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Seems that I'm upsetting everyone today. All I'm saying is that I might wanna go play blackjack maybe 7 times a month or so. I'm all new to this. All I get here is that I need to run simulations of billion hands on a software, which is around 80$. I have picked a system that has been tested on such software already. So I'm trying to put it to practice on a real simulation at home 'cos I ain't paying 80$ for something I don't really need. If I play as I said 30,000 hands a year. What's the problem like why is everyone telling me good grief?
He is saying it would take a lifetime to play a number of hands that would reflect your average accurately. Why not program a simulator to run billions of hands for you in no time. Then you would have the answer. The kitchen table is used by people looking for misleading results. Don't be that guy.Originally Posted by Daithy
Sure I understand completely what you are trying to say. And I had never doubted the superiority of the simulator vs kitchen table. But I'm not spending 80$ on a program,just can't afford that. And the kitchen table is better than nothing in my opinion. And at least it keeps the proportion of hands very close to reality.
Exactly, I'm not verifying the sim results at a kitchen table I only wanna see if I won't be going home with empty pockets after several sessions. That means I'm not trying to assess the exact profit but rather will I return with less money or more money after several sessions. That's all
Do you think I stand a chance with a starting bankroll of 400$?,,I know it's way below the recommended main bankroll, it's probably dangerous. And find the smallest possible game, maybe 5$ basic bet and take on a 6 Deck game with 1-10 betting spread Zen Count. Of course the game will have good rules like S17 ,double any 2 cards, insurance, blackjack 3:2,...I have run about 500 hands on my kitchen taple and I'm 107 $ in profit already was down to 360 at the worst, can say that it didn't put my starting bankroll to much danger, but I agree here that the insuffiency of hands shows here a litlle. But it still gives me an okay picture. I'll keep it running for about a week and I will see the biggest point of fluctuations.
Practising is fine, if your intention is to practice the techniques of counting. What people are trying to tell you, however, is that the results of your practice, in terms of money won or lost, are not meaningful. They don't tell you anything about how good your strategy is, how good your play is, how well you should expect to do in the casino, anything like that. They are just random numbers. Think about an extreme example - if you played just one hand on your kitchen table, the result would be effectively random. Hopefully you already know this. If not, read my earlier post in this thread and see if it makes sense (hint: it doesn't). The more hands you play at home, the more likely you are to be closer to an accurate result which reflects the quality of your strategy. It seems like you know this as well. The only thing you are failing to understand, which everyone in the thread is telling you quite plainly, is how many hands it takes to get decently close. If you only play 10,000 hands on your kitchen table, there is a good chance you will come out ahead, but you may well come out behind. This doesn't mean you're playing badly - it doesn't mean anything at all, because 10,000 hands is simply too small a number.
For that matter, if you only play 30,000 hands a year in the casino, you might not make money there, either. The movie 21 was not being genuine when it showed the MIT team making a profit every time they played correctly. So why would you play? Well, if you want to guarantee not losing money, you must either give up now, or set aside more than 30,000 hands worth of your time. However, if you play 30,000 hands in a year, and you play with an advantage, you will at least know that you have a good chance of coming out ahead. If you play again the next year, for a total of 60,000 over the two years, then your chance of being ahead over that period is a bit better. If this is enough for you, and you can afford the risk, then go ahead and do it. The more years you play, the better will be your chances of having won some money at the end of it all. The billion-hand simulations are there to tell you, with considerable accuracy, exactly what that "good chance of coming out ahead" is, and what your expected profit is. "Expected", here, is a technical term, and doesn't mean you should expect that exact profit. Without going into too much detail, the expected value of a single roll of a fair die is 3.5, even though you would never "expect" a result of 3.5 on a single die.
When it comes to managing the kind of risk that we're talking about, not only is it important to have enough time to play very many hands (or accept that you might lose), but you also need to have the necessary bankroll to keep playing even if you suffer significant losses. This is, of course, a separate topic, but it is extremely important, and you should learn all that you can about bankroll management.
EDIT: A few new posts came up while I was writing this. You're right that you should be interested in finding out your chances of running out of money in a few sessions. However, your kitchen table experiments aren't the best way of finding this out, either, as ZG points out. As you read more about bankroll management you will learn that every strategy leaves you with some chance of running out of money, and the ratio of your bet size to your bankroll size determines what that chance is. If you play with an advantage, and your bets are much smaller than your bankroll, your chance of failure ("risk of ruin") is small. That's what it's all about.
Last edited by lurppis; 03-03-2013 at 02:43 PM.
You should practice. Not to access your likely results because the practice results are going to be noise in the grand scheme but to perfect your craft. Add lots of distractions. try to multitask while doing it. The results of the practice doesn't matter people have figured out the log run already and you will need to play hundreds of thousands of hands before your results are likely to be assured to start to reflect it. Here is a little statistics for you. If you play all and use a 1-16 spread with $5 min bet and a $10K BR with Zen in a 6 deck 75% pen game with S17,DAS,DOA no RSA and no surrender:
You will average $28.15/100 hands and your standard deviation will be $530.55/100 hands.
So after 100 hands there is a 68.2% probabilty that you will be between -$502.40 and +$558.70.
There is a 95.4% chance that you will be between -$1032.95 and +$1089.25.
There is a 99.8% chance you will be between -$1563.40 and +$1619.80.
There is a .01% chance you will have lost more than $1563.40.
There is a .01% chance you will have won more than $1619.80.
After 35526 hands you have a 15.8% chance of still being behind.
After 71052 hands you have a 2.2% chance of still being behind.
After 106,578 hands your likelihood of being out of the red is almost 100%.
Now what exactly do you think your short term results are going to tell you given the wide range of results.
-*-
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