ocdplayer: Blackjack fairytale?

[ocdplayer]

I'm sure you're all familiar with the book "Bringing down the House" about the MIT teams in the early nineties. In this book, this team claims to have boasted on average a twenty to thirty percent return on their investment, and in one banner year, almost fifty percent. How on earth could this be possible? They operated as the standard arrangement of multiple spotters supporting about three or four big players. Last I checked, the best advantage any of us can ever expect on a red-hot shoe is maybe maybe maybe five or six percent. Not that I'm sorry about it (except for today's 26-unit beating) but this fairytale is what got me curious(and now totally involved) about advantage play.

[Don Schlesinger]

You misunderstand how return on investment (ROI) is calculated. You don't need more than a one or two percent edge at a game to get a yearly ROI of 100% or greater.

Your original bank is put into play many times during the course of a year.

Suppose you buy into a game for, say, $100 and have an average bet of $5 per hand. You might bet 100 hands for the first hour. If you play for, say, 20 hours, and win at a rate of 1%, you have won 20 x 100 x $5 x 1%, or $100. If $100 were your whole bank (of course it wouldn't be), then your ROI would be 100%.

Get the idea?

Don