Wrap-play, Front-loading and Spooking in Blackjack
To the most of the public, one of the most incomprehensible things about professional blackjack strategies is hole-card play. This includes a wide range of strategies. The one feature that can be found in all of these strategies is that the player either knows the dealer’s hole card, or has valuable information about that hole card, whether it’s a paint or not. To most casual blackjack players, this seems absolutely incredible and impossible, unless there is some sort of cheating going on. But it’s not impossible, and in fact, most hole-card strategies are perfectly legal.
Last year one of the best blackjack books author interviewed “RC,” one of the most successful hole-carders of modem times. In introducing us to RC, he writes, “For every one hour spent on the table playing, the hole-card player may spend ten hours scouting… Most players, even if shown a dealer who is flashing, would not be able to spot the hole card anyway. Holecarders spend hundreds of hours training their eyes to see something that flashes by in a fraction of a second, often cast in shadow.”
Most consider blackjack card counting too weak to be worth the trouble. Many quickly attain notoriety in the casinos and a degree of fame among other pros that appreciate the rare skills they have developed. But let’s look at some of the forerunners of today’s players, describe some of the most common hole-card strategies, and get a historical overview of this type of legal strategy.
What is warp play invented by Stanford Wong? In the old days, dealers used to manually peek under their tens and aces to see if they had a blackjack before satisfying the players’ hands. This constant bending up of the corners on the tens and aces tended to put a warp into these cards if the casino did not change its decks frequently. Warp play was simply using this information to make strategy decisions.
What is front-loading, another invention of american authors? A front loader is simply a sloppy dealer who flashes his hole card as he is placing it beneath his upcard. It’s actually a pretty descriptive term, since one common way that such a dealer inadvertently flashes the hole card is by tipping the face of the card up toward the “front” of the table as he is “loading” it. A player who sits in a seat that provides him a view of this card is said to be “front-loading.”