What if you could take your entire bet back?

I was reading a book today and while reading about LS I thought about this:

What if you could receive your hand and see the dealers up card, and then decide whether you wanted to stay in or take back your ENTIRE bet?

I know this would be a sick edge for the player but I'm wondering how much it would be?

you are only playing +EV hands, sounds great..

are you back betting here?

Running some quick numbers, it looks like the player's edge would be about 17% to 18%.

Essentially, the player would surrender any time the expected value of his hand against the dealer's up card was not positive. I believe that results in the player surrendering about 59% of hands and playing about 41% of hands.

Those numbers are based on a spreadsheet I threw together quickly, so I won't share all the details. Perhaps someone else could verify.

If you ever find a game like this you take out a second mortgage, your entire bank account and 401k, you get the highest loan you can get, and bet 1/10 your (big) bankroll at every spot on the table till you bankrupt the casino.

I say 100%. If this situation were real, I would bet the table max and surrender anything other than a natural. You would have zero risk and you would win 150% of your bet every natural. Easy way to bankrupt the casino.

A similar situation has happened. There used to be an online casino where if you hit the surrender button twice very quickly it would give you 75% of your bet back. Then some ass-clown told the casino.

EV is per hand. So if you did that you only get 150% per every 20 or so hands, giving you <7.5% advantage.

A much better way would be to only surrender when you were less than 50% chance to win, all while betting to the kelly criterion of course. Only when you are down to your last bet would you draw back everything except blackjacks.

In a real-life situation, I would expect that you could implement a small spread, maybe no more than 1-4 in a shoe game, and only surrender 14-16 vs. a T and A to create a reasonable edge without alerting the casino to the fact that a certain dealer doesn't understand how LS works. An interesting experiment for the theory people?

There is a difference between "EV" and "advantage".

"EV" is defined as (wins-losses)/(trials). Because EV takes pushes into account, this means that the EV for this strategy would be about 7.5%.

"Advantage" is defined as (wins-losses)/(wins+losses);which means that the ADVANTAGE would be 150%.

Both "EV" and "advantage" have separate distinct uses. EV is most useful when one wants to estimate how much he can expect to win in a specified time frame or a specified number of hands. Advantage is most useful to determine optimal bet size. For example, if you decided that you were going to take back your bet on everything other than BJ; you would be a fool to use the EV figure for a Kelly betting strategy. You would OBVIOUSLY want to bet 100% of your BR rather than 7.5%.

After giving this some more thought, I believe your edge would be less than 150%. The reason being because you cannot surrender before the dealer checks for a natural. If the dealer has 21 and you don't, you lose.

Your edge is correct.

I dont know if anybody told them.

They might've figured it out themself. They lost mid-6 figures (that i was aware about) so they might've noticed a drop in blackjack profits.