Quote Originally Posted by ZenMaster_Flash View Post
Let's take a look at this statement. jacquesblack is speaking about a three-week "trip"
and playing daily for, let's say, 18 days for maybe six hours per day, rounded to 108 hrs.

Assuming decent skills and smarts, a player betting light green with a polite spread should
have an e.v. of perhaps $60/hr. for 108 hrs. generating an expectation of about $6,100.

What you NEED to address is your Risk of Ruin. The amounts of cash you mentioned above
may be sufficient. Increasing your bank by extreme amounts in three weeks is very unlikely.

That is a markedly positive outlook (understatement) and the inherently evil left tail
of the bloody variance curve is vicious in extremis over a series of 10,000 or so results.

Thanks for your reply Zen Master and you were close to getting the figures right.
In the three-week trip, my target number of hours was about 150 - and that's almost seven hours per day for 19 days with two days off. I reckon my ev averages out at around $66 per hour and that gives the figure of $10,000 for the trip. To achieve this target I concentrated on double-deck games with no worse than 35 cards cut-off (of which I found plenty) and six-deck games with late surrender (penetration varying between 1.0 and 1.5 cut off). I was careful never to hang around in double-deck games for more than 20 minutes and can think of only one occasion throughout the whole trip when I attracted heat.
I take your point that in a three-week trip I could easily suffer a huge negative variance but this is applicable to any casino venue and my point was that Vegas still has plenty to offer. I agree with you that Vegas is nowhere near as good as it used to be and has become more a tourist destination than a gambling destination. But for an ap such as myself the city still offers more opportunities than anywhere else in the world.