Recent content by gordon5432

Try http://wizardofodds.com/blackjack. Don't worry about counting or comp-dependent strategy until you've memorized basic strategy down to second nature.

With those rules, that situation should never even come up. Just surrender 88vT. If surrender isn't offered, just hit or stand depending on the count.

More importantly, what does this machine pay out for a BJ? I'd be really surprised to find a 3-2 video BJ machine on the strip.

Check your arithmetic again. The # of inclusive numbers between x and y is (y-x)+1 so the odds of picking a number between 1 and 100 would be 1 in 100, not 101. In practice, a game which pays even money for predicting the flip of a coin is better than a game which pays 99 to 1 for picking a...

Anything based on superstition (playing hunches, bad players hurt you, the flow, etc) or flawed logic (clumping, any progressive betting system unless it's somehow tied into the count) rather than sound mathematics is voodoo. Ignorance of BS is not voodoo, but knowingly going against it, such as...

The costliest plays that most ploppies make are imo: 1. Playing side bets like royal match (can't resist the allure of a 22-1 payout) 2. Playing 6-5 games (the only thing that truly makes me want to smack them upside the head, but mathematically still better than side bets) 3. Taking...

Every real review of the book on Amazon.com gives the book one star (there are also ten "5 star reviews" which were obviously faked.) The reviewers mention that the book is only 40 pages long with no writing on the backs of the pages and that it is "more like a poorly written college essay" than...

Just triples the house edge? The man suggests surrendering 8v9.

Very interesting, and part of the reason why I love playing BJ is because of the counter-intuitive plays such as this (I couldn't help but laugh when a ploppy flipped out at me when I hit 16v7, then stood on 5-5-6v10 a few hands later.) Just goes to show why you should always trust the odds over...

I'm new to counting as well, but I have a friend deal pretend BJ hands 30 or so cards out of a single deck as quickly as he can with noise in the background, then we check the dealt cards to see if my TC calculations were correct. Contrary to popular belief, counting in a SD game is actually...

:eek::laugh:

That's a HUGE sucker bet, about the equivalent of taking insurance with the TC at -2. The payout should be changed to 5:2 or else no sane person would play that.

17 is actually an underdog against any dealer upcard except a 6, and that's only in a S17 game. As I said before, the math is extremely close, and you would make money in the long run doubling A3 v 4, just not quite as much as you would hitting in a multi-deck game.

You'd never want to stand on soft 17, so there are actually 3 cards you could catch doubling soft 14 that would make you wish you could hit again vs only 2 when doubling soft 15. It's very close, but mathematically you're better off hitting soft 14 v 4 than doubling (although in a single deck...