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  1. The Obligatory “If I ran a Casino” Post

    The goals of the casinos and of the advantage players are in conflict. The casino wants every dollar the player has and the player wants every dollar the casino has. If either party gets what it wants, neither side wins. It is necessary that both sides make money to keep the casinos in business and keep the mystique of the game alive. So, this is my attempt at triangulation.

    My suggestion is that the casino offer a rather poor set of rules, 8 deck, dealer hits soft-17, double after
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    Musings
  2. Simulation Reliability Note (Programmers only)

    I minor point that I neglected to mention in my book, not of interest to non-programmers. In the Sim Secrets chapter, I discussed simulator architecture – in particular, separating the actual simulation engine from the setup and display code. The simulation engines, the heart of the process, actually comprise a small percentage of the code. When you compile code, you set several options. Among them are various checks on operation of the code – for example, array bounds checks, integer overflow
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    Categories
    Code
  3. How Often Do We Reach a Count?

    When you are playing a six deck Blackjack game, and using KO or REKO, you start the count at -20. But, you do not get to bet until the card count has increased a fair amount. The question was asked on my forum, how often does this happen? Good question. I ran 32 simulations. All were six deck, S17, DAS, three players. Penetration varied from 65% to 80%. I measured the percentage of shoes where the count reached levels of -2 through +4. Below are the results.

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    Studies
  4. What Are the Ethics of Advantage Play?

    Is advantage play ethical? There are actions that some players have taken that are clearly unethical – sneaking extra chips onto a bet when doubling, bending cards, hidden cameras, and other such cheats. This is actually rare these days. What I am talking about is normal advantage play, as follows:

    Wonging: If you only enter a shoe only when the card count is in your favor, and/or exit when it is not, then you leave unaware players with worse odds then they would normally expect. They
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    Musings
  5. Wonging — How Many Shoes Do We Exit?

    Continuing the Wonging series started with Wonging — How Many Shoes Do We Play, I’ve added a chart on Wonging out. The question is, how many shoes do we exit? In this test, I assume that the player will exit at a fixed true count. Six decks, HiLo, 85% penetration. We will look at tables with one though five other players. And, we will look at Wongers that exit at a true count of -1, -2 and -3. Actually, the player will exit at one count lower if it is the first deck in the shoe.

    The
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    Categories
    Studies
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About Blackjack: The Forum

BJTF is an advantage player site based on the principles of comity. That is, civil and considerate behavior for the mutual benefit of all involved. The goal of advantage play is the legal extraction of funds from gaming establishments by gaining a mathematic advantage and developing the skills required to use that advantage. To maximize our success, it is important to understand that we are all on the same side. Personal conflicts simply get in the way of our goals.