This thread gets better and better! I loved HCB's statement about the luck factor! What % was "good" and "bad?"
Cray, you are a TRUE gambler! Not an AP bone in you! $800 to $10000? WOW!I could never stomach a swing like that! From $800 did you start by $15 again, then to $100, then to $15...how did you make it to $10000? I would have loved to see you in action!
Hal, if you PM me, i will explain how the quote feature works so conversation can be in context and civilized. to answer your question, i must surely have been referring to what YOU probably prefer to call positive and negative variance and the % i would have been referring to, turns out, is EXACTLY the same % that has been blowing glad smoke onto your efforts and kicking your butt, for a long time--greatly affecting your not-all-that-short-term, for a LONG time-----more so than the advantage i presume you enjoy.Originally Posted by Halbruno
guys like me have no problem making it clear it is LUCK we are grappling with managing. your approach is "damn the luck, full speed ahead, i will, surely, win sometime".
i think that is a swell approach as long as willing to do the work, suffer the sometimes bone-rattling, bankroll-depleting consequences, especially on the road to getting your unit-size big enough to make the endeavor worthwhile, are willing to re-sole your shoes walking to so many stores to avoid getting tossed, replace the shirts you wear out with your chin as you turn to look over your shoulder, can afford the rolaids bill as you get pissed at everyone at a table that is not you, have the time and money for your psychiatrist and valium bills, as you sweat whether the future will offer ANY beatable games----i am sincere in saying i ADMIRE those of you who have pulled this off. I have tried it myself and it is not going to happen for me.
now, in a DISADVANTAGE forum, plenty of scorn from all and guys like RollingStoned and Tthree and DSchles, have also thrown stones and poured plenty of cold water, BUT have ALSO been good enough to patiently provide information and education to those of us lacking the innate math talent. half of us disadvantage guys are delusional and the other half a mixture of neophytes who just dont get it yet and there are a few like me: bright enough, lot of play but no damn good at believing the big bang is bull**** just because a smart guy like hoyle made fun of it.
if you are reading closely, you can see i am STILL working my way thru whether adjusting bet-sizes, contingent on an artificial construct of where "zero" is represents the nonsense you guys insist it is or are you just a bunch of hoyles inventing derisive terms for what is true? even though such an approach manages LUCK far more sensibly than counting does, i am getting the slow, sinking feeling you counter-guys got it right----lotta you counter-guys are sheep so it does not bother me to play the fool till this non-sheep guy gets it figured out for himself--wouldnt trade to be a sheep.
thanks again to those who are educating their disadvantaged brethren--we all love the game and wanna beat the casinos.
Okay. In case your math challenged mind had trouble extrapolating what you are doing from the info I will break it down a little. I think you are upping your bet to make recovery more likely when you fall to far into the red. You are successfully doing that but...
At your initial flat bet your expectation is to gradually slip negative as you play. After an hour you expect to be down about 1/3rd of a unit. Of course your actual results will be wildly different but in the expected ranges of standard deviations just as likely above expectation as below. As you play more time the expectation continues to drift negative and the percentage you are from your expectation continues to become smaller. I am sure you got that much but maybe not. Then you decide you need to increase your bet once far enough behind because your recovery point is too much toward the positive tail of the bell curve indicating recovery is not likely. You up your bet and move that recovery point closer to the middle of the bell curve which accomplishes the task of making recovery more likely but you never cross the center of the bell curve which would make recovery the most likely outcome. Your expectation is drifting even quicker to the negative but the short term range of expectation has a wide range of distribution.
For every time you recover you expect another time equally likely on the other side of the increased negative expectation. The one wild card as you point out is the fact that you can end the Hail Mary bets and return to minimum bet or walk at any time. The road to expectation for your chip stack is undefined and winding. Sometimes it is a straight climb or a dive off a cliff in the short term. More often it wanders back and forth. You will never escape the house edge by this method but at increased risk of being much further behind you give yourself an increased shot at breaking even. If you experience the luck of landing in say the 40% chance that you recover (maybe even greater than 50% given you can leave as soon as it happens if you are 40% to be there after an hour you will have made it and adjusted before the hour for some of your failures an hour out. The trouble is you are breaking even with success and losing a lot with failure. No matter how many times you adjust your bet to make recovery more likely the times you fail to recover will be severe enough to put your cumulative successes to your expectation. It is the math that can't be escaped.
There is validity to what you do in changing win loss distribution to a more pleasing, lots of small wins corrected by fewer larger losses. Just as the hourly standard deviation is 14.2% and at 24 hours of play it is 2.9% so does your negative expectation increase and variance (range of expectation) narrowed. Each bump in bet will increase the overall standard deviation which increases the range of long term results but you still have the same approach to expectation in the long run. Play long enough and your results will approach losing the house edge times the total of all your bets. The bet increases just makes the long run further away as the increase in average standard deviation indicates. It doesn't change the general math it just changes the path to getting there and the duration of time to the approach of expectation.
Last edited by Three; 09-19-2013 at 05:31 AM.
Nope, I was too frustrated and emotional... I put it all up on the first bet and won. Then the next one I think was $500 and won that too. I just don't remember to be honest with you. There were so many crazy swings and no less than 2-3 times that I came real close to being wiped out. Had that feeling each time like that was the end of the road but it wasn't. I do think I got really lucky but had I not abandoned by strategy when I was frustrated and seeking revenge, I wouldn't have put myself in the situation of having the last of my BR on the table.
I can't stress enough just how many winning and losing streaks I had last weekend. It's funny because when I'm losing hand after hand and betting the minimum, I actually root against myself. This is because I feel like I'm saving a lot of money by losing the minimum on all these losing hands as opposed to 100-1000 a hand. All the players and dealers of course thought this was "cray cray!"
This thread gets better and better! I loved HCB's statement about the luck factor! What % was "good" and "bad?"
Cray, you are a TRUE gambler! Not an AP bone in you! $800 to $10000? WOW!
another very helpful post--thanks. Tthree you are very close to getting the handicapped to see it---gimme a little time to let stuff soak in and i will try to man-up and confess i am a convert to the Church of the holy counters-and-everyone-else-is-dumb-as-a-rock. i am not there yet, i know we are avoiding religious topics in this forum but these things take time.
cool post norm. as we both know, when counters and disadvantage players encounter negative variance, both look a lot like cat-herders but the counters get stampeded till they eventually round up and butcher the herd. careful disadvantage players dont get stampeded, enjoy the round-up and, unfortunately, if you have it right, lose all their cats before they get to market.Managing luck.Is that anything like:
great post and the quote above is understood perfectly, as to what you are saying. let me take a stab at staying consistent with what you say while describing what it looks like "in real life" with a "what-if?" teaser at the end. in going thru this, i told you i am very close to believing what this forum is trying to teach me of math and that makes me suspect what i say below must contain some gross error in math/logic as i have laid it out. so, by all means, point it out. but, be gentle, its my first time.
2500 bankroll. -.5% disadvantage. if ruin, start over, new 2500.
GO: close enough to 50:50, the player will enjoy some positive variance. for the moment we will ignore what he might do, will assume he doesnt screw it up and simply say that for THIS half the time he will quit at zero or higher.
NEXT: half the time he will go into the red and we will assume a fight to the death that results either in 2500 ruin or he quits because, "he made it back to even".
he will attempt this hocus-pocus by flat betting $25 till 16 units lost at which time he switches to $50 x 12 units.
if he gains 8 x $50 he is even and quits.
if he loses 12 units, he uses the remainder as $75 x 20 units.
he starts $75 x20 units at $1000 in the hole so this battle of armageddon calls for him to win 13.33 units and quit even, BEFORE he loses 20 units = $2500 ruin.
with better math skills, i might have expressed this differently but, to compensate for the slight over-presumption that half the time he started and stayed up or even, when he is in the red, we will act like each new "game", as constructed, only has a 50:50 chance of winning back to quitting even though it requires a smaller number of units won than the LARGER unit loss. ( i think this is a fair enough construction)
SO: 50% of the time, our player wins or breaks even. the other 50% of the time he has 1/2 x 1/2 x1/2 = 1/8 of 50% = 1/16 or 6.25 % of total games played will result in 2500 loss. and 15 times break even or gain. his 48 units would have a 6.25% risk of ruin somewhere over 600 hands played so our easier-to-envision-for-the-math-challenged-like-me expression comports just fine with reality.
SO, SO: THEN THE TEASER: 15/16 times, our intrepid player breaks even or wins. one in 16 times he will lose 2500.
THE TEASER: the assertion our guy will have buncha little wins or break-evens and one big loss is unassailable--i do NOT disagree. further, it is not lost on me that "betting up when winning" will often degrade a win = important cost, gives even more little wins or break-evens. HOWEVER, REALLY!? do we really figure that with 15 trials, this poor guy cant come up with 2500 to at least break even on his loss? answer? yeah, that might be right because MANY of his 15 are, indeed, only breakeven because he is busting his ass and quitting to avoid going into red or ruin and will infrequently be able to pursue a more substantial win.
BUT years of playing the game by all of us: you dont have to be a clueless, disadvantaged ploppy to recall experiencing, routinely enough, positive variation that propels blind hogs and counters alike to good wins. depending on how a guy does it, he not only might be expected to enjoy a bankroll sized, "lucky" win every 16 tries but he would also seem likely to experience some more modest wins that will add up. add up to a sustainable net win over time? i do not know BUT, if i might turn the tables on my math friends, here is what i DO know. if THIS 16-game "session" wins, it does NOT look, as constructed above, to be calling for any unusual amount of luck/variance and might be thought of as "repeatable". put this ONE data point in the book and don't let anyone tell you something like, "yeah, but now you are overdue for a lot more losses because the house edge, inevitably, cannot be avoided." "it is the math that cannot be avoided" has a common sense look of being presumptive and applying a "serial independent trials" math-rule to trials that are in no way independent nor equally "cumulative".
though i remain open-minded about joining the advantage movement, i am concerned that whatever army of math guys may have examined what i understand is not even a slightly unique thought, that somehow a math problem with contingent variables is not solved by reduction to "ultimately there is only one variable which is average unit size that WILL concede the house advantage". (pardon my using non-math english to raise a math objection--i dont know how to say it mathematically but you get it).
i have some, also-not-original-thoughts as to WHY this might "work" but i will save that entertainment for you sharks to feast on later---i got a bad feeling the logic/math flaw i alluded to is fixin to get me carved to pieces.
T3 - you, sir, deserve a medal for the amount of work you've put in this thread trying to save people from losing all their money. Or maybe just a bottle of Tylenol, because I imagine that much banging of your head against the brick wall must give you a mighty headache...
"I did it for me..... I liked it. I was good at it...and I was...really...I was alive..."
Hardin County Boy,A lot of patience and energy has been expended in this thread addressing your questions/assertions and you seem to be a fairly reasonable, appreciative fellow (maybe a little hard headed - like most of us). I'm wondering if you've considered this:http://www.blackjackforumonline.com/...ack_System.htmor maybe something like this:http://www.amazon.com/Betting-On-Bla.../dp/1580629512 There are, of course, many others that describe pure betting schemes purporting to do what you desire but at least these don't make outrageous claims. They will not claim to make you $4000 in 12 hrs or less (which I know wasn't your goal as was the OP), unless you have a huge bankroll of which $4000 is a small fraction. They are not focused on counting, but they are focused on maximizing the possibility of short-term wins for the recreational or "hobbyist" player. The win rate for the first may be much lower than you're satisfied with but none other an authority than Arnold Snyder himself gives a nod to this betting system - at least for short term weekend warriors. Of course, he does note that it suffers from the same flaws that all pure betting or hunch systems eventually succumb to. I relied heavily on a strategy derived from the second source when I first started playing (and learning to count) and it does often keep you playing and winning small reasonable amounts much of the time. I still use a scaled back version of that same strategy but only as basically a cover progression, or system, during neutral and slightly positive counts. After seeing how significant the losses will be (not can be) when it doesn't work out, my count and the corresponding indices are what determines my play and bet sizes now. But, these are just somthing to consider you haven't already.NORM, I'M WONDERING WHY I CAN'T PUT LINE SPACES IN MY POSTS!
Last edited by blacksheep; 09-21-2013 at 04:22 PM.
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