Hi,
I became interested in Blackjack and card counting a little while ago - learned from wizardofodds.com and blackjackapprenticeship.com, read books by Dr. Thorp, Lance Humble and Peter Griffin; practiced basic strategy and card counting at home and visited casino in Louisiana a couple of times, but ended up losing money all the time. As I was aware of the "law of large number" and being a full time worker, I wanted to find out how many trials (hands) do I need to play in order to generate some meaningful gain, and whether that many number of casino visit is feasible for me or not. Therefore, I wrote a python script which includes basic strategy, playing deviation (Illustrious 18), card counting and 1 to 8 bet spread strategy. I am providing the Google Colab link below. To my surprise, no matter how many number of trials I ran (Most common streak I ran was 1 million hands. Assuming that casino deals in average of 40 hands/hour, 1 million hand is 25,000 hrs of Blackjack play), my script ended up losing money overall. There are localized streaks of gains, but the overall result is loss. I wonder if anyone else has similar real or virtual (simulated) advantage play experience of losses after losses. My script sort of broke my heart and I am wondering whether I should even think about casino visit counting cards, and been thinking is variance in nature more dominant than we would like to think.
Link to code (written in Python) in Google Colab:
https://colab.research.google.com/dr...oM?usp=sharing
Here is a set of example where I ran one set with playing deviation and another set without playing deviation. Each set contains 100 streaks of 10,000 hands/streak, i.e. 1,000,000 hands total. The screenshots of the bankroll and the game data of each hand is saved under:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folde...2Z?usp=sharing
As you can see, even with card counting, regarding whether deviation is on or off, player can expect to lose significant number of hands. Implementation of playing deviation improves the odd to some degree. But, nowhere near the rainbow or sunshine. I looked at the txt files of game data (saved in link above), where it shows each hand. It seems like the basic strategy, deviation, wager adjustment, card counting are performed correctly.
Thank you for your time. Any input on why I am losing despite using basic strategy, card counting and playing deviation is greatly appreciated!
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