Not too long ago I bought the kindle edition of Casino Tournament Strategy by Stanford Wong. In the beginning of chapter 2 he presents a generic strategy chart. You can see this basic strategy chart at Amazon and they let you see the first few charters of the book.
Anyway what jumped out at me is he says A2 (soft 13) vs 5 is a hit. I always thought it was a double down on both S17 and H17 games. What is right? You can check out the chart at Amazon and look at chapter 2 without buying the book.
You can make a big change by just switching it from >=0 to >0. The math is still RC math and the EV moves a lot when you get rid of the RC 0 off the top bias. Too many RC 0 hands are off the top of a shuffled pack. Changing it to +1 is overkill.Originally Posted by hypercube
The question had nothing to do with counting. It asked about a basic strategy chart. Doubling A,2 vs. 5 in an 8-deck game is the closest BS play in blackjack. The difference between the two plays is 29 ten-thousandths of one percent! Griffin stated that he thought that not doubling 6,2 vs. 5 in SD was the closest play in the game. But he was wrong. That difference is 49 ten-thousandths.
Don
No, but I was referencing a post suggesting moving the index from 0 to +1. It helps to look at the quoted post to know what a post is referring to. I was pointing out that simply changing the index from 0 to "positive" is a pretty big index move. But being more conservative it wouldn't cost as much. I find the frequency of the 0 TC bin is well served by adding a positive RC index between the TC 0 and TC +1 indices. Plus the TC 0 bias to being heavily represented by off the top deck compositions always makes a bump in the usually steady flow of EV for a play through the high frequency TCs. If the index is close to or at TC 0 it is worth looking at using "positive" as the index rather than keeping strictly to integer indices.
The same concept could be used for any integer but 0 is the only one that is the RC at the start of the shoe. That makes RC 0 and TC 0 a bit of odd ducks. The data collected by the sim will be heavily weighted with early deck compositions. For other TC bins not so much.
Which is why my response addressed the part of the thread that had nothing to do with the OP. Don said all that needs to be said about the OP. But I had something useful to say to those considering moving the index from 0 to +1 as was suggested.
Technically, you're correct. But I liked the additional comments by Three and hypercube. I've always known these are close plays but 3's comments relating it to counting helped me understand just how close this play is. It's made me think about it differently. I'll definitely be incorporating 3's strategy. I know it doesn't improve my game a lot, but every little bit helps. Also, I enjoy learning more about plays like this. While counting was not part of the question, the comments by Three on how he thinks about it added more depth to the answer.
Also, the 5 pages of banter after an answer is what makes this my go-to-site. It would be a boring site without this.
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