Need to turn 6K into 10K, what are my chances?

[hardin county boy]

I love all the people here who purport to be BJ experts but in the end the game really is just about luck and how the cards fall. Sure you can improve your chances slightly by counting cards but it's still all about luck.

Betting like that because you won a $15 bet is just Cray Cray.

cray,

i agree with you AND the players who gain advantage by counting---i play similar to you and dont count.

the counters enjoy a proposition that gives them an ever more likely probability of being a lifetime winner AND staying in the black--great approach if you are willing, able and will be playing enough lifetime hands to fulfill THAT destiny.

you and i believe that, focusing on where in relation to even and the clock we are, for the trip at hand, and, sizing bets accordingly, we have reasonable prospects of allowing favorable variance to deliver a win and, as that becomes less likely, re-size the bet such that positive variance is again given opportunity to deliver a win, all the while with an eye to not needlessly sizing up and risking unnecessary ruin. our "advantages" are the clock, bet-size and the right to walk---these are not the "true" advantage that counters enjoy but they ARE exploitable.

the fallacy of claiming such an approach changes nothing, that, in the end, the house advantage is the same and you will be ever more likely to LOSE is defended with straw men: first, "no such thing as "trips" or sessions" or "it is all one continuous game"

when you and i play, we are focused on winning one game/ one trip and we give the game of blackjack multiple chances in the trip to catch a little variance that will make us a winner. you bet up winning and down losing and when we look at the end of your one trip, this time, we do NOT find the house edge came true---you beat the crap outta that, even though you probably DID win and lose pretty close to the % of hands the math predicts---sheer, stupid, random luck of winning more of the bigger bets was your friend--better not count on THAT every time. BUT WAIT! this was not quite random--it was sheer stupid-lucky BUT, you provided "safe" opportunities to knock a home run IF that lucky variance showed up and this time, it did----the big win was not a random accident but rather you framed the opportunity. now, you have ONE data point to record and it would be something like bet size was $200,000 (1000 hands x $200-average). You won 2% (200,000 x 2% = your $4000 win).

fast forward to your next trip: you learn, in the nick of time, not to be such a crazy riverboat gambler because variance reaches up and bites your ass (these guys are right, you may die a bad death if you dont think through how BEST to be disciplined to lose small and win bigger--maybe we can get some math help?)---1000 hands, cant catch a break and this time you LOSE 3%!!!--hey, "they" are right, you are regressing to the expected house advantage as your two trips = "exactly" the expected AVERAGE loss of -.5%. BUT WAIT: disciplined guy that you are, losing your ass this time, your " bet" was 1000 hands x $25 average = bet of $25,000 for this, your second data point. so, you have experienced exactly the expected house disadvantage to you and you won $4000 and lost 3% of $25,000 = -$750 for a net win of 3250.

continuing to prop up the straw-men of "no such thing as trips or sessions" and "it is all one continuous game that never ends" denies the reality that one can "effect" what each data point will be in ways other than counting. counting does EXACTLY the same thing as this but by a totally different, more "certain" path but it is fallacy to claim every blackjack player must conform to "no sessions", "one continuous, never ending game, doomed to losses thru the house advantage, the more you play"---if i was a counter, i would want to believe this also but that does NOT make it so.

the next thing the naysayers will say is that, in time, you will simply lose big a few times and win small more times for the expected net loss and it is very accurate to observe you could easily fall into just that AND be a loser. however, it is NUTS to INSIST it must be so. it is true, life is not as simple as the two trips above because you will have a trip with a little win so you bet up, lose, screw up a small win, go negative and bet small, never get it back so toward the end of the trip, you up your bet a bit, still lose and with time running out you bet size to hail mary size and maybe get crazy lucky but better chance you suffer full ruin and go home with a new, ugly data point.

can you, in disciplined fashion, limit losses but win MORE, enough to make up for it? i think so. i have really hoped to learn something from the more math talented guys but, so far, have had no luck in someone MATHEMATICALLY examining the prospects for most intelligently betting arbitrarily up winning and less losing and altering bet size to give "reasonable" good variance a reasonable chance. it seems easiest to dismiss, straw-man and ignore the notion that a non-suicidal, gentle progression when losing (martingale is suicidally stupid and another straw man) has reasonable prospects of moving you to a win. if math talent would instead give it thoughtful consideration they might see the two trips above are plausibly repeatable over a lifetime for a net win and PERHAPS math-talent could contribute sound advice of how one might best structure bet sizes, based on risk of ruin, how much up or down and, YES, how much time left.

good luck cray but lemme meddle a little and encourage you to not easily get into a hail mary position and NEVER AGAIN set yourself up as HAVING to win 66% of your bankroll---you will win 66% plenty of times but it sounds like you damn near blew some great variance for some artificial goal and that'll kill you dead and it wont take a million trips.

guys, can you help a coupla disadvantaged brethern out with some of that math talent channeled toward a topic other than counting?

[Three]

The way these kinds of betting systems work is you can create lots of wins but there will be in the grand scheme of things the losses to hit the HE unless but some fluke you are fluctuating your bets with the fluctuating advantage enough to change the HE. This math can't be denied. Some bettors engineer lots of minimal wins that get erased by one or two big losses (martingalers for one). Others engineer more small loses waiting for that big win. Some mix it up but the math of it all is there will be corrections. No way around it unless you can correlate bigger bets to player advantage and smaller bets to house advantage.

The math is pretty simple. You are making bets at various different amounts independent of the shifting advantage. In 5th grade you learn the commutative law of addition. This says you can add numbers in any order to get the same answer. Rather than seeing the long term as sessions you can make it flat bet groupings for each bet size and add the sum of each group together. If each group has enough of a sampling the luck factor for the average advantage in that group will disappear and you will be left with the HE. Now you have a bunch of flat bet "sessions" added together that any 5th grade math student can tell you gives the same long term total as your system viewed as you group the same bets chronologically. This is the math of random bet changes independent of shifts in advantage. This is why corrections have to be built into the way you choose to put your money at risk.

[hardin county boy]

Tthree, thanks for a thoughtful response. the only part i understood well was that your 5th grade math class was WAAAY more advanced than mine. i will look up some of what you are teaching and be back---lot of us, here in disadvatage land, dont even know what HE is but i will loook it up.

[Cray Cray]

Excellent post. Some of it made sense and some of it did not. I do have a confession to make. The first is that my same strategy netted me $3650 on a separate one day trip to Mohegan on a weekday last week when my BR was just $3,000. The second is this past weekend I was not disciplined in employing my strategy of betting big while winning and betting small while losing. Once in the casino of the wind I got so frustrated that I decided to bet big even though I had been losing hand over fist. I watched in absolute horror as the dealer continually drew to 21 and took 4-5K from me in less than 10 minutes. While I wasn't counting, it had to be at least 6-7 in a row. Had I stuck to my strategy and been disciplined, those would have been $15-20 losses (I forget what the minimum was on that table) instead of 500-1000 losses. The guy and his girlfriend next to me who both worked on the port Jefferson LI ferry commented that "it was a bad table" for me. They were correct but it didn't have to be... Feeling desperate and needing to make it back fast, I decided to go to the high roller pits. Some tables were reserved. And the others did not allow mid shoe entry. ****! Naturally I didn't want to wait and was going crazy so I went back to the $5 H17 tables which are always a circus and played a couple more big hands. Lost again. Instead of being up 2850 as I was earlier in the day, I'm now down to my last 1800. So from 8850 down to 1800! I mosy on over to the H17 tables by sky valet and bet table max on a hand. I get dealt an 11, double for less with the remaining 800 in my pockst and draw a face. Don't remember what happened to the dealer's hand but they lost. I'm now back to 3600. Then went back to my strategy and ended the night up 1100. In other words I turned that 3600 into 7100 using my strategy and being disciplined. That was Friday. Saturday had less drama, mostly because I didn't arrive back at the casino until 4-5 and then I watched the fight with my buddy. I still made 900-1000 but no real huge swings that I can remember. Sunday is another story. I started out being down 200 at the S17 tables and because the dealer was so slow and people had no idea how to play, I decided to move to the smoke free tables next to the casino of the wind. Big mistake. Historically I have never really won at these tables or the tables in the casino of the wind. I just knew I was gonna lose and I did. I'm now down about 600-700 total for the day. No sweat. I decide to try the sky valet tables again as it was approaching noon and they were just setting up shop. I sit down with my buddy who I lent 1k to because he lost all his money on slots (so stupid, I know, but he never listens to me) and after a few shoes I'm back to even for the day. We move to another table and for hours upon hours his 1k bounces between 1600 and 400. My play bounces between being down maybe 600-800 for the day and being up 800-1000 for the day. He finally cashes out at 600 (down 400) and stops playing. I continue to play and once again, I get frustrated and abandon my strategy. I'm quickly in the hole for $2200 for the day and keep pulling out a grand at a time, betting either 500 or 1000 on each hand. One of them was a table max 1k double down which I lost 2k on. I finally pull out the last of my cash. Couldn't believe it. It was something like 700-800. Won the hand and from there I went on to continue my strategy, turning it into 10k plus within maybe 7-8 hours. The whole weekend was one big roller coaster ride. I'm just fortunate I got off it at the top as opposed to the bottom.

What's the point of all this? It's simple. I really wonder just how much more I could've made (or really, how much quicker I would've gotten to my 4k goal) had I stuck to my strategy the whole weekend instead of the two blow ups on Friday and Sunday which nearly wiped me out from betting big during losing streaks. Next time I go I'm going to try to be more disciplined and not let my emotions get the best of me.

[hardin county boy]

cray,

been there and such as that really was as self-destructive to me as the guys say--i also had some crazy luck like you describe but ultimately lost needlessly big. i am trying to untangle the points Tthree is making. great idea to shift from calling it "my strategy" and work toward understanding how we might optimize variance up and minimize the damage of variance down and, importantly, when to alter bet size because because you are down so much that even "reasonable good variance", were it to show up, has little prospect of moving you into the win column.

[Three]

Once in the casino of the wind I got so frustrated that I decided to bet big even though I had been losing hand over fist. I watched in absolute horror as the dealer continually drew to 21 and took 4-5K from me in less than 10 minutes.

Believe me counters hit runs were the dealer does this when they have a big advantage thereby big bets out. It probably happens slightly less frequently to us but the sum of all those same sized big bets over the long run will approach 2% return over the sum of the bets even with the bad luck that comes along the way. I once got crushed for 20% of my BR in a couple hours. I had a big advantage in almost every shoe but just couldn't win much. The real crusher is the 2 times I split to 4 hands with doubles and the dealer hit 4 times to 21. I had strong hands across the board one of the 2 times. Ouch. I was thinking where are all those high cards. The trouble is sometimes they are behind the cut card.

[hitthat16]

Troll alert.

[hardin county boy]

No way around it unless you can correlate bigger bets to player advantage and smaller bets to house advantage.

This is why corrections have to be built into the way you choose to put your money at risk.

Tthree,

focusing on these 2 quotes, examining the counter: he is correlating bigger bets to player advantage and, long run, should accrue to his advantage BUT he has much larger variance that can be very long in correcting and he suffers the likely temporary "disadvantage" of bet sizing that does not respect where he is, relative to "even". we both know this is not a "true" but rather, is a practical disadvantage which should be eventually irrelevant and he should find a winning path that eventually will even immunize him from likely negative lifetime, assuming he doesn't increase minimum bet.

examining our "bet up when up and down when down" gambler, whether accidentally betting up during advantage, or not, he will experience "whatever" and that will be determined far more by variance than advantage. when lucky, if he squirrels some away, the way we all do, he is moving toward a decent win. he arbitrarily declares victory and gets out and his next "session" starts back at "zero" and the "bet higher up and lower down" approach may or may not "get lucky"---if not, gently raising bet......yada, yada, yada------the math i would be interested in involves the notion that a thousand hands might be looked at as containing 3-10 "trials" of oscillating variance, with a bias toward downward variance, representing the house edge. so, if trial one goes up a lot and is pocketed to come again another day, one has been lucky.

if instead one gets to that spot we all know about of down enough he is unlikely to flat bet his way back to even so he artificially commences the "next" trial of 3-10 trials in a thousand hands--he increase the bet a little, giving lucky variance, should it come, adequate unit size to plausibly deliver him to winning. NO LUCK. ok, next trial, rinse and repeat----lot of "trials", constructed by circumstance, delivered by eventual variance, with some inevitable losses.

the simple arithmetic of my FOURTH grade class suggests this is NOT subject to the same math as flat, random, nor count-adjusted hands played over the long run as the bets are sized CONTINGENT on simple math calculations designed to balance avoiding ruin with adequate unit size to exploit common-enough positive variance--agree the EXPECTATION MATH does not differ but defining ruin and perhaps defining a maximum win, then adjusting unit size to respect positive and negative variance and "resetting" when some kind of win is reached IS different. % of hands won should be as predicted in the long term artificially contingent bet sizing should assure more wins at higher units and less at lower---you cant and are not making it happen but rather are simply offering more chances for bigger win when "can" (by luck) and offering less chance to lose big by not betting big when luck is not there.

[Norm]

Wow. Mind-control over luck and variance. Even Superman couldn't do that.

[Solo player]

Might go on a little shopping spree this week there but will make sure to leave all my cash and credit cards at home.

Yeah whatever. IMHO, two of the most precious commodities in life are time and money. You do very well wasting both of them.

the simple arithmetic of my FOURTH grade class suggests this is NOT subject to the same math as flat, random, nor count-adjusted hands played over the long run as the bets are sized CONTINGENT on simple math calculations designed to balance avoiding ruin with adequate unit size to exploit common-enough positive variance--agree the EXPECTATION MATH does not differ but defining ruin and perhaps defining a maximum win, then adjusting unit size to respect positive and negative variance and "resetting" when some kind of win is reached IS different. % of hands won should be as predicted in the long term artificially contingent bet sizing should assure more wins at higher units and less at lower---you cant and are not making it happen but rather are simply offering more chances for bigger win when "can" (by luck) and offering less chance to lose big by not betting big when luck is not there.

How many hours of real table time have you logged in at casinos? Where are the sims to prove yourself? Us counters can "show" our work. You know what I mean. Kind of like in fourth grade math class, when we had to "show" our work.

It's very difficult to even read your posts. Not the topic so much as the terrible grammer and typing. Try using real sentences. Are you still in fourth grade?

[hardin county boy]

How many hours of real table time have you logged in at casinos?

2000 hours = quite a bit for a hobbyist, not so much like a pro.

agree, counters can show their work and that matters, big time.

i THINK a serious math look at this MIGHT reveal substance--math talent MIGHT be able to show the work? my limited math education recalls most complex problems can still be expressed mathematically.

now, a $2500 bankroll, green chip minimum bet, has a defined risk of ruin in 1000 hands, -.5% disadvantage. accept my 2000 hours, anecdotal experience or do the math but in either case it will be true that the player will experience ruin or a bankroll size win with similar frequency WHEN, contingent 100% on luck (variance), he bets up when winning and more modestly when losing. (no one is suggesting any magic in this and it is conceded as fact that betting up DEGRADES a good win with a bit more frequency than it enlarges it.)

if the math question is limited entirely to ONE "trip" of a thousand or fewer hands, the first question is to look at modestly increasing flat bet size when losing so much, even a decent run of favorable variance, at the minimum unit, may not suffice to return the player to "up". this will modestly increase his risk of ruin but provide "one more chance" for variance to deliver his desired win. given that he is "prudently" chasing losses with smaller bets than his upside aggression, this SEEMS to allow a lot of chances to win/break even at minimal increase in risk of ruin. periodic, favorable variance on the upside SEEMS to deliver more net winnings than losses.

my sense is this CAN be tested mathematically but it is NOT tested by invoking "laws of cumulative betting at a disadvantage" because such an approach disregards the VARIABLE of the bet-size being selected relative to the desired point of completion ie even or above, and it does not take into account the player "option" to declare victory and quit at time uncertain----this is on point for ONE, SINGLE, TRIP-----we could untangle more "trips" later but gotta get one trip accurately looked at first. (a trip is one trial, a trial that is NOT random, as described, nor is its outcome a simple function of house advantage).

[Norm]

i THINK a serious math look at this MIGHT reveal substance

Do you have any idea how many PHDs in math, statistics and finance have examined Blackjack? The concepts that you are discussing were debunked long ago.

[Three]

Gees, the math is simple. It has been done a million times and showed exactly what I said. Each bet is made at a disadvantage equal to the HE (house edge) when enough bets have been made. Any coincidental correlation to the count gets evened out over enough bets. I went through this a couple of ways. The commutative law of addition: A + B + C = C + A + B = C + B + A = B + A + C = B + C + A = A + C + B. So when you look back at a session the EXPECTATION would be the same no matter what oder your bets are placed in. In one session your results are not very likely to be at expectation but as you play long enough the weighted average of these sessions will approach expectation of losses equal to your total bet times the house edge. That is the math and it is basic math. The more you raise your bet independent of shifting advantage the higher your hourly loss rate will be in the long run.

There are two things that are true for your play.
1) You are never due for a correction to negate your wins.
2) You will be close to your long run expectation once you have played long enough. That means at some point you will likely see a correction.

The standard deviation for flat betting playing basic strategy and the expectation vary by rules of the game you are playing but to give you an example for a good 6 deck S17, DAS, LS game:

Assuming 60 hands/hour.
1 hour of play: expectation is -0.32 units of your total bet with a standard deviation of 14.2%
.a) within 1 SD of expectation: 68% of the time you will be between -8.84 and +8.2 units
.b) within 2 SD: 95% of the time you will be between -17.69 and +16.39 units
.c) within 3 SD: 99.7% of the time you will be between -26.53 and +24.59 units
2 hours of play expectation is -.65 and SD is 10%
.a) 1 SD: -12.70 and +11.40 units
.b) 2 SD: -25.40 and +22.80 units
.c) 3 SD: -38.09 and + 34.21 units
3 hours of play expectation is -0.97 units and SD of 8.2%
.a) 1 SD: -15.73 and +13.79 units
.b) 2 SD: -31.46 and +27.57 units
. c) 3 SD: -47.19 and + 41.36 units
8 hours of play: expectation is -2.59 units and SD is 5.02%
.a) 1 SD: -26.69 and +21.51 units
.b) 2 SD: -53.38 and +43.02 units
.c) 3 SD: -80.08 and +64.52 units
24 hours of play: expectation is -7.78 units and a SD of 2.90%
.a) 1 SD: -49.52 and +33.97 units
.b) 2 SD: -99.04 and + 67.93 units
.c) 3 SD: -148.55 and + 101.90 units

So you can see why in a session you may show a profit often enough but when you bump up your bet because you are well in the red you increase SD which makes your chances of recovery improve but also makes the chances of much larger additional losses go up even more just due to the distribution and also because you aren't just trying to show a profit against the bell curve that is against you but you must make up the loss that made you raise your bet to start with. This is the math. You have increased your likelihood to be way further behind for a decreased likelihood compared to the beginning of the session that you will be ahead. You will save some sessions and show a small profit but you will lose big more often than you show a small profit as you can see the shorter you play at this higher level the better your overall chances are.

http://www.blackjackforumonline.com/...g_And_Risk.htm

A math lesson on the bell curve:

http://expressiveepicurean.files.wor...bell_curve.gif