Blackjack question #2

Once again the disclaimers about the shallowness of my grasp of blackjack, blah, blah, blah. Still, I wonder things.

Video blackjack machines exist. I have seen them. I have played them at the MGM Grand while waiting for a show to start, at Ellis Island while waiting for a seat in their excellent barbecue restaurant, and at Terrible's in Primm, again while waiting for a show.

But what always puzzles me is how few and far between these units are. I was discussing this with Cardgrrl over dinner at the cafe at Harrah's the other day. She didn't seem convinced, so we wandered all over the casino floor in search of a video blackjack machine, never finding one. Perhaps there are one or two tucked off in a corner somewhere that we missed, but I'm not sure. We passed dozens upon dozens of video poker machines and slot machines (reel and video) of every variety. I checked as many of the multi-game units as I could, because I know that sometimes those have blackjack as a game option--but not at Harrah's. No video blackjack.

I don't understand this. If I were inclined to play blackjack, I would prefer a video machine to a live dealer, all else being equal. I'm assuming here that the payout schedules are the same. That may or may not be true, but it should be true that the video blackjack machines don't have worse payout than live games, because the casino logically should want to encourage people to play the version of the game that costs the casino less to provide, which is surely the electronic one. So if there is any difference, the payout schedule should favor the machine over the dealer. Still, I'm assuming that they are equal, without having put even one minute into ascertaining whether this is so. (Why would I bother with actual facts when I can form opinions without them?)

If that assumption is correct, then the video version seems to me obviously superior to the table game, if making more money (or losing less money) is your goal. You get a lot more hands per hour, and you don't lose anything to dealer tips.

But it's perfectly obvious from the scarcity of video blackjack machines and the large number of blackjack tables that very few players prefer the machines to the dealers. My question is why that would be so.

One possibility is that people counting cards can't exercise this skill at the video game. But surely that's only a small fraction of all blackjack players.

Another possibility is that people like the social interaction with the dealer and/or with the other players. I don't suppose I can say that that is clearly irrational, but it seems odd to the misanthrope in me to put that factor ahead of the financial one. Maybe if you know that you're going to lose money over the long run, spreading the loss out more slowly makes sense so you can enjoy it longer. But that frame of mind is completely foreign to me--if you know you're losing money, why play in the first place?

My best guess, though, is that the main reason that people choose the table version of blackjack is that they don't trust the machines to be playing fair. When you happily stand pat with your two 10s, and the dealer is showing a deuce with a 10 in the hole, then catches a 9 to hit 21, my hunch is that most people just chalk it up to bad luck when the pretty young lady is turning over those cards in front of her. But if the same thing happens electronically, they think they're being cheated by a crooked machine that deliberately dealt itself the perfect card.

Naturally, I can't prove that the casinos and video machine manufacturers do not conspire to make the loss rate higher than it would be if the game were fair, but I'm inclined to think that they're legit, in the absence of pretty compelling evidence to the contrary. Then again, when I see contrails from jets overhead, I think that they are what they seem--condensation from the heat of the engines in cold air, rather than seeding the sky with mind-control chemicals to enslave the population, or whatever.

So for those of you who play a lot of blackjack, enlighten me: Do you pick the dealer variety primarily because, (A) you're counting cards and you can't do that at the machines, (B) you know you're losing money and you want it to leak away more slowly, (C) you like the social atmosphere and would miss it at a machine, (D) the payouts are somehow more favorable at the table game, (E) you can't bring yourself to trust that the cards are genuinely being dealt randomly in the video version, or (F) some other reason I haven't thought of?