Blackjack Strategy

[Mitch Evans]

[ QUOTE ]
I understand that 1% -ev is 1% of all bets lost but if I am entering a session with $20 and if I win I play until I am bored (usually when I start losing) If i lose my $20 I go do something else

So far it seems to be working very very well (I haven't played poker today just blackjack and I have made far more then I could in a week of poker at the .50/100 limit..)


[/ QUOTE ]

Man, I don't know what else to tell you... people have been doing what you have been doing for centuries, and no one has been able to sustain long-term a win rate. Good luck....

[Jeff_B]

Oh I know just interesting to me especially this its been working really good recently.. btw if you find $1 blackjack in vegas you are awesome least I could find was $5 and a sign that said $2 blackjack inside (I think on fremont downtown) and well the table was no where to be found...

[MicroBob]

odds of getting a blackjack are about 1:21 (depends on number of decks though).

i would say that the dealer would have a blackjack when you have a blackjack roughly once in every 21 occurances (although actually less than that since you are taking a T and an A from the shoe that he can't get).
The chances obviously increase significantly when the dealer is showing a T or an A.


I agree with Mitch Evans regarding your insistence that everything is working great for you on this whole blackjack thing.
You are playing a negative ev game. You claim to understand this. But then you claim that your little betting system is giving you better profits then you ever could at poker.

Well, yeah.
If I played the slots or roulette and ran hot I could make more too. Same if I played the lottery.

Your recent blackjack wins have everything to do with running lucky at the right time (most likely when you happened to place a larger bet out there) and zippo to do with how great your betting system is.

[Jeff_B]

oh I know but the thing is this strategy seems much better then a regular $1 betting system or however I used to play because I never used to win..

[kyleb]

[ QUOTE ]
oh I know but the thing is this strategy seems much better then a regular $1 betting system or however I used to play because I never used to win..

[/ QUOTE ]

Drawing conclusions from invalid sample sizes.

www.wizardofodds.com

[Sandra Bullett]

[ QUOTE ]
oh I know but the thing is this strategy seems much better then a regular $1 betting system or however I used to play because I never used to win..

[/ QUOTE ]

Casino games have 4 common attributes:
1) house advantage
2) very fast 'rounds' (so the house advantage can 'bite' many times per hour).
3) easy to learn (so idiots can pick it up quickly, idiots being their target market)
4) very high variance.

To discuss the last point further. High variance means, in English, that the results are highly erratic, ie. fluctuate wildly. Gamblers remember their wins but forget their losses, and get hooked. A very low variance game, eg. where hand after hand you get back 95% of what you bet, would be very boring and very unprofitable for casinos. No one would get hooked. ALL casino games are high variance around a house advantage mean.

Even among all the casinos' high variance games, BJ is especially variable (whereas Poker is among the lowest varianced of games)

For the same +$10 EV/hour, a poker game might have a standard deviation of $50 to $75 (variance of $3600 say), whereas BJ will have a std dev of $600 (variance of $360,000, ie. 100 times worse). This has a huge effect on human perceptions. In fact, with BJ, it pretty much destroys human abilities to judge. To explain:

When I have run BJ simulators (which I have done a LOT of), wanting to get an EV of certain betting systems and bet spreads, I wouldn't even glance at the simulation results until the simulator had run over 100 million hands. Even runs of a few 10's of million hands would show noticeable fluctuations due to 'small' sample size. Bear in mind that it takes about 5 years for a full-time BJ professional to clock up just 1 million hands.

What I am saying here is that your personal BJ experience, over weeks and even months, bears absolutely no resemblence to statistically likely EV. Your results will be utterly and totally dominated by luck, rather than statistical likelihood. Therefore you simply cannot judge whether one betting system is better than another betting system, unless you use both of them for at least 5 years each (and preferably about 50 years each).

Poker, OTOH, will usefully approach EV within a few months of play.

Your current level of BJ experience is statistically worthless. Either play for another 5 to 10 years then get back to us, or program your betting system into a BJ Simulator and run a few 10's of millions of hands and tell us the results (hint: you will prove the house advantage as you are varying your bets independently of any useful variable, ie. you are not counting, etc).

Your statement is as silly, statistically speaking, as saying you've flipped a coin 3 times and seen that heads come up twice as often as tails, and so your Head betting strategy "seems much better".

[posnera]

This is NOT meant to be a defense of Martingale (or reverse) as a long term profitable strategy. However, if my plan is to go to play some blackjack, with a predetermined maximum loss, then there should be a strategy which gives a higher likelyhood of a big win. It seems that a doubling when you are winning strategy gives the best chance of accumulating chips. Yes, this comes at a higher risk of busto, but my risk of busto approaches 100% anyway, because I'm playing the amount I buy in with, with the hope of a big win. If doubling when losing gives a small chance of being slightly ahead with a large risk of ruin, wouldn't the opposite give a small chance of a big win with a large risk of ruin? This is all in the short run, assuming that I am on the good side of variance for a few hours.

[Myrtle]

You have authored two superb posts in this thread!

Many thanks for taking the time amd making the effort to lay it out in such an easily comprehensible fashion.

Myrt........

[zaphod]

I think my system is better:

I bet 0 dollar on the first hand. If i loose i double the stakes for the next hand, if i also loose that hand i double again.... Has been working perfect so far. Currently i am about even.

[Jeff_B]

No I am just saying it is an interesting idea and it is nice to be making some "significant" money off of blackjack for once instead of dropping 20 here 20 there in just playing $1 at a time...
its intersting obviously it is not perfect other wise everyone would be a million and doing it
Perhaps I am just running good plus using the charts most of the time for this but it is still enjoyable...