ALTERNATIVE BETTING, FOR MD. part 1of2

Floating advantage

This is my first post on this site. I've viewed it for a while. Of the sites I have seen, this seems to be the most open minded. In my opinion, Ken does an excellent job of allowing posts that do not necessarily conform to some pre-conceived notion, and instead drawing the line when posts turn into degenerate name calling without substance.

Anyway, for the past few years I have been working on a program to compute exact expected values. I don't promote it as everything you will ever need for blackjack. Instead I look at it as a tool that can be useful in analyzing the game.

A screenshot of the program showing the overall EV of 1/2 deck gives an idea of what I think is being referred to as "floating advantage."


The overall CD EV (using full shoe CD strategy) = +.8093 as compared with +.0243 for full single deck. If best CD strategy is used the EVs are +.8712 and +.0248. If infinite shoe basic is used, the EVs are -.0487 for the full deck and +.5780 for the 1/2 deck.

I think floating advantage refers to the fact that the fewer the number of decks, the greater the overall EV. What I have shown is a 26 card slug with a composition in an exact proportion to a full deck comp, which may not necessarily be the case.

I have made a demo version of the program available (Dead link: http://www.bjstrat.net/cdca_demo_download.htm) _here_. Basically what is required for the program is enough memory and a Windows OS.

The demo version is free, but I hope to make a little $$. I'd like to hear impressions of the program. I have an email address that can be found in the download.

k_c

that's the way I understand it - high +TC's don't carry the advantage one would think they would due to lots of pushes and, conversely high negative TC's are even more disastrous than one would think due to bad splitting and doubling results.

So therefore basic strategy itself is worth more at TC's around 0 in order for the overall HA to be what it is.

So a TC0 with 3 decks remaining in a 6D game is worth more than if u had started with 3Decks.

So the "advantage" occurs around 0 counts not extreme counts.

Of course I'm still trying to grasp why the much-maligned CSM's have an advantage over cut-card games.

Welcome aboard k.c and thankyou for the free demo, i'll be contacting you as soon as i figure where the warp drive button is.:laugh:

I haven't tried it yet but it looks like a cool program. It looks similar to the (Dead link: http://www.beejack.com/blackjack-analyzer.html) _Beejack analyzer _except that it includes more EV information.

-Sonny-

Actually it is a pretty simple program. If you do nothing and just accept the default settings and click "Compute," you will get the overall EVs for a full single deck using best CD strategy for the default set of rules. That should get you started.

k_c

I downloaded BeeJack a few years ago and found it to be erroneous at that time. I downloaded the latest demo to check it out again. It doesn't compute exact EVs but it seems to be pretty close in general. Its playing decision EVs are better than its overall EVs. It always computes SPL3.

The hardest thing for me to do in my program was to allow for some form of sub-optimal strategy computations. It's actually simpler to just compute optimal play.

k_c