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Modern Blackjack nth Edition

The Effect of Ridiculous Players

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The complaint from card counters is common: Stupid players are destroying the count. There is a high count, I bet large, and some player in front of me takes too many cards and ruins the count. It has been explained many times that, on average, this has no effect, and I will not repeat the explanation here. But, as is true so many times in Blackjack, there are exceptions.

In single-deck Blackjack, some casinos deal a fixed number of rounds, and some a fixed penetration. But, there are others that shuffle based on a combination. Either shuffling when either or both a number of rounds or penetration is reached. I decided to take a look at one such possible scenario.

Let us simulate a single-deck game with H17, DOA, nDAS, three players (one billion rounds). The dealer will shuffle when three rounds have been played, unless less there are at least 20 cards left. In that case, a fourth round is dealt. The card counter sits at third base. In separate sims, the other players play Average (typical player strategy), Mimic the dealer (play exactly as the dealer plays), No Bust (Never hit 12 or higher) and split all tens. Below are the SCORES:



What we see is that there are some differences in the SCOREs. Let us look further. Below are the percentage of hands played in the extra round:



OK, we see that when the other players play No Bust, we see more fourth rounds, and when the players split ten pairs (the most common hand), we see few fourth rounds. This obviously makes sense as the No Bust player will take few cards and ten-splitter will take many, many cards. BUT, shouldn’t we expect the opposite effect on SCOREs? After all, want deeper penetration – but the deep penetration is hurting us. Well, this is due to another known problem. Below is the average EV of each round for the first sim:



As we see, the first round has negative EV since we have no card counting information. The second rounds enjoys higher EV with some information and the third, more info for more EV. But, not so with the fourth round. The thing is, we only get a fourth round when few cards have been played. And, if few cards are played, it is because they were large cards, not requiring many hits. And that means, the count was often negative. So, we have more information, but often it is of less value due to poor counts.

So, yes it is possible for other players to affect your advantage in the case where it materially affects penetration. But, the effect may not be what you expect.

Keep in mind that this is only one possible scenario.

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