When does a system become legit?

I have employed a system with success, roughly up 3k in 6500 hands. I am wondering how many total hands (15,000? 50, 000?) will it take to feel very confident whether the system is legit. I am not aware of any software programs that I could put my sytem to use to test it in a million hands. If there is such a program that is user friendly please advise, or if anyone knows how many hands would it take for it to be legit let me know, thanks

I read somewhere online that a progession system could work for blackjack by keeping count of the losses and wins and stuff because of the fact that players chances improve after a loss and decrease after a win. But then they mentioned that the edge on such a system would be so low that it really wouldn't be an advantage at all.

Several hundred thousand hands ,at a minimum.
If it is a radical departure from accepted play,several million hands.
6500 hands is little more than a week of playing one on one full time.
Its been posted here that some of the best players in the world go thru months long losing streaks.The inverse would be that some lousy players go thru months long winning streaks.

perhaps your system is ammenable to a simulator. give the parameters of your system and those of us that have simulators can tell you if it can be tested on the simulator.

Wong and have a large bankroll. Or sit with a large bankroll and know what your doing.

It must be logical and independently verifiable.

I once used a system in Vegas that beat every club. I won $3,300. The goal was to win $100 in each club. Up $95 in one club with only another $5 to go I dropped $800 chasing that last $5 before recovering and walking away a winner. I never used the system again because I saw a flaw in it. The system was logical but didn't handle variance too well. You must be your own critic and try to tear your own system apart and try to find its weak points and pinpoint its good points. Don't let the money you're up fool you.

Good simulators for non-counters are hard to come by. Any system that goes off the beaten path probably needs a custom simulator. If your system is logical and you can't find any unmanageable flaws and you've put in 2000 playing hours in a real casino coupled with good records of all sessions then a simulator will just confirm what you already know. Above all it must be logical to yourself and anyone else looking at it. Logical, mathematical confirmation and then simulation.

To determine the advantage of a strategy you should run at least 250,000,000 hands. I typically run 2 billion and the sims in Blackjack Attack were 20 billion each. But if it is a progression strategy, save your money. Any valid simulator will show it has negative EV.

Simulators

An error free simulator only gives confirmation to the probable outcome of a specific task. How well money is applied to an, either/ or event, as in progressions, needs a specific simulator.

In your 20 billion hand sim, how often did the player go broke or did you use an infinite bankroll?

I heard this too. It increases your odds very slightly over BS, but it does not overcome the house edge. I dont even think it comes close...

I read from a reputable blackjack author that it CAN overcome the house edge, but it would be very complicated and the player's advantage would be miniscule. It would take me all day to find that again but take my word for it. It is possible.

And what I mean is that it is possible to devise a progession system to overcome the hose edge not that it has been done yet.

"Sounds like a job for supercool!"
-Supercoolmancool

If you find a single deck game that is dealt to the bottom, and you bet the table min except when all hands in a shuffle are lost and then bet the table max on the last hand, you can get an advantage. But, they would shuffle the cards when you made the max bet. This is not a progression system. It is an extremely weak counting strategy.

Sorry, it is not possible.

I think he means that is possible under some extreme conditions. For example if you find a game that has a tiny house advantage, you could use a dumb little win/loss system to overcome the tiny house advantage. Either way, using a dumb little trick like that is still not doing much, even if it doesn overcome a tiny house advantage. I wouldn't look into it anymore than you already have...

No, actually you couldn't.

you gotta love when ppl talk about random BS that will never occur. yes a system can beat blackjack (but the rules alone could be beaten just by BS, ie make a game with 2:1 BJ payouts, and super good rules). nothing like this will ever happen and talking about it is a waste of everyones time, thank you supercoolman.

Don't be so quick to say you can't in any situation. You could theoretically think of a situation where you could. Lets say there is a game that has a set of rules that gives the house a .001% advantage. Now you use a win/loss system that will increase your odds just slightly. It would be enough to overcome the house edge in this example.

I'm not saying it's practical, but you could imagine a situation where it might work. I'm not advocating using any system just because of that.

Well I searched and searched but I couldn't find the article. But seriously you gotta believe me guys. The dude said that it is theoretically possible to overcome the house edge in blackjack using a complicated progression system that has yet to be devised comprised of keeping a count of wins and loses. But yah he said it would not be effective because of the low advantage. I will continue to look for it but it was from a respected site. The point of the article was to say that it is NOT IMPOSSIBLE to beat blackjack with a progression system. Just that it hasn't been invented but that you can't dismiss the idea all together. You have too analyze it instead of just automatically saying no.

At this point, with people studying blackjack with computers for 40+ years, if there was such a system, it would have been found by now. And if it has been found by now, it is either illegitimit, or it's been kept super, super secret by some (now) Billionaire.

Making claims of a "system that beats the house/is better than bs" is like making claims of "disproving the theory of relativity". Both the blackjack community and the physics community have accepted these theories because there is a ton of legitimate, peer reviewed, proven facts that support those systems. It's been shown to work time and time again, by many people, in many different ways-- and more importantly, it fails under conditions that it should fail.

For bs: Any number of mathemiticians in any number of seperate locations using any number of methods will always come out with the same results when analyzing the house edge on any game of Blackjack. The same is true if any of them were to analyze BS, or Hi/Lo, or indicies, or anything. And by analysis, that means testing every possible outcome where appropriate, and using multi-billion hand simulators in all other cases.

SO, if you have a theory, then it must be provable by anyone-- you, the guy you hire, some other mathmetician-- anyone who is qualified. And you have to be looking at the multi-billion hand region. The reason for this is because of the margin of errors and variance involved. Variance is just another way of saying margin of error. Margin of errors don't go away. They are inherent in any measurement of any kind using any instrument. The trick is to take a same large enough that the margin of error is statistically insignificant. (IE: Let's say that you are measuring a distance, and the instrument you are using has a margin of error of +/- 1cm. It would be bad to measure the distance from your fingertip to your palm. 1cm might make a difference if you were fitting gloves. However, you could easily use it to measure the distance from New York to Japan. 1cm won't matter). The same is true with blackjack sims. Mathmeticians have figured out that the multi-billion hand range is a large enough same to overcome any variance that a player might experience.

Noone is talking about getting a huge advantage using a system, simply overcoming the house edge. It's really just a discussion for fun, there will be no practical value to overcoming the house edge if you dont get any advantage...

this is probably the article you're referring to:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/greenbaize21/prog.htm (Archive copy)