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Don't set goals but play unit to unit!

It was late summer 1994. My wife Elizabeth and I were traveling with Daniel Roberts and his wife Marilyn to Squaw Valley Resort at Lake Tahoe. First, we were taking a few days off to relax at the Mirage in Las Vegas. Back in those days, blackjack at the Mirage was a great game. After playing all morning, Stuart and I met the wives at the pool for lunch. During lunch, Daniel remarked that playing at the Mirage was "like taking candy from a baby". When asked by Marilyn, how much he had won, Stuart replied, "$2,500". Elizabeth turned to me with the same question. Almost embarrassed, I said, "$250". Liz asked me why I didn't win big like Daniel? At the time, I did not know the answer, obvious as it was.

Knowing how to accept profit is a mental problem for most players. It has to do with their belief system about gambling. It is their attitude of not winning enough and emotionally not able to detach from a loss. It also has to do with the little known concept of the units played and the bankroll.

Losing is not fun and it must be accepted as part of the game. How much you lose is usually a matter of going bankrupt or holding to a discipline to walk away. The thought form of winning big and winning more is what I want to address in this issue. Winning is a limitless experience. When it comes to abundance, you are bound only by the limitations set within your paradigm about money. There is nothing stopping your abundance, from having it all, except for your own beliefs and thought forms. The catch to what I just said is when you are playing a zero sum game with odds against you winning. Even when on a winning streak, you still face the odds predicating the eventual end to the streak. The problem arises when a little voice in your head starts whispering, "keep playing, win more". In order to win more sessions than you lose, you must be able to accept any profit that comes your way. As Daniel Roberts used to say, "The only way to quit winners, is to quit while you are winning."

I do not like to speak about wins or losses in terms of an hourly rate. I especially do not like win goals. I prefer to relate to winning or losing in terms of units played per session. A session may last twenty minutes or three hours and twenty minutes. In my introduction, I told the story of two players' success at blackjack. One player won ten times that of the other player. The part of the story not explained was that Stuart was playing ten times the unit that I was playing, or a $50 unit compared to my $5 unit.

For either blackjack or a dice game, when playing to win, it is all about the units. The money won or lost is relative to your minimum unit or base bet. When you have an understanding of how many units you can expect from either game, it makes it easier to accept the profit or the loss. No matter your minimum bet, the units won or lost will be the same. The difference in the money won or lost is a factor of the unit bet. Simply stated, if you want to win big, you have to bet big. It goes without saying, that you must be prepared to lose big as well.

Now, there are a couple of limits to deal with when it comes to gaming. You are limited to the money you have available to gamble and you are limited by your emotional tolerance to risk. The cards and dice are dumb. They do not know how much you are betting. Entering a game with $150 or $1,500, unit to unit, the results will be the same. At the end of a session, you will ether be in profit a certain number of units or down a certain number of units. You must be emotionally comfortable with whatever unit level that is your financial support to enter a game.

Let's take a look at a game of blackjack, using "units won" for an example. An expected win, playing blackjack, can range between 8 to 14 units per session. Playing $10 units, the money won is between $80 and $140. Since the average unit won depends on your playing style, the only way of consistently winning more money is to increase the size of the betting unit. In order to win $1000 playing blackjack, the unit bet needs to be a hundred dollar chip. The units won or lost will be the same, only the value per unit changes.

If you want to win more, you must be able to finance yourself for the level of play necessary for that dollar amount. Please understand that I am not trying to limit your winning sessions with my example. At the same time, I want to impress you with the fact that the table games, on average, do not give up big wins very often. You must be able and willing to accept any win along with any loss as well.

Recognizing that the game is measured in units played, I hope that it will help you with the thought form of winning big and winning more. A five-dollar blackjack player is not going to win $500. A five dollar blackjack player is likely to win $50 or ten units. The same player, playing $50 units is going to win $500. Unit to unit, the difference is in the dollar amount of the unit played.