Discussion: What is required to succeed as an AP in Blackjack?

[Three]

Here is one question that I haven't answered and hope a more experience (since almost all on here are) player will help. You plan to play an 800 hand sesion, you have an EV of 80 cents per hand given your spread and rule set, pentration and strategy variables. You sit down at the table and in the first four shoes, blow it up with large bets and win $1400 or more than twice your ev at 700 hands. Make sense to go home or stay?

Planning to play 8 hours is not a good idea for most AP's unless you can hit multiple casinos in that time. Yes you should leave but not because you are way above EV. You should leave because you have shown the casino you max bet cycle a bunch of times. If you are at a bet level that they may not care about it isn't as much of a factor but you don't want to give them too much to evaluate your play on to see if you are a threat. That means win or lose after showing them your min to max bet a few shoes it is a good idea to at least take a break if not leave. A skill you will hopefully develop is evaluating the reaction to your play by the casino. After enough visits you should have a pretty good idea of what they will tolerate.

So what do you do, consider mission well accomplished and get the heck out of dodge (knowing that by missing 700 hands you can easily go down by the same amount in one shoe and have less hands to balance it out or play the hands you came to play knowing that at the end of the year you budgeted 100k hands and that is what really matters?

What I would do would depend on what was going on in the casino. I have played marathon sessions with a dealer giving great pen in a place that pen is usually not so great. I have played marathons against dealers that were making mistakes of doing other things that would up my win rate. If there was nothing special my assessment of heat would be the biggest factor on whether or not I would leave. If the conditions deteriorated like got crowded, a slow dealer or players or the pen went downhill I might leave based on that. If I needed to show more losses due to having a lot of winning sessions I might take a small loss and either take a break or move to another casino. A small loss and a small win are about the same thing but a loss looks better in their system. It is all one big session and they see your play as you won this many times and lost this many. Having the numbers of wins and losses look good can depend on when you break your sessions. Ideally you want nice sized wins and small losses.

Is there a point above your ev where it makes sense to walk away from a session, planned trip or even month or year of playing?

In case you are missing the point the answer is NO. The decision to leave or stay has nothing to do with being above EV. If you are BR challenged it may make sense to continually grow your BR from trip to trip as you learn and get better at your craft but as it is all one big session thus mathematically it doesn't matter. Leave negative EV and play through plus EV. Leave or stay based on the strength of the opportunity and heat factors.

When I had a small BR I caught a promo tat ran every so often that gave me an advantage off the top of the deck. I would be able to green chip rather than my usual red chip at the same RoR. I would be up almost as much as my BR and leave with a significant but smaller profit at the end of the promo period. I often wondered like you do that I should have cashed out with a huge win but in retrospect my only regret is I didn't play more. It was both fun and scary with a minimum bet 2.5 to 5 times my usual minimum bet. I have rarely gotten an off the top advantage again. Now I know you aren't talking about anything special to keep you there but I think I defined pretty well what your decision to stay or leave should be based on. If there is no special need for logging a win that day then base the decision on what I outlined.