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Thread: Norm Wattenberger: Which is better, negative expectation or positive expectation?

  1. #1
    Norm Wattenberger
    Guest

    Norm Wattenberger: Which is better, negative expectation or positive expectation?

    No it?s not a trick question. There have been many posts lately in several places that consider this a no-brainer. That any positive expectation, no matter how small, is better. Like many other BJ questions, the correct answer to this question is - it depends. It depends on your goals, your situation and most importantly, what you need to do to get that positive expectation.

    Let me provide an example. You visit LV once or twice a year. You like to play BJ and plan to play 1,000 hands. You aren?t willing to learn KO for an occasional trip. You would like to win of course, but it?s more important that you don?t exhaust your budget before your trip ends and wind up walking the Strip waiting for the trip to end. Your budget is $500 and you will play the $5 tables. The sims are for 4.5/6 decks, S17, DAS, four players. The two strategies compared are OPP with optimized bets and 1-16 spread versus Basic Strategy flat-betting (i.e. also optimized bets.)

    OPP (perfectly played) will win 39.7% and go bankrupt 54.5% of the trips.
    Basic Strategy will win 45.1% and go bankrupt 0.9% of the trips.


    So, using OPP, you will bust before the end of the trip half the time instead of 1 out of 100 with BS. And, you will actually end up a winner more often with BS. In the long run, OPP will win more (about $95 a trip more.) But, if your goal is to make it through the trip without busting and having to leave the casino, the negative expectation strategy is a better match.

    Now some people will say that the comparison should force the average bets to be the same. I disagree. The problem with weak counts is they force a large spread. And unless you want to play with silver dollars, the average bet can be forced higher. But, I ran a sim with the same average bet anyhow. In this sim, the BS player bets $15 a hand. Here, the player wins 41.9% and bankrupts 40.0% of the trips. Still better than OPP.

    I receive rather a lot of calls for advice on strategies. Most often I suggest KO (even though it was not included in CV until recently.) However, I have also suggested BS many times. In my mind, if you don?t wish to learn KO, then you are better off with BS than a very weak system.


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  2. #2
    Norm Wattenberger
    Guest

    Norm Wattenberger: Re: Which is better, negative expectation or positive expectation?

    Arnold has chosen to respond where I cannot post. I disagree with his response. First, he states "It would be easy to go from Norm's logic to recommending various types of betting systems that win more often than they lose." But my logic is exactly against this as I am arguing that people should bet optimally and that would be inoptimal. I compared optimal BS and optimal OPP. He appears to want to compare optimal OPP with inoptimal gambling systems. You can't compare OPP played perfectly against wild betting systems and claim this is a comparison with BS. Obviously if people with small bankrolls bet wildly they will quickly bust.

    He also states that "just about every recreational gambler who arrives with $500 will bet wildly as his trip nears its conclusion if he has not yet made his score." I agree. Two points. First, I would bet that includes OPP players. They are no less likely to bet wildly at the end of a trip than someone advised to play BS. Secondly, so what? At least they would have made it near the end of the trip without running out of gambling funds. And that was the stated goal in my post.

    He concludes "Wattenberger is essentially arguing in favor of an approach to blackjack that's not realistic for real people." I believe this is true of OPP. We are talking about people unwilling to learn KO. Fine. But why would you assume that such people would actually play OPP correctly or that they wouldn't be among those that would bet wildly once they became bored and frustrated?

    My post compared a recreational player using OPP played correctly versus BS played correctly. The BS player is less likely to bust. Now if you want to compare a perfect, disciplined, OPP player against a BS player that bets and/or plays wildly, that's another subject. But that's comparing apples and suicide pills.:-)

  3. #3
    ToAnyOne
    Guest

    ToAnyOne: Quite Ironic (and revealing)

    It's funny to see that those very people that this count is supposed to be good for is actually the ones who will be most hurt by it, increasing their ROR 60 fold.

    This sim clearely proves that it can be desastrous for recreationnal players to adopt srategies that are designed for maximising long term expectations. As I am sure that even the HO2+A recreationnal player that spreads 1-16 on a 100 unit bankroll will go bust a hell of a lot more than the bs flat bettor.
    Actually you proved in a previous post that this particular player (the one spreading 1-16 on 100u bank) actually has a lot less EV than he beleives since he will not have sufficient money to complete the shoe as soon as he loses 6 max bets in a row, which is a common occurence.

    This also demonstrates that betting patterns DO affect the outcome of the game even tho they do no affect what cards you will be dealt.

    Thank you very much, I would also like to compliment you for your recent sims that are quite revealing; to me that is the greatest thing about this game, to be able to look at this game from so much different perspectives, and always learn something new.

    TAO

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