Some of you here were quite angry with my recent post, "There is no proper way to play blackjack." That leads me to believe that I probably was not clear about what I was trying to say. I don’t think what I said was very important (I just like rambling about blackjack), but I really don’t want to spread pseudo-science, so I want to clarify what I meant…
In part of my post I said something like, “if you hit a 12 and get a 9, and win the hand, then you have made the correct decision, regardless of basic strategy.” This could be interpreted, though, as me saying that such an outcome means you should abandon basic strategy, or alternatively that a person who hits a 12 and gets a 9 is a winning player. I think that both those interpretations are responding to a different statement than I was trying to make. I was purposely talking about results on a micro-level. Whether someone is an advantage player can only be determined through the analysis of large numbers. And the analysis and interpretation of large numbers can lead us to accept undesirable outcomes sometimes for the sake of being right most of the time. For example, if someone deviates from basic without knowing why and goes on to win the hand then, yes, I still argue they made the correct play, but unfortunately they should not have made the correct play.
We generally talk only of results in terms of large numbers in gambling (reasonably so), so I wanted to be a little kooky for a second and refer back to the atomic unit of large numbers, which are individual outcomes. The reason for this is that sometimes imo we think at such a large scale in gambling that we forget that we actually do want to win our current hand – we do want to make the correct play. What I am trying to note is that in the situation where someone stands on a 12 and then loses because they followed basic strategy, even though a 9 was coming, basic strategy has failed to accomplish our fundamental goal of winning/losing the least possible hands.
We should not as AP’s be trying to play basic strategy as much as possible. We should instead be trying to win as much as possible. The two are the same practically given a very basic understanding of blackjack, but the two are also fundamentally different. Basic strategy is a means, winning is a value. We should adjust the means we use to optimize for our values. This is why we count cards. Counting cards gives us extra information that improves upon basic strategy (this is what deviations are). But we should only use deviations when we know what the count is.
The reason I say all this is because I think it serves us to have a creative approach to games, rather than simply seeing games as the systems we use to play them. Games offer potentially infinite information, systems use limited information. We should seek to look at games for all the information they might offer. I think this is how new and better ways of playing are contrived. Card counting is a system that leads to us losing about half the hands we play and could have us in the negative financially for hundreds of hours. And there’s really nothing wrong with that. There are so many reasons why someone would do nothing at all besides count cards. And I don’t like when people say that counting cards is stupid, and that only more advanced AP is smart. I’m just saying that counting cards may feel limiting to you, and that is because all gambling systems are in fact limited and optimization is always subjective and determined by the information and values you have.
So, if you go on to try to find other ways to play they should be rooted in math and then further your personal preferences, like, say, how much EV you want to generate, how much risk you want to take on, how much you want to travel, how much heat you wish to accept, or how short you want your N0 to be, etc.
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Originally Posted by autonymity
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