BLACKJACK IN THE SUN: ARUBA

I had to laugh again. He was a very pleasant and entertaining fellow who was having a great holiday. His red, sunburned nose and silver hair made him look like a tropical Santa Claus. I hope' he reads this story and recognizes himself. I also hope he had the cajones to quit a winner.

You may be wondering how I did on the trip. The results of my playing sessions are shown in the accompanying table. I had nine winning sessions and six losing sessions for a net profit of $920. Most of my playing was at crowded tables for fifteen to; thirty-five minutes at a stretch. A couple of times I played for; more than an hour. On one of these long sessions I suffered my' largest loss: $265.

My betting pattern was typical for a four-deck game. About 90 per cent of the time I was making the minimum five-dollar bets. Of the remaining time, two out of three bets were jumped to twenty dollars when the count was high enough. In the other one third of favorable situations, when the count was very high, my bet would be either forty or fifty dollars, or thirty dollars each on two hands. Once in a while I played two hands of forty or fifty dollars each. Because my winnings per hour were relatively high, I have to conclude that the gambling in each of the Aruba casinos is completely honest. I never saw anything suspicious at any time. This, coupled with the lack of heat, makes Aruba an excellent place to play winning Blackjack.

You may be wondering what happened to my wife during all this. Although she knows the strategies nearly as well as I do from helping me practice in my early days, she prefers to play the slots. She hit a fifty-dollar jackpot in the slot machines two nights in a row. Then she lost forty dollars and quit gambling for the week. Wise woman.

If someone is after you to go to an island paradise, and you like to win at Blackjack, don't pass up Aruba. It's growing all the time and more hotels are planned (they plan carefully and build only one hotel at a time). The food was excellent, and the vaca-tioners friendly. However, I must disagree with my gambling ac-quaintance. You don't need cajones to win in Aruba; all you need to know is how to track the cards with the Hi-Opt I system. The rest is a heaven I'll be back to enjoy soon.

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