To the public at large, one of the most incomprehensible things about professional blackjack strategies is hole-card play. Hole-card play is not a single strategy, but a whole range of strategies. To most casual range of blackjack players, this seems absolutely incredible and impossible, unless there is some sort of cheating going on. 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. But it’s not impossible, and in fact, most hole-card strategies are perfectly legal.
In introducing us to RC, Munchkin writes, “For every one hour spent on the table playing, the hole-card player may spend ten hours scouting… 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 players, even if shown a dealer who is flashing, would not be able to spot the hole card anyway.”
Hole-card players speak their own language and have their own heroes. Most consider card counting too weak to be worth the trouble. 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.
James Grosjean’s Beyond Counting (now out of print, though a second edition has been announced) is widely regarded as the hole-carder’s bible. In 1980, Stanford Wong published a book, Winning Without Counting (now out of print), with an initial price tag of $200. To pros, the book was well worth it. Wong discussed many methods of hole-card play for the first time and provided the only detailed description and analysis of “warp” play ever in print.
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. An observant player could see the arc in a dealer’s hole card created by hours of bending the corners of the tens and aces. Warp play was simply using this information to make strategy decisions.
In addition to everything Uston wrote about card counting and team play, Uston went into more detail about two of the hole-card techniques Wong had revealed the year before in Winning lnthout Counting: “spooking” and “front-loading.” Uston, in fact, had become quite adept as a hole-card player after his first book, The Big Player, was published in 1977.
Many quickly attain notoriety in the casinos and a degree of fame among other pros that appreciate the rare skills they have developed. Some dealers, in peeking, angled the card in such a way that a person standing behind them, or sitting at another table on the other side of the same pit, could glimpse the card also. The guy behind the dealer was called the spook. He would signal his buddies playing at the table with whatever information he could get on the hole card. Dealers don’t peek this way anymore, and this is one of the reasons why.