i've greatly enjoyed the discussion engendered by pat saying he has had great success with a 7k bank playing single deck spreading 4:1 and wanting to "go pro".

most, with the best of intentions, replied that was way too short a bank and any success was pure luck. that was my origional thought, too, til i decided to "run the numbers" and trust the math.

i simmed the best possible conditions i could imagine: single deck, 1:4 spread, no heat problems, da2, das , nrsa, ns, 60% pen. i also had him wong out @ rc <-6.

as to risk, in my mind's eye, i thought 2 standard deviations would give one a 97.7% chance of being under or above the curve and a ror of only 2.3%. pretty reasonable, i thought.

then i spread pat thusly : $100 @ tc +4 or greater, $75 @ tc = +3 , $50 @ tc = +2, $35 @ tc = +1 and $25 @ tc less than +1 .

i did the sim using (appoligies to norm :-) :-) :-) "only" 40,000,000 hands . the results as follows : wr/100 rounds = $45.41 (round to $45) and sd/100 rounds = $499.89 (round to $500).

then 2sd's would = $1,000. assuming 100 rounds per hour , and calculating sd for a set number of hours as the sd for one hour times the square root of the number of hours played we get the results for pat;

after 100 hrs +$14,500 to - $5,500
after 200 hrs +$23,140 to - $5,140
after 400 hrs +$38,000 to - $2,000
after 10,000 hrs +$450,000 to +$350,000 !!!

all with never slipping below the 7k bank with a 2.3% risk of ruin.

i was stunned.

assuming my math assumptions are correct and finding this fine game is possible, pat would have to be "unlucky" to bust....

thoughts....