Small incremental gains add up significantly. If you spend years doubling your bankroll six times player A with a 1.05% edge has 25% more money than player B with a 1% edge. That's tens of thousands of dollars or even more depending on the exact approach. This is mainly because of a kind of compound interest effect where an extra cent you might be earning from a session grows into a huge amount of money over a long enough time period.
You'll need to do calculations based on your own actual play to find if that crude estimate is representative but generally speaking the compounding effect always becomes significant over time.
So if you could play the harder perfectly all other things being equal, yes, it is worth it, even though you won't notice any difference at all in the short term.
The issue is can you play the extra system perfectly all things being equal? You can reduce this to a formula, something like:
Gains
____________________________
Errors+Play Speed+Heat Factor
- Gains: Represents the expected monetary gains from using the count system.
- Errors: Accounts for the errors introduced by the count system.
- Play Speed: Reflects the speed of play.
- Heat Factor: Represents the impact of the count system on attracting casino heat or suspicion and associated reduction in win rate.
You can make this more accurate but also more complex with other considerations which may affect your win rate.
You can estimate these factors based on publicly available literature for a generic estimate but it is much better to get the data from your own play
from simulation.
There are a few other factors that rarely get discussed in the context of harder I want to emphasize:
1. People generally assume the complexity of a count system and increased error have a linear relationship. They don't. Human error doesn't work that way. Human psychology is complex.
Obviously a system beyond the mental abilities of a card counter is going to increase error. However a system that is beneath the abilities of a card counter becomes tedious to use and tedium is also a
major source of error.
2. Most pit personnel trained to count cards will be using hi-lo. Higher level count systems are not perfectly correlated with hi-lo. They are generally quite close but if your count system causes you to make a big bet when hi-lo would recommend otherwise and this buys you extra time at your favorite candy store-that
is a big deal.
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