What Is Heat?

Heat is the attention that your play is drawing from the casino. This attention can be as light as the pit casually watching your play, to the pit boss standing at your shoulder and surveillance analyzing your play from the “eye-in-the-sky” using software. Unfortunately, you cannot see surveillance. The more attention, the more likely that the casino is considering countermeasures against you.

This chapter will briefly look at the causes of heat. I will begin by looking at a Heat Profile table from Casino Vérité Blackjack, provided on the previous page. This table is used by the software to analyze your play and warn you if your style of play is likely to draw heat. Note, this is just a sample table and will be used here only as a basis for discussion. Every casino is different. For example, Bellagio is less likely to be bothered by large bets. However, some casinos will sweat you if you show any signs of counting. This also ignores your “act,” that is how you present yourself in the casino.

The basic concept of the table is to add degrees to your temperature whenever you take an action in the table. The higher the temperature, the more the danger. The degrees added depend on whether you are playing single-deck, double-deck, or shoes. Single-deck games are watched far more closely (except for 6:5 BJ). Also, two temperatures are kept: pit and surveillance. The pit temperature is the attention you receive from the pit. Surveillance (the eye-in-the-sky) generally spends more time watching money and for signs of cheating. However, in larger casinos, if pit temperature increases enough, they may call surveillance to watch you more closely. This is more dangerous. I will discuss heat using this table as a general guideline.

Seat

The first four rows provide the starting heat. This depends on the seat in which you are sitting. First base is at your far right and third base at your far left. Card counters gain a slight advantage sitting at third base, particularly at single-deck. For this reason, it has long been known that card counters are more likely to sit at third base. However, since this has been long known, counters are more likely to sit at the seat next to third base. However, this is also long known by the casinos. What I am trying to say is that it

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger