> Thanks Don. Well, that certainly explains how EV is
> affected. But what about SD and SCORE? SD will
> increase and SCORE must decrease.

Well, s.d. increases by the amount of extra s.d. the extra four units will incur five times per hour. That's a piece of cake to figure as well. So, because the four extra units are played at negative e.v., SCORE gets hit doubly -- the e.v. is ever-so-slightly lower AND the s.d. is greater -- just the opposite of what you want. But, you knew that going in.

The s.d. for a hand of blackjack is about 1.15 units. Since you have four extra units, making one such bet incurs 4.60 units of extra s.d. per hand. If you have five such hands per hour, the increase in s.d. is sqrt(5) x 4.60 = 10.29 units per hour.

So, e.v. goes in the numerator, to get SCORE, s.d. goes in the denominator, and that value is squared. If you know the original SCORE's e.v. and s.d., you would now make the above adjustments to get the new SCORE.

> Anyway to ballpark
> those figures?

See above.

> Suppose the 1 to 25 bet spread yields a 50 SCORE. How
> many dollars do you guess are lost betting 5 units off
> the top?

Get the individual numerators and denominators, and follow the above. In other words, a 50 SCORE is a 7.07 DI (the square root). That means hourly s.d. is about 14 times hourly e.v. Plug in your actual numbers and do the math. Shouldn't be hard.

Don