Hi everyone,
I'm relatively new to advantage play in blackjack. I've been using the KO method (because it's easy for beginners) at low limit tables, mostly just for fun (I have a nice 9-5 job, no interest in being a professional gambler), though I've actually had quite a lot of success with it. I could be getting extremely lucky, but it's still one of the most enjoyable hobbies I've ever started.
I'm glad to have found this forum, and after lurking for some time have gained a lot of respect for the players on here. I look forward to benefitting from your wisdom and experiences and I'm already pretty grateful for the things I have learned just from lurking here w/o posting for a while.
Anyway I feel like I truly "broke my cherry" the other day as the aforementioned good luck ran out and I lost 20 hands in a row using perfect basic strategy (and I know it was perfect as I was using a basic strategy card that I ordered off Amazon lol). So, what are the odds of this happening in a "1 in X" format? This only cost me a hundred bucks as I was betting the table minimum of five dollars. After losing ten hands in a row, I actually decided to keep going just to see how long it would last (my previous record had been 13 hands in a row, but I walked away so it potentially could have lasted longer). I'm aware that 10 hands in a row is actually not that rare (about 1 in 500 odds, with roughly a hundred hands dealt every hour, it happens all the time), but 20 in a row seems pretty severe. Has to be worse than 1 in a million?
And this was 6 decks, if that's relevant, and anyone wants to include that in the calculation. I'm not sure how to calculate these probabilities, so I figured I'd ask here along with the losing streak horror story and self-introduction. (Don't worry about this factor, but it probably goes without saying that I had a negative count throughout the whole streak.) If this post is too silly for the General Blackjack Forum, I'm totally cool with it being moved to the Stuff forum.
Edit to add if there is a good book/resource for probability in blackjack that anyone can recommend? I just order Probability for Dummies so that should give you an idea of where I'm at when it comes to knowledge in this area, lol.
Anyway, great forum.
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