How Rare... A Man Using His Brain!

http://scoblete.casinocitytimes.com...ckjack-a-new-strategy-for-a-new-millennium-96

Walter Thomason - Twenty-First Century BlackJack.

Anyone using this guy's strategy? I haven't read this book nor will I likely do so, however it is good to see that someone is finally beginning to think for themselves rather than just jumping on the card-counting bandwagon.

He has "quit points" in his strategy. Does anyone know what they are? Quit points would be what I term "External Indicators". Indicators apart from wins and loses that tell you when you need to either increase or decrease your bet. Card Counting is an External Indicator. The "True Count" tells you when to increase or decrease your bet.

Cheers, Licentia.

As much as it goes against my usual thinking, this might be an interesting book to read.

The idea of comparing different methods against the exact same hands is probably new, eh? I don't think I've ever heard of anyone doing that.

EDIT: I just realized that article is over 8 years old. Time to hit google and see what everyone thought about this 8 years ago.

I briefly flipped through that book in the library a few weeks back...wasn't too impressed, but I sure didn't get into the meat of it.

He’s just another guy trying to hawk a progression system. A full analysis of his system can be found here:

http://www.blackjack-scams.com/html/prog__systems.html

That page has some other good information on it as well.

It doesn’t matter. Things like quit points and stop-loss limits do not change your long-term results. Several short sessions will still average out to one longer session. You are not changing the house edge because you are choosing arbitrary times to enter and leave the game.

No, quit points are internal indicators because they are directly based on your wins and losses, not the actual house/player advantage.

-Sonny-

Here's one critique of the book:

Save your money!, June 30, 2000
By [Author's name deleted]

The most important thing you need to know about this book is that Thomason's system simply does NOT work. Despite Thomason's claims, there is no logical reason to think it should work; there is no convincing (that is, statistically significant) evidence that it does work; and there is CONSIDERABLE evidence, from both math and computer simulations, that it does NOT work. I have simulated this system using CVSim (a popular commercial simulator), with my own simulator, and with a modified version of a "freeware" simulator. All together, I have the results from many billions of hands. All three simulators gave precisely the same result: This progression produces slightly worse results, in terms of amount lost per dollar bet, than flat betting. My own simulator also accumulated results by "sessions" ranging from 100 hands (about an hour of playing time) up to 50,000 hands, and it also compared flat betting to the progression on the same hands, as Thomason does in the book. In ALL cases, the progression had fewer winning sessions than flat betting, and flat betting beat the progression in more than half the sessions. It seems likely that Thomason was merely self-deluded at the time he wrote the book (as a result of the insignificant number of blackjack hands that he used for testing), but he now knows about these results, after lengthy debate with myself and others on Stanford Wong's [...] forum. It's hard now for me to avoid the conclusion that Thomason simply doesn't care that a lot of people will lose a lot of money playing this system. You don't need to be one of them. Do NOT fall for the idiotic "reasoning" that since card counting is hard, you should play a progression. This is really just an example of Thomason's inability to deal with ordinary logic.

To be sure, there were other critiques that were entirely complimentary. Some readers swore by it from there actual experiences. They pooh-poohed the idea that billions of simulated hands disproves that it is a winning system, stating that they will never play a billion hands in a lifetime. Unbelieveable! All the billion simulations means is that there's no chance that the proof is just a fluke--it has nothing to do with whether one actually plays a billion hands.

Also, I can find a limited set of data that will prove that an out and out martingale will work. That may sell books, but it doesn't prove a thing!

If his quit points are based on wins and losses then it is indeed a progression system.

I found a great site for testing strategy. It calculates the Standard Deviation to show if the money your strategy makes is mathematically possible if there is a house edge against you:

http://www.qfit.com/calcrisk.htm

Over 170 hands my strategy was up over $700. Using the website I could tell quickly whether that was mathematically possible with the house edge against me. How wonderful it was to see a "0% Probability percentage of winning at least the desired amount!!!"

that calculator is bogus.. it claims i have a 60% chance of winning $10 playing 10,000 hands with an $11 average bet if my advantage is .3%.. no matter how you look at it (being $10 up anytime during those 10k hands, or finishing at least $10 up at the end of 10,000 hands) its got to be wrong.. just mess around with different numbers and you can tell its not right

It doesn’t actually tell you if your system is a winner. It only tells you how likely you are to get lucky and avoid the house edge. For such a short time as 170 hands you could use almost any strategy and still get a profit most of the time. Unfortunately, the more hands you play the less likely you are to stay on the lucky side of variance.

-Sonny-

This is my 2nd system by the way. Mentally I know that it has to work. It just wouldn't make sense if it didn't.

I understand what you are saying. I have done abundance of testing already though. My results are consistent. After 11283 recorded hands tested I am up $2325.00. And that does not include the almost $800 over 170 hands because I accidentally closed the game window before I recorded the stats. I also have had times up a lot of money that I didn't track because the game crashed or whatever. The majority of the sessions are wins or break even, without even winning 42% of my hands. Over all I would judge that I am up more than $4000 after about 13,500 hands tested. It is just too consistent to say that it won't work.

And you guys have said also that if my high bets are during win streaks and low bets during loss streaks then this could happen. But my bets are consistently up and down whether I am winning or not. For example, from shoe to shoe I spend as much time at high bets and low bets as I did the previous shoe. It is not as though some shoes are all low bets and others high. My bets are constantly going up and down and up and down. It looks like a progression system because the bets go up and down so much. For every 5 hands I play I will estimate, I am at both my base and max bet within those 5 hands. Even so, I can be only winning 32-38% of my hands and my bankroll only drops $500-$700 in 1000 hands. But I can win 43% of my hands and be up $1000 in 1000 hands. Or that day I won 56% of my hands and was up almost $800 in 160-170 hands. I wish I wrote the stats down from that day. I had a big fat 0% possibility on that website.

But damn I would love if I could sim it.

Licentia.