Question about the impact of others "poor" play

[K Love]

I understand that decisions of other players has no impact on the outcome of your hand. The overall impact of not following basic strategy has equal chance of benefitting and hurting the other players chances of winning

However, if a counter is generally on playing positive counts, wouldn't the tendencies of poor players skew towards not hitting or splitting when they should, versus the opposite? And wouldn't that lead to fractionally more hands available at a higher count?

I'm not implying that the impact would be material, but that there is some marginal favorable impact.

Obviously, there is significant positive impact from others "poor" play in relation to house rules and comps. But my guess is that you'd occasionally get an additional hand dealt at a higher count as well.

[VonDox]

Everything I have read and I guess experienced is that a table full of ploppies do one or all three of the following that impact the game: slow the game down, place dumb side bets that slow the game down even more and they get drunk and slow the game down even more. From what I have read, the more players that play use up more cards. As many experts have indicated if you can play head to head and a single spot and go as quickly as you can play all the better, because it's about getting in as many rounds per hour that you can. I am not the math BJ wizard that grace this site so I will bow to their words of wisdom on the math part of poor game play and how it effects positive counts. All I can comment on is if I am playing solo and suddenly I get 2, 3 or 4 ploppies that jump in I jump out and take a break and look for a new game.

[DSchles]

I would say that poor players don't tend to not hit as much as they would hit 12s, and 13s, and maybe even 14s, against all dealer upcards. They might split more too, wanting to get more action. I doubt very much that tendencies either way would get you more hands, on average, from their poor play. Note that, when surrender is offered, poor players who even know what that means tend to surrender many more hands than they ought to. This is one of the reasons that, since its inception, all the way back in 1966, Caesars Palace has never not offered surrender. They know that the value from all the idiotic plays that the ploppies make far surpasses that of the skillful ones.

Don

[moo321]

Most ploppy plays don't affect the game much. They don't like to hit 12 vs. 2,3. They don't like to double soft 18. But these won't hurt you in any significant way.


The one exception is splitting tens. If you have a ploppy that splits tens, they can seriously deplete a positive deck. This is because they're more likely to get dealt tens, and get more tens on the split if the deck is heavy. There's also risk that they can bring heat down on your table.

[Archvaldor]

I understand that decisions of other players has no impact on the outcome of your hand. The overall impact of not following basic strategy has equal chance of benefitting and hurting the other players chances of winning

However, if a counter is generally on playing positive counts, wouldn't the tendencies of poor players skew towards not hitting or splitting when they should, versus the opposite? And wouldn't that lead to fractionally more hands available at a higher count?

I'm not implying that the impact would be material, but that there is some marginal favorable impact.

Obviously, there is significant positive impact from others "poor" play in relation to house rules and comps. But my guess is that you'd occasionally get an additional hand dealt at a higher count as well.

Years ago I developed a play to avoid detection when playing DD, where you'd have a small player spread to multiple hands in neutral/negative counts, and back to one when it went positive. This works quite well as a cover play since a big bettor can win with little to no bet variation, and most pit personnel are simply not clued-up enough to detect something like that. So you could play forever without heat.

I tried to work out a strategy for the small player/s to hit/stand/split to increase the team's overall win rate, but even when you do it very deliberately the effects you get from simulations on the big player are generally around .1% - that's doing unrealistically weird shit. Without a deliberate strategy I'm pretty certain you'd be looking at less than a hundredth of a per cent without a conscious card-eating strategy and awareness of the count.