Insurance

[SiMi]

If you don't take insurance, especially on good hands like BJ or 20's and then all of the sudden start insuring everything, even your 15's or hard 7's....uhhh well, stamp card counter on your forehead.

I think this is a VERY good point! My 'cover spiel' for why I'm NOW taking insurance is that "I've got a big bet out and the Dealer hasn't had Blackjack for a long time so I'm not taking a chance." The problem is the eye doesn't hear any of this. They would just see you insuring crap hands with big bets after blowing off insurance several times on good hands with small bets. Given this, and looking at the sim data more closely, I'm thinking of holding off on insurance until TC=+4 or even +5 as a pretty cheap form of some additional cover by delaying when you take insurance. If you hit Max Bet AND take insurance, as KJ says, it's time to hit the road anyway...

[Gramazeka]

It already was-

http://blackjacktheforum.com/showthr...0-10-Insurance

[mofungoo]

You're being silly. You have index numbers for a variety of plays that you make: stand, double, split, surrender. And, you have one for insurance: >=+3, you insure; <+3, you don't. What's to have a weak point in your game? Makes no sense. You're waaaay overthinking this.

Don

Grosjean covered this subject in a chapter of The Book titled Expectation Isn't Everything. What the basic number for insurance does is to maximize expectation. There is also variance to consider. One can give up a small bit of expectation for a large reduction in variance. This can be done by insuring "good hands" sooner than the number says to insure, and waiting for a slightly higher count than the insurance number to insure weaker hands. See The Book for details.

[DSchles]

Please do us all a favor and NEVER quote Werthamer here again. We'll all be better off for it.

Don

[mofungoo]

Why not?

[Norm]

Werthamer is a highly intelligent person. Just wrong a remarkable percentage of the time. He has long, fancy proofs that contain an error somewhere along the line leading to a completely incorrect conclusion.

[DSchles]

Some further elaboration. Werthamer is a theoretical physicist, with a strong math background. Incredibly, several years ago, as if he had been living in a cave, away from the real world, he decided to study the game of blackjack from scratch, basically ignoring the hundreds of thousands of pages of literature and mathematics that preceded him.

To read him was fascinating, because, for one thing, he completely invented his own terminology for everything, since he didn't know what the established names were for anything. I tried to help him, and reached out to him, both to proofread his proposed work, and to help him better understand the things he was trying to describe. But, it became clear to me, rather quickly, that he was incredibly arrogant and didn't want to be told that he wrong about anything. He was simply going to reinvent the concept of blackjack research, all on his own. And, believe me when I tell you, as Norm has suggested, that he wrong as much as he was right.

So, again, do us all a favor and please don't quote anything that he says here.

Don

[Norm]

Well, we're all arrogant. We just don't believe we can do it alone.

[Norm]

Depends on the person

[Three]

Thanks for your input. The 10s represent 30.77% of the deck. I'm wondering where you come up with 33.333%? I insure when 10s increase to 40% of the deck composition.

Insurance pays 2:1 if there is a ten down. If there are twice as many other cards as there are tens (66.66 to 33.33% the insurance bet is 0 EV) if there are more tens it is plus EV. If there are less tens it is negative EV.

[Three]

Plus I don't see how one could remember and perform all his algebra equations in a timely manner to place or increase a bet (unless your name is tthree).

HaHaHa. This made me laugh. While I was reading it I was thinking that I rarely have to do any conscious math as most of it is done on autopilot. If it is so close a call that I am doing the math consciously I should probably use BS for the playing decision or bet more conservative or aggressive side of the decision line based on deck composition specifics rather than the math for the betting decision anyway. Then I read the unless you are tthree and I just busted out laughing.

[RS]

I just busted out laughing.

The machine has emotions.

[Nyne]

It's difficult to throw money at a 35% success ratio, even at +3. But yet yields a worthwhile profit over the long haul.

It yields a very healthy profit. If you are winning 35% of the time on a wager that pays 2:1, you have a 5% edge. If you could do nothing but make that bet over and over 100 times per hour, you'd have a SCORE of 1250. Don't focus on the success ratio. Sure you lose more often than you win, but at the end of the day (or week or year) you will rack up a nice profit. As other said, don't overthink this. You get paid 2:1 on the bet, so as long as the ratio of non-tens to tens remaining is less than 2:1, you have an advantage.