Ben Affleck plays blackjack in Detroit following Nevada ban
The Hollywood actor turned director Ben Affleck has been spotted playing blackjack at a casino in Detroit, following a ban imposed upon the star in Las Vegas.
Affleck was banned from playing blackjack in a Las Vegas casino – the Hard Rock Hotel - after he was caught card counting in April.
Card counting is a technique blackjack players can use to try and determine the likelihood of cards being in favour of the house or the player.
Players may use a number of card counting techniques, many of which involve assigning a value to each specific number of a deck, and tallying that up to work out if the odds are in your favour.
However there exists some controversy over whether or not the use of this technique falls within the fair play of a Blackjack game.
Ben Affleck's blackjack bluesWhile card counting is not against the law in Nevada, many casinos have it as a part of their policy that clients cannot use the technique. Yet Affleck's perspective is different.
Speaking to Details Magazine the actor said: "I took some time to learn the game and became a decent blackjack player. And once I became decent, the casinos asked me not to play blackjack."
Affleck was reportedly banned for life from playing the game; a charge which has followed the Argo director internationally, as he was asked to leave a blackjack table in Canada in May.
However other casinos seem happy for the custom, as the resilient Affleck was spotted playing a $30,000 table at the MotorCity Casino in Detroit mid September.
While the Hard Rock Hotel has not retracted the ban from the blackjack tables, it has released a statement which reads: "Mr. Affleck, a valued guest of Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, is not banned from our property and is welcome back any time."
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