life is short

so this advantage stuff, when it comes down to the idea of beating blackjack with AP play, thing is we are always encouraged to take the long term view, philosophy, perspective where we pin our hopes and dreams on that day that surely might come. lol.

so ok thats fine. stilll it begs the question, what about now, what about a trip or session of play? if one is as much interested or even more so in short term results, is there a different way to play in any respects than the orthodox AP ways that would at the same time raise expectations for the short run and the long run?

You can go read some of Monkey's posts about betting towards an hourly wage, especially if you don't rely on BJ to pay the bills. His advice on that topic is really useful under a thread title of life is short.

Using this method you can definitely increase your short run expectation along with your ROR. Long run, maybe not. To increase both, you need to play stronger and play longer.

any links?

Sure!!! Stand behind a table and wait for a good count and put your whole BR on one hand:laugh: I tried this once:cry:

oh no you didn't? :whip:

The highlight of my BJ career...some time ago


Ya, but it was only a whopping 175.00. Some BR huh...:laugh:

big enough. did you know what your odds where?:cool2:

Let me guess you were dealt aces, right?

Never fails!!!But the hard part was, I got dealt 2 tens, right on top of them:whip:

To me the best short term approach is to use the best long term approach. If expected win rate is 0% or 100% on an even money payout bet (sure thing) then short term and long term coincide. If win rate for the same bet is greater than 0% and less than 100% then short term can be viewed as a "partial" sure thing. If short term you win 50% of the time then long term you will expect to break even. If short term win rate is less than 50% then long term you will expect to lose all. If short term win rate is greater than 50% then long term you will expect to continuously grow your bamkroll. It's all about doing the best you can to recognize conditions and make the best decision. That's all that can be done and in that respect you can apply this approach to more than just blackjack since I don't think everything in life boils down to a sure thing. When you're dealing with short term events that are not sure things then anything can happen. It's up to each individual to take whatever short term risk they decide is fit to take but first they need a method to assess risk and making reference to long term is it.

Since this is the Voodoo Forum maybe some voodoo priest or priestess will refute this. I think I remember a system by the immortal Lucky Ned which reduces this question to a simple statement, "Go with guts!" The voodoo ¿advantage? is that it tends to be far simpler than anything else.

how about progressions with maybe some goal, maybe some stop loss point? some of them supposedly you can get ahead around 75% of the time.
so say you take a gamble, i dunno 'every so often' (what ever that means, just lets say rarely), and you get lucky and come out ahead those 'every so often' times (ie. you by luck just experience the 75% get ahead experience). but then the vast majority of the time you do as you suggested use the best short term approach, which is to use the best long term approach.
is there some statistical law that would make such fancy foot works' success improbable, or impossible?

The true odds are still the true odds, win or lose like the truth is still the truth, said or unsaid.

Sure. If you want the long run to get here sooner then you either need to play with a bigger advantage, less variance or both. If you want to have a reasonable chance of getting to the long run in a single trip then simple card counting probably isn’t going to cut it. A card counter might need to play for at least 400-800 hours to have a reasonable chance of reaching his long-term results. Using more advanced strategies could bring that number down to around 10-80 hours of play, which can often be done in a single trip if you can get in enough playing time.

If you’re looking for quick profits, don’t be too eager to settle for progression systems or other non-AP techniques. If you need to get the job done quicker then you need to use stronger tools, not weaker ones. The weaker tools are easier but the results are much less reliable. With strong tools you are geting to the long run faster. With weak tools you are trying to avoid the long run. They are two very different approaches. If your goal is to make a profit, it's better to have the odds on your side than to try to buck the odds.

-Sonny-

I personally play with a higher ROR, since I don't rely on BJ for income. I am using it as an investment tool. I aim to make roughly my hourly wage. This means my max bets are often 1.3+% of my total BR. I haven't crunched the numbers lately, but I think this puts my ROR above 15%.

I also have a very low trip ROR. I haven't thought about this too much (whether it is good or bad....).

I have to travel far to play, don't play that often, so I increase my risk to an acceptable level with the expectation of making my hourly wage+. The other thing I did was learn a level two counting system. Graduating from KO to UBZII (BJinfo open source variant). This helps on all fronts, making my overall game stronger, my EV bigger, my ROR smaller with the same max bet compared to KO! It's already revealed many positive betting situations where KO would have given me no information (or given it to me 2-3 rounds later).

Luckily my BR has experienced a lot of + variance, maybe in the +2 SD range over the past 2 months. I'm at the point where I can lower risk and still have the same hourly expectation. But where is the fun in that!? maybe it's time to up my ROR a little more and double my bankroll in the next 6 instead of 12 months.

gambler's fallacy or statistical fact

when it comes to true counts for some pack of cards you get a normal frequency like in this link:
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=117223&postcount=3
and pack depth can have an influence on the range of true counts as to how they are going to present as evidenced by this link:
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=117284&postcount=8
then how one calculates true counts can influence the true counts that one actually perceives as evidenced by this link:
tc calculated by actual number of cards
vs
tc calculated by full decks left to be dealt
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=117353&postcount=18

also this sort of stuff appears to have a 'trend' of behavior that carries on according to what i tryed to discuss in this link:
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=119537&postcount=24
specifically of interest for this discussion being the frequency of what ever tc is going to present in time at a low depth level such as only one deck deep. like ok, i raised the question of the rarity of relatively high tc's such as tc = 4 at the one deck depth level and speculated that it may have to do with "i guess it's got to do with the probability of the combination's that one is likely to find so many low cards clumped in a limited region like that. darned if i understand it."
lol, i was hoping maybe k_c would have a clue about this and respond.

but anyway for me right now it begs the question of a couple of things. and this is where i dunno if the gambler's fallacy is in play or statistical facts.
so ok, say we go even less depth in the pack as far as this true count behavior is concerned. say we just talk some number of cards dealt and maybe even ignore true counts, just look at for some given number of cards at some depth or even at what ever depth, but we just look at how many low cards presented relative to how many high cards presented at said depth for some number of cards. so the question becomes is there a normal way we can expect the high and low cards to present even over a relatively small number of cards seen? like i dunno, take what ever number of possible cards seen you want at some depth and true count. say for example ten seen cards. say you saw ten low cards in a row. that would seem rather abnormal. so the question becomes, would there be some normal way of those cards presenting that we could expect? and if so, say that number of cards presented in an unexpected way, then could one perhaps take advantage of the knowledge of that fact? perhaps, betting on such a basis in a short term situation with out regard to known orthodox ways of betting on card counting.:whip:

I''l try. Hope this helps.

I could probably get my HiLo/KO comp enumeration program to compute the probability of each RC at any given pen (and thus corresponding TC,) but it would take some work. It's not necessary to do this, though, in order to know that the frequency of high posiive or negative TCs increases as pen increases.

In order to solve complex problems, it's best to start with simple examples. If pen=0 (no cards dealt) there is only one possible subset (full shoe) and one possible TC which is 0. If all cards but one are dealt, there are 3 possible HiLo RCs: -1 (last card is 2,3,4,5,6), 0 (last card is 7,8,9), +1 (last card is 10,ace). There is 1 possible subset for each RC and a total of 3 subsets for all possible RCs when 1 card remains. So the probabilities are:
At one extreme (full shoe) it is impossible for TC to vary at all. At the other extreme (1 card remaining) it is more likely to have a variable TC with wild variations possible or even likely. In between the extremes there would be varying possibilities/probabilities but I think it's safe to say high TCs are more probable the deeper the shoe is dealt.

i appreciate your input k_c.
what your getting at is in fact part of what i'm interested in.
like it would be interesting to me to know true count frequencies for a given depth level of a given pack. QFIT's graph shows how the ranges could present, but i'm interested in how the frequencies of the TC's in those ranges would present.

the other thing i'm wondering about is more voodoo, where i'm not sure if it's gambler's fallacy sort of thinking or not.
maybe the best way to frame it would be say we are ignorant of the true count or the running count but we know where we are at in a pack in terms of depth. so in a sense at that depth in the pack the cards that did come out and are going to come out are influenced by that 'potential' of true count ranges and frequencies for that given depth level. and it's pretty much a given that at least qualitatively less depth means less potential for a higher tc and more depth means higher potential for a higher tc.

ok, but there's a whole other thing i'm wondering about as far as what one can perceive. that would be the question of the probability of streaks of how high and low cards might present. then the other question would be is the probability of such streaks significant with regard to how proceeding cards are likely to present.
like for example, say your at some depth and you get what ever, say ten low cards in a row. maybe i'm wrong but that would seem a fairly rare event, be it a positive true count or a negative true count. but ok the question is, you just got ten low cards in a row. would it be reasonable to expect say the next five cards that present to be relatively richer in high cards? or would that be a gamblers fallacy sort of way of expecting things?

Remember in blackjack, probabilties are constantly changing. If you see 10 low cards in a row and know 200 cards have been dealt but know nothing about the 200 cards except that the last 10 were low cards, then you need to treat 190 of the cards as unseen. Just because these 10 low cards appeared deep into the shoe is no reason to assume that something magic is associated with them. In other words the case where 10 low cards in a row are the first 10 cards from the shoe and the case when the last 10 cards following 190 other cards of which nothing is known amount to the same thing.

yes indeed.

lemme ask you because i know evidenced by this link ( http://www.bjstrat.net/shuffles.html ) that your on top of all this permutations and combination's stuff.

question being, would you consider ten low cards (order ignored) presenting in a row a rare event in a qualitative sense for a six deck pack?
or how many low cards (order ignored) presenting in a row would you consider a rare event in a qualitative sense for a six deck pack?
when i say qualitative, i mean qualitative in the sense that if even more low cards were to follow you would think it rare or beyond the norm.

It's very easy to figure the probability of any number of low cards in a row being dealt from a give shoe composition. If starting comp is full 6 deck shoe, prob of 1 low card in a row is 120/312. Prob of 2 low cards in a row is 120/312*119/311. Prob of 3 low cards in a row is 120/312*119/311*118/319.....etc.

The probability that some number of low cards in a row will be dealt at some point in a shoe given the shoe will be dealt to a pre-determined pen is a harder problem. It would be very easy to sim, though. Just shuffle up the cards and deal shoe after shoe and look at the cards up to the given pen, recording the number of times the criteria is met and keep track of the number of shoes dealt. You could record when 10 or more low cards in a row appeared or when exactly 10 cards in a row appeared or whatever.