum stake games than losing players. I find I almost totally avoid five dollar games. I very rarely sit in a five-dollar game. Why? Because five dollar games in general are the worst games in the casino, unless the casino happens to have three dollar games or one dollar games, what have you. They tend to be the worst games in the casino because they are the games that are played the most with the most number of players. The tables tend to fill up, the cards tend to get clumped and biased very, very quickly. Winning players recognize this fact. They recognize that they have to go up in minimum stakes in order to find games where the cards have not been overplayed. In some casinos, $10 games are sufficient. Unfortunately, that's not very often. In more casinos, you'll find that $15 minimum stakes games are sufficient, but in many casinos it'll be $25. In Atlantic City, $25 games now can be considered low stakes games most of the times, and particularly on the weekends, so that we may even have to go higher in stakes in order to find games that have good credibility. Now, this is a very tricky point. I don't want to put myself in the position of saying that the only way to win at blackjack is to play higher stakes games. And of course, your question to that could be well, of course they play higher stakes, they're winning. That's why they play higher stakes. If they were losing, they wouldn't play higher stakes. You can look at it that way, but that's not reality. I think it's more reality to note that they're winning because of the fact that they play higher stakes games. Let me put it to you this way. I would be willing to bet that many of our fifty and hundred dollar game players that are that are uh consistent winning players. Players would not be consistent winning players if they were forced to play the $5 games. I think that they would lose a much higher percentage of the games that they play if they were forced to play high uh $5 games or low stakes games. Many times players have said to me, Yeah, Davis, but I can't afford to play the higher stakes games. And I say to them, Well, I can't afford to play the lower stakes games. I can't afford to play games where my hands-one ratio is going to be that low. I'm going to leave it up to you, but I'm going to tell you that in general, in general, the higher the stakes are, the easier the game is to play, the more credible the game is going to be. Now that does not mean that all high-stakes games are going to have good credibility, far from it. Many won't. However, you're going to find a higher percentage of good credible games in the higher stakes games than you are in the lower stakes games. And the winning players understand this, and they have they have a tendency to zero in on the higher stakes games. They'll automatically do this as a look for empty seats in the casino. You're going to find more empty seats in the higher stakes games, certainly, than you are in the lower stakes games. Okay, number five. Adaptation. What we do with variable strategy, and what we do with the try-point strategy, is we adapt the strategy to the game that we're playing. We will find that the more random or the less clumping there are in cards, the closer it will play to basic strategy. And the more clumping there is in cards, the closer it will play to dealer strategy. We need to know in the game we are playing how often we need to hit in that game. Winning players, pay attention to this. They're going to know exactly what level of hitting is optimum in the particular game they're playing. And as the game changes, even, they're going to adapt to the new conditions. Am I always breaking when I hit 16 in this game? Is the dealer breaking more when she has a 10 up, or is she breaking more when she has a five or a six up? All these kinds of questions the winning player knows to ask himself to increase his hands-one ratio that little bit that it takes to win the particular game that he's playing. Adaptation. Okay. Number six, they do not overplay their physical abilities. Let's take a look at the profile of the losing player. He goes in, he's very often looking for the low-stakes games. He gets in one, he plays, he loses. He bounces to another one, he plays, he loses. He bounces to another one, he might win for a while, might win any of these games for a while, but in general he loses. He has a tendency to play for extremely long hours. What will happen with a losing player is when he gets in a struggling game or a back and forth game, he will have a tendency to stay there forever because it's the best game that he's played all day. He may play this game for hours on end. He may omit meals, he may omit breaks, and just play blackjack. There's no one that can play blackjack for hours and still be fresh enough to win the game, still be fresh enough to use correct adaptation, still be fresh enough to jump on juggler situations when they arise. The mediocre or the losing player tends to overplay his physical ability to play at peak performance. I tell players all the time, it's not how much you play, it's how well you play when you play. Look for opportunity, look for opportunity and play those opportunities. Get plenty of rest. Eat right, eat normal. Play when you're in your peak ability to play, and don't overplay that peak ability. Winning players automatically do this. They know when to quit. They know when to take a break. They know when to get a fresh start. Okay, and last but not least, they know when to go for the juggler. You know, in part of the game you're going to have the advantage, but in part of the game the dealer is going to have the advantage. That's true in every shoe, and it's true from one shoe to another. However, the winning player, he's won before. He knows when he's got the dealer. He knows when the dealer has gotten herself into a bad situation. You know, we talked about biases before. Well, biases can also work against the dealer. Biases can work to the point where the dealer isn't getting any first card tens or very few first card tens. She continues to get stiff cards up, she can get herself into break situations, she can get herself into situations where she's continually getting seventeens and eighteens. The wise player or the the alert player can see the situation developing, knows when he's got the dealer, and goes for the juggler. These opportunities don't come up that often. When you've got the dealer beat, when you're winning the vast majority of the hands, for instance, you need to know enough to go for the juggler. You've got to increase your bet. If you look at the game of blackjack strictly as odds, player odds, you're going to drastically increase your player odds if you know enough to go for the juggler at the right point in time. Let's look at some examples. Suppose you're playing first base, and you happen to be in a game where virtually every time you expect to get the ten, and therefore you bet high, you do get the ten. We've all played first base. We all know that in some of the first base games, you'll get the ten most of the time, you expect it. Some of the game, some games you play, there doesn't seem to be any significance in uh trying to bet on first card tens. But in other games, you just simply are always getting it. And in many of those games, when you get that 10, you win. When you are in a first base situation that's really working, we've had first base situations where we've won 90% of our high bets. When you get in that kind of a situation, you've got to know enough to go for the juggler. Leave your minimum bet alone, leave your low bet alone, leave them at leave it at table minimums, but increase your high bet. There's nothing that says you have to stop at 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 spread. You can go to 10 to 1, 20 to 1, in some cases 40 to 1 spreads under the right conditions. If you're winning the high bets, jump on that situation. Let's look at advantage betting. The same thing can happen. As soon as you see that you're winning a very high percentage of your high bets, you've got to address that situation, you've got to increase your high bets, you've got to increase your spreads, and you've got to go for it. The same thing can happen when we're playing progressions. Let's say we get in a game, we're playing maybe a 1, 4, 6 progression, we've progressed up to a 1, 4, 6 progression, and we're simply never losing three in a row in that game. We've got to start doubling our bets. We've got to look at that situation. We've got to say, hey, we're in a real good situation here, we've got to go for it. These situations do not come that often. But even though they only come once in a while, one of those situations will make up for a whole lot of bad games. The winning player knows when to go for the juggler. If world-class play, world-class blackjack, is about any one thing, that's what it's about. It's about jumping on opportunity. It's about going for the juggler at the right point in time. Okay, that takes care of the secrets of winning players, but as we go through the tapes, I'm going to try to give you examples of the secrets of winning players, the traits of winning players, whenever I can. Okay, I'm back. I took a significant break there and drove down to the uh Turning Stone Oneida Indian Reservation Casino. This is a brand new casino which opened uh just last month in uh central New York, just uh east of uh Syracuse at exit 33 and the New York State throughway. If you have uh read newsletter number eight, and by the way, winning players subscribe to the newsletter. Uh if you've read newsletter number eight, you'll note that I rated Turning Stone the number one uh casino area in New York in uh in the world. In the world, in the United States, including including uh Canada and including the Bahamas. Uh for that matter, I rate it number one in the world right now, since the best casinos I believe are right here in the United States. But at any rate, that was my seventh trip to Sterning to Turning Stone. Um I'd like to take time out here just for a second to let you understand that this is not my first attempt at making these tapes. I've had several false starts where I would go back and I would listen to what I said and I would say to myself, will these tapes do the job that they're supposed to do? Will they make players uh winning players out of the players that listen to these tapes? That is their purpose, to make you winning players. How do these tapes rank against that gold? And I just wasn't satisfied with my performance or with the performance of the tapes toward that goal on several stops, and I got the idea of taking you on a casino trip. I felt that that's what's missing from these tapes, practical demonstration of winning play, and I got the idea to take you on a casino trip to tell you exactly what's in my mind and exactly how I do it and why I do what I do, almost a play-by-play description uh of this trip. Let's talk about Turning Stone just for a moment. Uh Turning Stone, there's about 60 or 70 blackjack tables at Turning Stone. When the casino is completely finished, there will be 200 gaming tables, probably about 150 blackjack tables. It's a very large casino, it's uh no glitz whatsoever, very plain, and it's a player's casino. Uh I love to play under the conditions that this casino offers. There's no slot machines, uh, I don't like a lot of noise. It is a Vegas format game. Now I've mentioned that several times, Vegas format, and I understand that some of you don't really know what that means. Vegas format simply means that it's a peaking game. In this particular case, the case of Turning Stone, it's what we call a full peaking game. That means that whenever the dealer gets either an ace up or a tenup, she is going to peek and see if she has a blackjack. If she has the blackjack, she just turns it over and the hand is not played out. They don't, for instance, play that way in Atlantic City. The other thing about the Vegas format is when the dealer deals her own hand, she deals both cards down. And she turns up the second card just before uh and uh hopefully it's the second card. If it's not, she's doing the Bahama the Bahama whole card trick. We want to make sure that it's always the second card. But she deals herself both cards down and then turns up the second card just before the first base player uh is asked for his play decision. Uh they don't do it that way in Atlantic City, for instance. Uh uh just uh Vegas is where it's primarily done, and that's why we call it the Vegas format. In Atlantic City, they just go ahead and deal the first card up to the dealer when it comes around, and they deal the second card down. In Atlantic City, they don't peak, so you never know if the dealer has blackjack or not until the hand is played out. Now we used to think, and I've even said, that uh it makes absolutely no difference, it's just a format change. But I got to thinking about that on the drive down to Turningstone. Turningstone is a fairly pleasant two-hour drive from here uh towards Syracuse. I take Route 29, the back roads through the mountains, over to the throughway. I'd hit the throughway about halfway to the casino, and then it's New York State Throughway, very boring drive from there on into the casino, and it gives you a lot of time to reflect on things. Now, you might think that I would think about blackjack all the way. Um actually, pretty much the opposite is true. I try to keep my mind uh off of the game, but every now and then I try to give myself some encouragement. I say things to myself, play like play with discipline, don't play a bad game. Go for the juggler when the opportunity presents itself, and so forth. But one of the things I happen to reflect on, on the drive on the way to Turning Stone, is that there is a significant difference in the Vegas format versus the Atlantic City format, let's call it. The Vegas format is in fact more player favorable than the Atlantic City format. We should favor the Vegas format situation. Here's why. We know that dealers will tend to get blackjacks more frequently in the high ratio sections of the deck. We know that the high tens ratio sections of the shoe are the player favorable sections of the shoe. In the Atlantic City format, when the dealer gets a blackjack, the cards continue to be played. That means that the players will be faced with making their play against either an ace up or a ten up. So anyone with a stiff hand is going to hit. Well, since blackjacks occur more often in high ratio areas of the shoe than in low ratio areas of the shoe, this means every time or or whenever the dealer gets a blackjack in a high tense ratio area of the shoe, that a portion of that shoe is going to be of that high tens area is going to be wasted by useless hits against that 10 or against that ace. We're going to use up unnecessarily portions of our favorable high tens ratio area. However, in the Vegas format, in the Vegas format, the game is cut off if the dealer has blackjack. She simply turns it over, the players have no opportunity to waste hits against a blackjack, and therefore the remainder of the high tens ratio is preserved for further play. When you the more you think about it, the more you realize this is a fairly significant advantage of the Vegas format style of play. Also, this gives you an idea of the kinds of things that occupy my mind on the way to the casino. Another thing that I always thinking think about on the way to the casino is the importance of winning the first hand, the very first hand that I play. I always make a very special effort to win this hand because as soon as you win the first hand, you are now playing on their money. Whenever you're playing on their money, you are in much better psychological condition to win than when you're playing on your own money. A lot of us tend to think, well, when we first get to the casino, we've got a pocket full of money, we can afford to fool around, as it were, an experiment and so forth, because we've got plenty of money. It's a very foolish way to think. The quicker you get to playing on their money, the better off you are. Okay, I see we're running out of tape. Um on this particular side. I want to tell you about this game, and I'm going to save it for tape number three.

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You've just listened to E. Clifton Davis speaking on the topic searching for opportunities. For further information or questions, you may contact Mr. Davis by phone. His number is 518-587-9219. In addition to these WCB tapes you are listening to, MBJ also has a broad spectrum of other products. These include Eclipse and Davis's quarterly newsletter, as well as other products in development. Also available are a wide variety of gaming supplies at discount prices. For further information on gaming supplies, please contact Keith Smith at 717-533-7992 or Bill Ray at seven one seven seven nine oh nine seven two nine. This ends side B of Tape One. Thank you.