Simulation vs Actual Question

#1
First, I am new at Blackjack. I have played Blackjack on and off in the past 20 years, but not with BS, not for long and not for more than $5.

There actually is a question at the end of this which reads "How similar are the simulated games to actual play and can I expect pretty much the same results at table play?". But, first a bit of background to the question.

About 5 months ago I was playing around with the Blackjack Hustler game on my phone and was consistently winning and making good money. Thought I was the first Human since the times of King Tut to develop a new and wildly effective Blackjack system. So, in preparation for taking a trip to Vegas and cleaning out the Casinos, I started doing my homework, learned BS, read this very helpful site, Wizard of Odds and others.

I have since abandoned the phone game as useless and mostly accepted the fact that my Miracle System was a fluke statistical bump played on a bad simulation, although the dream died hard. However, I am still enjoying Blackjack and refining my game. I have not done much with counting but am starting to work on that a bit.

I have played about 30,000 simulated hands on BJI, Wizard of Odds, Bodog and, recently CV. I have kept track of wins, losses, # hands, bankrolls and bet size. I have recorded and analyzed these on Excel using the graphing function until I have played long enough to get consistent trend lines on my win/loss units per 60 hands which means my sample population is large enough to declare my results as representative of a much larger sample. I do have a fair, but rusty, background in statistics, but decided Excel was good enough for my purposes since I am constantly rearranging and comparing different elements of my samples.

I have analyzed my money return per hand and per hour, W&L Strings, bank growth and shrinkage. The most meaningful analysis seems to be my betting units of return per 60 hands which has remained perpendicular for some time now.

I have found differences between the various simulations. BJI and CV ( I have not altered the original CV settings) seem to perform almost identically, although I had a very very painfully long bad string on BJI and it took a while for the trendlines to recover. Wizard of Odds seems to similar to BJI and CV, although with less drama and a slightly higher return. I figure this is because Wizard of Odds reshuffles after every hand. The other simulation games (mostly Casino come-ons) seemed either too easy or I didn't play long enough to get a large enough sample population to develop anything meaningful.

I have also played about 300 hands at a local Indian casino with unfavorable table rules (HS17, NDAS, 6:5,etc.) and kept track of my BJ's, wins and losses. This is my only "actual" game experience in recent years, and while I do not have enough hands or data to compare to my simulated playing, the rhythm does "feel" very similar to simulated games.

My question, after this long introduction, is this.......How similar are the simulated games to actual play and can I expect pretty much the same results at table play?
 

Canceler

Well-Known Member
#2
Hate to see a new poster ignored...

First, a small terminology lesson: When most people here see any form of the word “simulation”, they are thinking of a program that plays billions of hands by itself. An electronic representation of a BJ game which you play yourself would be called… a game. :)

Grasshopper said:
How similar are the simulated games to actual play...
The BS Trainer on this site, for example, has a shoe full of cards shuffled into random order, it shuffles at a certain point, and plays by the rules, just like a live game. So…

Grasshopper said:
...can I expect pretty much the same results at table play?
Yes, subject to those sometimes wild short-term fluctuations you’re already familiar with.
 
#3
Thanks for the info Canceler

Thanks for the info and vocabulary reminder. I was wondering about that. Appreciate it a lot. Still seems like I am having an incredibly long run of good luck , though.
 

Deathclutch

Well-Known Member
#4
Grasshopper said:
Thanks for the info and vocabulary reminder. I was wondering about that. Appreciate it a lot. Still seems like I am having an incredibly long run of good luck , though.
It happens. If it's any sort of betting system it's a loser however.
 

shadroch

Well-Known Member
#6
QFIT said:
When you have played a few hundred million hands, you will have meaningful results.
I would argue that the car I'm ordering with my BJ winnings is meaningful enough,even though it took me a bit less than a few hundred million hands
 
#8
How long to play a million hands for real?

QFIT said:
When you have played a few hundred million hands, you will have meaningful results.
A few hundred million hands? Wow! Not sure I can wait that long.

The way way I calculate it, if I play 8 hrs/day, 5 days/week, 52.14 weeks/ year it at an average of 100 hands per hour it will take me 4.8 years to play a million hands and 4,794.5 years to play a billion hands.
 

kewljason

Well-Known Member
#9
Grasshopper said:
A few hundred million hands? Wow! Not sure I can wait that long.

The way way I calculate it, if I play 8 hrs/day, 5 days/week, 52.14 weeks/ year it at an average of 100 hands per hour it will take me 4.8 years to play a million hands and 4,794.5 years to play a billion hands.
8 hours a day, 5 days a week @ 100 hands per hour. Looks good on paper, but in real life, no way you can come close to that. And that 8 hours a day is 8 hours of actual play time. Counting moving around between tables and/or casinos, add in food and bathroom breaks and your 8 hours a day play time is consuming 12 hours a day of clock time. :eek:

I keep track of hands played as best I can estimate rather than hours and by my estimate I played just over 98,000 hands last year, and I play ALOT of blackjack. This year almost 3 months in I am at 24,000+, or about the same pace. To get double this amount would take 80 to 100 hours a week. :eek:
 

Sonny

Well-Known Member
#10
Grasshopper said:
A few hundred million hands? Wow! Not sure I can wait that long.
It takes less than 15 minutes with a good sim program. Spending a month or so learning the techniques could save you 4,794 years of wasted time. And you would have plenty of time left over to test hundreds of different systems until you find one that works. :)

-Sonny-
 

Renzey

Well-Known Member
#11
Grasshopper said:
A few hundred million hands? Wow! Not sure I can wait that long.

The way way I calculate it, if I play 8 hrs/day, 5 days/week, 52.14 weeks/ year it at an average of 100 hands per hour it will take me 4.8 years to play a million hands and 4,794.5 years to play a billion hands.
Ran a sim for several hundred million hands and checked the yield every 90,000 hands (representing around 900 hours of play). The game was a fair-to-poor 6 deck variety with fair rules, fair-to-poor pen, a 1-to-11 spread and a fair counting system. The player was ahead after 90,000 hands 98% of the time. Meaningful or not? You call it. NOTICE: See Correction Below!!
 
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QFIT

Well-Known Member
#12
Renzey said:
Ran a sim for several hundred million hands and checked the yield every 90,000 hands (representing around 900 hours of play). The game was a fair-to-poor 6 deck variety with fair rules, fair-to-poor pen, a 1-to-11 spread and a fair counting system. The player was ahead after 90,000 hands 98% of the time. Meaningful or not? You call it.
Well, there is being ahead and there is being ahead. If some percentage of those sims showed you were a tiny bit ahead, and the sims assumed perfect play and never having to leave with a positive count, what does that mean?

I am certainly guilty of running many sims with perfect conditions as that's a good method of comparison. But, it makes me nervous when someone uses empirical evidence as a source of any results.
 

Renzey

Well-Known Member
#13
QFIT said:
Well, there is being ahead and there is being ahead. If some percentage of those sims showed you were a tiny bit ahead, and the sims assumed perfect play and never having to leave with a positive count, what does that mean?

I am certainly guilty of running many sims with perfect conditions as that's a good method of comparison. But, it makes me nervous when someone uses empirical evidence as a source of any results.
It's true the player played perfectly and never left play on a posivie count. He also never used any camo hand plays, never tipped the dealer, never played two hands, never drove players from the table with any high count ploys, never made any scavenger plays, etc.

The player was ahead by more than his EV 50% of the time, was below EV but still ahead 48% of the time and was behind or busted 2% of the time. NOTICE: See Correction Below!!!

The game was 6 deck with 3 other players, H17, DAS, 70% pen, KISS III system, 1-to-11 spread.

I can run another sim to find what percentage of times the player was ahead by a small enough margin that it might be legitimately feared he would be behind in real world play.
 
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Renzey

Well-Known Member
#14
Sorry! Correction!

Renzey said:
I can run another sim to find what percentage of times the player was ahead by a small enough margin that it might be legitimately feared he would be behind in real world play.
My first report above was WRONG! I misinterpreted the run. Actually, the player was down by his EV or more, 2% of the time. SO SORRY!

Upon rerun, I see that the player was ahead after 900 hours just 85% of the time. Also, there was only a 70% chance that he'd be ahead by half his EV or more. So if in real world play he gave up half his EV thru mistakes, cover, heat, tipping, etc, I guess there'd be a 30% chance he'd be behind after 900 hours in this mediocre game. That's a lot worse than the original 2% posted above!
 
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aslan

Well-Known Member
#15
Renzey said:
My first report above was WRONG! I misinterpreted the run. Actually, the player was down by his EV or more, 2% of the time. SO SORRY!

Upon rerun, I see that the player was ahead after 900 hours just 85% of the time. Also, there was only a 70% chance that he'd be ahead by half his EV or more. So if in real world play he gave up half his EV thru mistakes, cover, heat, tipping, etc, I guess there'd be a 30% chance he'd be behind after 900 hours in this mediocre game. That's a lot worse than the original 2% posted above!
Now THAT sounds more like REAL life! :laugh:
 
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