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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