Got knocked down a peg

I have been learning about Spanish 21 and found a great place to play. I used Katrina's method, hi-lo starting the count at -24 to account for the absense of 10s. Little cards seemed to fall pretty fast. My bets climbed. By the time the shoe was half over the count was positive. I had max bets out for almost the rest of the shoe. Ended up +1200. Was a great run!

I decided it would be better to stop into another casino rather than going back to table minimum bets with so much money on the table. It was shortly after I arrived at the 2nd casino and saw some 6 deck games that I realized my mistake. I had been playing in an 8 deck game, which I knew and used for deck estimation, but was starting my count at -24 instead of -32.

So my big win came from over betting since my running count was 8 points more generous than it should have been. I feel stupid, but won't make that mistake again. I think this is the first time I ever learned a lesson AND came out $1200 ahead.

-Lucky Apex

Glad to hear you did well. You are LUCKY to have come out ahead and that is a very valuable lesson to learn. This is a good lesson for all of us. Be sure you're playing what you think you're playing before you start and be sure that you are using the correct method to be applied before you implement it.

Just recently I sat down to sequence and quickly realized the game was machine shuffled so I played through the 3rd "shoe", using just cc'ing on the first two, and left immediately. I don't have the mental capacity to track two shoes at a time (really 4). Maybe some here do. Well, I felt like **** after I made that mistake.

Each of our sessions really just boils down to luck. Short term results have no bearing on our abilities. Until you lump all those sessions together into one giant session does the math start to reveal itself.

Good luck with your SP21 career.

By overbetting the shoe you probably GAINED a bit in EV. You dodged a bullet in variance.

Don't beat yourself up too much over this one. You're going to make a lot of worse mistakes than THIS!