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Thread: Why the rule that the dealer stands on a hard 17?

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  1. #1


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    Why the rule that the dealer stands on a hard 17?

    I have been wondering about the house rule that the dealer stands on hard 17.
    If you were playing "solataire" blackjack where there were no other players
    and your goal was to get as high a score as possible without going over 21
    wouldn't your best strategy be to stand on hard 15? That is because if
    you drew on hard 15 there are 7 cards that would bust you and only 6 that
    would improve your hand.


    If casinos changed their rules so that the dealer had to stand on hard 15, I
    think that many players would consider the change to be in their favor. Would
    the reverse be true? What do you think?

  2. #2


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    You haven’t got an answer yet, because your question is ridiculous. Further, since this your first post, many would consider your post as trolling. You either need to learn basic, or attack in some other line of endeavour.

  3. #3


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    I think you are a player, not a mathematician. I am a mathematician, not a player. I am interested in blackjack because it is the most difficult casino game to analyse; in fact it was not analysed mathematically until the 1950s by three army statisticians at Ft. Meade, Md. They developed the Basic Strategy. Edward Thorp carried on their work and discovered that the game favored the player when the remaining deck is rich in high cards, hence card-counting.

    Part of my studies has involved computing by hand Thorp's table of dealer probabilities. I did so to avoid being accused of copyright violation in case I quoted it in a publication and it contained an error. I found it to be correct to four figures but was computed on the basis of a single deck not containing the dealer's up card. Did you know that?

    I have found studies of strategy variations based on dealer's drawing rules but only on whether or not he must stand on a soft 17. I have not found any based on his standing on a different total and possibly none exist because casinos do not offer such games. As I said, I do not play blackjack but am interested only in its mathematics.

    If you would like to know me better, look me up in the Wizard of Vegas forum under the same name. There are a few excellent mathematicians there and I have had conversations with two of them, Elliot Jacobson, Ph. D. and the Wizard himself. I was wondering if there are any such people here. A mathematician would understand that my question is not trivial.

    Perhaps I should add that I am the author of "A Player's Guide to Lotto Strategies," available on Amazon. In it I debunk nearly all of the popular books on how to win the lottery. It has sold a few hundred copies, but the books I debunk sell much better because people have dreams and are willing to grasp at straws to see them realized.
    Last edited by kratchik; 01-11-2019 at 08:48 AM.

  4. #4


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    Quote Originally Posted by kratchik View Post
    I think you are a player, not a mathematician. I am a mathematician, not a player.
    The player does not need to be a true mathematician as all the pertinent work on the analysis of the game itself has already been done for us by top-notch mathematicians.


    Last edited by BoSox; 01-11-2019 at 09:29 AM.

  5. #5


    1 out of 1 members found this post helpful. Did you find this post helpful? Yes | No
    Quote Originally Posted by kratchik View Post
    Perhaps I should add that I am the author of "A Player's Guide to Lotto Strategies," available on Amazon. In it I debunk nearly all of the popular books on how to win the lottery.
    I hope you didn't spent much time on it.

  6. #6


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    Tough crowd today

    OP, yes, your question is ridiculous. Do some basic reading/learning.

  7. #7


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    Kratchik
    The fundamental issue is analyzing your 2 card holding against dealer upcard. The next step is to analyze how to win more money when appropriate to do so, and how to lose less money when you do not have the advantage. This is simple straightforward math. Tables to do so have been established and used for some time.

    Your simplistic example shows a fundamental lack of understanding. If you are a mathematician, then surely you understand combinatorial analytics.

  8. #8


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    Freightman
    I have read some of your posts and I thank you for your unusually polite response. You are telling me how to play blackjack and I agree with you completely, however I don't play. I have read some of the books and seen the tables. I have even computed some myself.

    Players seldom have an advantage at a casino game and when they do and win consistently they get banned. I prefer to play the stock market. There you don't have to go to a casino, you can do it at home. There is no house limit and at times the player has a big advantage. If you win big you aren't banned but are cheered as a hero. Altogether it's a much better game!

    therefinery
    I did get some good reviews. You can check them out on Amazon. One reviewer on Amazon Britain panned it because I said all of the systems were bunk. That's only partly true. I was infuriated by one outright scam (The Lotto Black Book) and faulty math (Gail Howard, etc.) so I had to say something.

  9. #9


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    Quote Originally Posted by kratchik View Post
    Freightman
    I have read some of your posts and I thank you for your unusually polite response. You are telling me how to play blackjack and I agree with you completely, however I don't play. I have read some of the books and seen the tables. I have even computed some myself.

    Players seldom have an advantage at a casino game and when they do and win consistently they get banned. I prefer to play the stock market. There you don't have to go to a casino, you can do it at home. There is no house limit and at times the player has a big advantage. If you win big you aren't banned but are cheered as a hero. Altogether it's a much better game!
    Miracles of modern technology, I write this as I fly, getting close to my destination.

    I can be very polite. I also recognize that I can be an asshole - example - dealing with the Dipshit, who is worthy of disdain. Though not evident in your OP, I can now see levels of intelligence emerge, and that is good. Accordingly, I trust you will forgive me for categorizing your initial post as dumb.

    The game is afoot when one descends to a house edge game, with the full intent if overcoming said edge, and walking away a winner. The stock market is not that much different, though one doesn’t have that nasty little min bet to worry about, qthough I think it tends to be a zero sum game. One party must win, one party must lose, and the facilitators get paid regardless of outcome.

    You are also correct in your assumptions as well. A good operator can do well, and another, who doesn’t train himself for battle, will get beaten up.

  10. #10


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    Quote Originally Posted by Freightman View Post
    The stock market is not that much different, though one doesn’t have that nasty little min bet to worry about, qthough I think it tends to be a zero sum game. One party must win, one party must lose, and the facilitators get paid regardless of outcome.
    Freightman, that’s what you get for thinking. You’re 100% wrong. Casinos and the stock market are very different. Don’t feel bad, because many APs make this mistake. Casinos are a zero sum game. There is a winner and loser and no value is created other than entertainment. Warren Buffet (you may have heard of him) points this out and explains why casinos and stock market are very different.

    The stock market is NOT a zero sum game. The stock market is a collection of companies that make our country run. It’s why we have one of the highest standard of livings in the world. Everybody can win in the stock market. The seller of the stock, the buyer of the stock, the people working for the underlying stock company, and the consumers buying the product from the stock company.

    Since you have a hard time following my points, I’m going to illustrate this very simplistically for you. Take Amazon. The people who initially invested in Amazon made money selling the stock, the people who bought the stock have made money over the years, the workers of Amazon have made money and the consumers have benifited from Amazon due to lower prices. Everybody won and is winning. It’s called one of those win, win, win, win situations. There are no losers. Yes, some companies (stocks) in our country have gone bankrupt but this is what happens in a free market system when that company is not meeting the market needs for whatever reason.

    The reason casinos were not legal in our country before 1931 is because they are a zero sum game. Nothing of value (other than entertainment) is created. In the past, governments didn’t legalize things that are zero sum games. They only wanted to generate revenue from things that drove our economy. This is also why chain letters and ponzie schemes are illegal. They are basically zero sum games.

    Why did our government legalize casinos, gambling and lotteries? To raise revenue without being voted out of office. Casinos are really our governments voluntary tax program. So next time you win money from a casino, what you’re basically doing is taking money away from our government.

    Hope this little lesson helped you understand the difference in casinos and the stock market. And guess what’s it was free. You don’t need to pay me $3K and go to some bootcamp to learn it. Lol. So next time you hear somebody say something like “the stock market is the worlds biggest casino”, you can tell that person how stupid he is.

  11. #11


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    Wall Street and Casinos

    Quote Originally Posted by Dbs6582 View Post
    Freightman, that’s what you get for thinking. You’re 100% wrong. Casinos and the stock market are very different. Don’t feel bad, because many APs make this mistake. Casinos are a zero sum game. There is a winner and loser and no value is created other than entertainment. ...
    Hope this little lesson helped you understand the difference in casinos and the stock market. And guess what’s it was free. You don’t need to pay me $3K and go to some bootcamp to learn it. Lol. So next time you hear somebody say something like “the stock market is the worlds biggest casino”, you can tell that person how stupid he is.
    I don't think it's stupid to compare the stock exchange with a casino; many people have made money in stocks using this approach. An example is to be found in the book "Wall Street:The Other Las Vegas" by Nicholas Darvas, a sequel to "How I made Two Million Dollars in the Stock Market." While most publicly owned companies grow and add value to the economy, many fail due to poor management, loss of market, or accounting fraud. My favorite example of this is recited in the book "A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market", by John Allen Paulos, Ph. D. There he describes his strategy of buying shares of Worldcomm as they were declining and losing everything when the company went bankrupt. He could have made a fortune in the stock but he used the wrong strategy.

    I know of two strategies that can make money in the stock market. One is a "quant" strategy. The first quant fund manager was Edward O. Thorp, yes the same one who discovered AP in blackjack. He claims to have had a 20% return in all kinds of markets. His results are described in his recent book "A Man For All Markets." I don't know the mathematical details for this kind of strategy so I use a trend following strategy, which works only some of the time. It worked well up until October 2018 but is not working well just now. A short introduction to this strategy can be found in "How To Trade In Stocks" by Jesse Livermore, available online. Livermore made millions both by buying stocks and selling them short in bear markets.

    Some posters have mentioned "zero sum game." I agree that futures are a zero sum game because one never holds a futures contract up until the delivery date, except by accident, and what the longs gain the shorts lose, or vice versa. I have read the arguments that trading stocks and options is not a zero sum game but I don't think that whether or not this is true affects the proper strategy. There is an important difference between stocks and futures and options: futures and options expire whereas stocks do not unless the company goes out of business. Thus, one cannot realize long term gains in futures or options unless one exercises a call option.

    I'm glad that this thread has become worthwhile. I was worried at first!

  12. #12


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    Quote Originally Posted by kratchik View Post
    I don't think it's stupid to compare the stock exchange with a casino; many people have made money in stocks using this approach. An example is to be found in the book "Wall Street:The Other Las Vegas" by Nicholas Darvas, a sequel to "How I made Two Million Dollars in the Stock Market."
    krarchik, I’m glad you enjoy this thread and good to see you contributing. I do think it’s stupid to compare the stock exchange with a casino. With this said, I know this is a popular take on our economy. The phase “the stock market is the worlds largest casino” has been popularized by the left. I don’t want to get into why, but it’s basically to scare the public into allowing the govenrment to have more control over our economy. The left believes this will bring more stability to the markets. I have not read the book you’re referring to but I’ve read several with this slant and none of them made much sense (as I said, this is a popular view among intellectuals).

    As far as Ed Thorp’s book, I’ve seen it advertised and read reviews on it, but I have not read it. I’ve also read several articles on how Ed Thorp thinks the math behind bj helped him with the stock market. There are many reasons I disagree with this premise. I have already discussed some in a previous thread so I won’t go over them again here in detail.

    Basically, I think it’s ridiculous to think some game of probabiiity (bj) has any relationship to something as complicated as our markets. I know people have been trying to come up with mathematical models to predict the market forever so Thorp trying to do this is nothing new. All these models work when the market is stable. When there is some unforeseen event, they all break down.

    Whenever a hedge fund beats the market, what they’re doing is using leveraged vehicles. This works and gives good returns when the market is stable. I encourage you to do some research on Lehman Brothers to see what happens when unforeseen events occur. As far as WorldCom and Enron, this was corruption. Yes, there will alway be some corrupt companies in the world so this is nothing new. Lehman Brothers downfall was not due to corruption. It was due to very smart people who thought they could use math to give them outized returns, which basically meant they were too over leveraged in securities (mortgages) that people though would never fail at the rate they did. Bottom line is most companies are not corrupt. Corruption is not what makes markets fall or rise. It’s much more complicated than that.

    Markets are far too unpredictable and there are too many variables to ever be able to use a math model to predict
    their performance. I used to live on the east coast and I had friends on Wall Street, some who made some serious money. I’d have good discussions with them on this topic, but they never quite understood it. They were young and had seen some very good years doing their leveraged trading, so they thought they had figured it out.

    An an interesting side note to illustrate my point, the reason Bennie Madoff was caught was because someone noticed how constinent his hedge fund returns were. This was a major tip off something wasn’t right with his fund.

    As far as Ed Thorp, did you know his first hedge fund (Princeton/Newport Partners) was shut down after becoming embroiled in the junk bond schemes of Micheal Milken? His hedge fund was cleared of any wrong doing, but this could be a legal way of saying they didn’t have enough evidence on his fund to press charges. This fund only returned 15%. I know some people have quoted 20% returns for his funds, but I don’t know where they get these numbers.

    I have ordered Thorp’s book “A man for all markets” and will read it when it comes in. I’ll report back after I’ve read it. It should be interesting.

  13. #13


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    Quote Originally Posted by Freightman View Post
    The stock market is not that much different, though one doesn’t have that nasty little min bet to worry about, qthough I think it tends to be a zero sum game. One party must win, one party must lose, and the facilitators get paid regardless of outcome.
    That's not quite true. The options and futures markets are zero-sum games, but the stock market isn't. Suppose company A goes public tomorrow and issues a million shares at $10 a share, which the public buys. Tomorrow, the stock goes up to $12 a share. The public just made $2 million. Who lost that money? Answer: no one. Wealth was created. Sometimes wealth is destroyed. But the stock market isn't a zero-sum game.

    Don

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