As a fairly new counter I have become accustomed to hearing the phrase long term. I have a couple of questions about it. Is there anyone on this board who has reached it yet? And if you have what does it mean, does it mean its impossible to lose the profits you have gained through playing up to this point. When do you realize you have attained it? This phrase is spoken by counters like a christian talks about heaven. Keep up the good work and one day you will reach your ultimate goal. The problem is dead people can't tell you if there is a heaven or what its like. I'm hoping some of the more experienced players can give more assurance that the long term really exists by actually speaking about it while being there.
What is the real meaning of long term?
- Thread starter JoeV
- Start date
Sure, many of us have reached our long term EV.
It means that you have overcome the variance. Basically, your good luck and bad luck have canceled each other out and you are left with the results of your skillful play.
No, you can still lose that money back. It just means that you are likely to achieve your expected profit without having much interference from “luck.”
See the link below for an old discussion about it:
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showthread.php?t=4891
They are, essentially, the same thing. :grin: It is the point where you expect to reach your ultimate goal.
-Sonny-
It means that you have overcome the variance. Basically, your good luck and bad luck have canceled each other out and you are left with the results of your skillful play.
No, you can still lose that money back. It just means that you are likely to achieve your expected profit without having much interference from “luck.”
See the link below for an old discussion about it:
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showthread.php?t=4891
They are, essentially, the same thing. :grin: It is the point where you expect to reach your ultimate goal.
-Sonny-
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Simple answer.
The long term is what will happen over an extended period.
Everyone knows that a coin flip is 50-50. But the chances of getting exactly 5 heads in a sequence of ten is not 50%.Its much,much lower.But,in the long run,the longer you flip,the more towards a 50-50 split you should get.
In BJ,the long run is often referred to as 1,000,000 hands or more.
Elliot Jacobson calls this The Blackjack Zone.Over 1,000,000 or more hands,most things will perform almost exactly as they should,with very little deviation.
The long term is what will happen over an extended period.
Everyone knows that a coin flip is 50-50. But the chances of getting exactly 5 heads in a sequence of ten is not 50%.Its much,much lower.But,in the long run,the longer you flip,the more towards a 50-50 split you should get.
In BJ,the long run is often referred to as 1,000,000 hands or more.
Elliot Jacobson calls this The Blackjack Zone.Over 1,000,000 or more hands,most things will perform almost exactly as they should,with very little deviation.
The long term is dependent on the kind of game you are playing and the way you are playing it. We often use the figure of merit "N0" (that's a zero) to describe a game. The N0 is the number of hands it takes to have a 1 standard deviation of being ahead. For a deeply-dealt and well-played single deck game, it can be as low as 4,000 hands, and for shoe games it is usually in the order of 15,000-30,000 hands. All games of chance have an N0 for both the player and the house, and sidebets and advanced advantage play techniques have their own N0's that can be higher or lower than that of straight card counting.
Video poker players often use the house N0 to their benefit, meaning, how many hours of play it will take for the house to have a good chance of breaking their bank even though the house has positive EV, and how many thousands of dollars in cashback they will have accrued in that time. It's a satisfying calculation.
The N0 is an interesting number because it gives you an idea of just how much work you have to do to expect to be ahead. Let's say your N0 for a game you play is 20,000 hands. It applies to your first 20K hands, your last 20K hands, your first 10K and last 10K hands together, and to 20K hands selected at random from all the hands you have played.
N0 also applies to individual plays within the game of blackjack (like index plays) and also to the difference between two different ways of making a play. Your insurance bet has an N0. Let's say two level 2 players are having an argument. One of them takes insurance at TC=+6 and the other one takes it at TC=+7. Not only does the insurance bet have an N0 but so does the difference between insurance at +6 and at +7. Homework question: will these two players live long enough to expect to experience a difference between taking insurance at +6 and +7?
Video poker players often use the house N0 to their benefit, meaning, how many hours of play it will take for the house to have a good chance of breaking their bank even though the house has positive EV, and how many thousands of dollars in cashback they will have accrued in that time. It's a satisfying calculation.
The N0 is an interesting number because it gives you an idea of just how much work you have to do to expect to be ahead. Let's say your N0 for a game you play is 20,000 hands. It applies to your first 20K hands, your last 20K hands, your first 10K and last 10K hands together, and to 20K hands selected at random from all the hands you have played.
N0 also applies to individual plays within the game of blackjack (like index plays) and also to the difference between two different ways of making a play. Your insurance bet has an N0. Let's say two level 2 players are having an argument. One of them takes insurance at TC=+6 and the other one takes it at TC=+7. Not only does the insurance bet have an N0 but so does the difference between insurance at +6 and at +7. Homework question: will these two players live long enough to expect to experience a difference between taking insurance at +6 and +7?
long term is whatever u want it to be.. how close do u want to get to the "long term average/EV", and with what guarantee? for instance it would take millions of hands to have a 99% guarantee of getting w/ in 1% of the expected EV.. this comes up a lot in video poker, an example would be that u have a 1 in 47 chance of getting a royal flush when u are drawing to a 4 card royal, but after 4700 4 card royal draws, will u have gotten that 5th card exactly 100 times? probably not, but if 470,000,000 4 card royal draws shud yield very close to 1,000,000 royals.. like i said its how close u want it to be, but to have a 99% guarantee of the long term average ur supposed to be hitting, plan on playing a lifetime
in my 1 year of gambling, i have come very close to my EV (video poker and blackjack combined), im actually up, but that doesnt mean i hit the long run, it merely means i hit close to the avg in the short run (if u get tails 5/10x when flipping a coin, that dont mean u hit the long run).. so a lot of u out there who are at the avg may think u hit the long run, but u didnt.. this is why slots are so bad to play, because the more u play them, the more guaranteed u are to be screwed, so they may be fine for som1 who wants to play $100 a year, but if u go there every week, u will get screwed
I've been doing some experimenting with VP lately. Some games have payout schedules greater than 100% with perfect play. (100.7% is about as high as it gets). Not many machines have these payouts. And not any in my neck of the woods.
If you combine it with cashback of .5% or more, it can be pretty impressive, I guess.
If you combine it with cashback of .5% or more, it can be pretty impressive, I guess.
Look at the pay table and play perfect strategy for that particular pay table. If the pay table is good, the game will offer close to if not over 100%, the rest will come with comps and cash backs. If you only want a 100% return game, just double up all the time, it will get closer and closer to 100% every times, just don't do that if you are already in a +EV game since it will get closer and closer to 100% again but that would mean you are loosing money.
Oh, Really?
Something tells me that a few folks around here , viz. Fred, Zg, Ken, Monk etc. may tend to disagree with that statement. There is a specific formula (I forget exactly which books) to determine the N0 for various games, ala SD, DD 6D etc.
Monk's question was interesting in that he boiled N0 down to a specific play at a certain count. I don't ever recall this aspect being covered by any author.
Something tells me that a few folks around here , viz. Fred, Zg, Ken, Monk etc. may tend to disagree with that statement. There is a specific formula (I forget exactly which books) to determine the N0 for various games, ala SD, DD 6D etc.
Monk's question was interesting in that he boiled N0 down to a specific play at a certain count. I don't ever recall this aspect being covered by any author.
Yeah, the double feature is +EV with comps. It is still +EV for machines that pay over 100%, even though it "gets you closer to 100%". The only thing is you might do better to not play the double up feature for comps when the payout is over 100% because it might not make you as much as the actual game does.
'long term' is a term used by idiots who have no concept of probability nor how to apply it.
If you count or not you always have a certain probabilitiy of winning or loosing after a certain number of hands. Some will consider the 'long term' to be the number of hands until a counter is 99% chance of being in profit, others want 99.9% chance, others 90%, others 99.999999%, others 50%, others count the long term as infinity.
The ironic part about it is that in any game where you have less than 100% chance of winning, and you start with a finite amount of money, then you are bound to eventually loose it all, because eventually you will hit a streak rare enough to wipe you out. You can imagine this easily if you look at it like this:
If you have 10 units you might servive 100 hands. IF you have 10 units it will be much hard to survive 1,000 hands and much much harder to survive 10,000 hands. This even applies when you have a player advantage.
For exmaple if a person has $10,000 is betting say $10 units with a 0.25% house advantage, there is a FINITE average number of games before is loose all his money. This is counter intuitive to many, who think he must eventually win. This is no so.
So no matter how big a player advantage you have, the real answer is that 'in the long run' you can never win, even if you are 99.95% player advantage.
If you count or not you always have a certain probabilitiy of winning or loosing after a certain number of hands. Some will consider the 'long term' to be the number of hands until a counter is 99% chance of being in profit, others want 99.9% chance, others 90%, others 99.999999%, others 50%, others count the long term as infinity.
The ironic part about it is that in any game where you have less than 100% chance of winning, and you start with a finite amount of money, then you are bound to eventually loose it all, because eventually you will hit a streak rare enough to wipe you out. You can imagine this easily if you look at it like this:
If you have 10 units you might servive 100 hands. IF you have 10 units it will be much hard to survive 1,000 hands and much much harder to survive 10,000 hands. This even applies when you have a player advantage.
For exmaple if a person has $10,000 is betting say $10 units with a 0.25% house advantage, there is a FINITE average number of games before is loose all his money. This is counter intuitive to many, who think he must eventually win. This is no so.
So no matter how big a player advantage you have, the real answer is that 'in the long run' you can never win, even if you are 99.95% player advantage.
Now that’s just silly. If you revise that statement to say “you can never be 100% assured of reaching long run” or “you can never be 100% assure that you won’t go broke” then I might agree, but to say that you will “never win” is absurd.
The problem with your theory is that it doesn’t take into account the player’s accumulated winnings. Sure, if you start with 10 units then it us unlikely that you will survive for 10,000 hands, but if you do then you will have amassed enough money to withstand a pretty big streak of negative variance. As Don Schlesinger says “If they don’t get you in the beginning, they probably won’t” (paraphrased from BJA).
Actually it was Brett Harris. Trust me, he knows a thing or two about probability. Any of his articles on optimal betting will quickly show that. Check out some of his work on bjmath (Archive copy).
No, that’s a very different statistic. The long run is the number of hands until a counter reaches his EV. The probability of being in profit is very different because it does not consider the size of the profit. If a counter plays for 100 hands and wins $1 he has not reached the long run. Similarly, if he plays for 100 hands and wins $100,000 (assuming it is well above his EV) then he has not reached the long run. I explained that differentiation very clearly in my original post.
-Sonny-
The problem with your theory is that it doesn’t take into account the player’s accumulated winnings. Sure, if you start with 10 units then it us unlikely that you will survive for 10,000 hands, but if you do then you will have amassed enough money to withstand a pretty big streak of negative variance. As Don Schlesinger says “If they don’t get you in the beginning, they probably won’t” (paraphrased from BJA).
Actually it was Brett Harris. Trust me, he knows a thing or two about probability. Any of his articles on optimal betting will quickly show that. Check out some of his work on bjmath (Archive copy).
No, that’s a very different statistic. The long run is the number of hands until a counter reaches his EV. The probability of being in profit is very different because it does not consider the size of the profit. If a counter plays for 100 hands and wins $1 he has not reached the long run. Similarly, if he plays for 100 hands and wins $100,000 (assuming it is well above his EV) then he has not reached the long run. I explained that differentiation very clearly in my original post.
-Sonny-
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That's not true, and getting around this "gambler's ruin" problem is the whole point of Kelly's Theorem.
Let me digress to physics and the two-body gravitational problem. We know that all object which have mass exert a gravitational force on each other, and that force is the product of the masses, a general gravitational constant, and the squareof the distance between them, right? So no matter how far away two objects are, they are exerting force on each other (there's even a force between Uranus and your anus) (sorry, that joke isn't as funny to those who don't speak US English), therefore if you were to launch an object in projectile motion off the earth, no matter how hard or how far, it's bound to return to earth because the gravitational attraction will never go away and sooner or later it has to overcome the outward momentum of the launched object, right?
Wrong. There's the matter of escape velocity, and that's the speed at which the gravitational attraction pulling the projectile back towards earth decreases rapidly enough that it will never win. And that's exactly how Kelly betting works- yes, there is always the probability of an infinitely long losing streak, but it takes an infinite length of time to hit one, and by that time your bankroll will be infinite too! Under Kelly betting your bankroll will increase faster than your chance of hitting a prolonged losing streak big enough to wipe it out will.
Of course, this does not mean you are immune from bankruptcy, for your infinite losing streak could begin on your very next trip to the casino. (You should have seen what happened to me playing a video poker promotion last week! Oy! I couldn't buy quads! :cry: ) But it does make you immune from certain bankruptcy.
Let me digress to physics and the two-body gravitational problem. We know that all object which have mass exert a gravitational force on each other, and that force is the product of the masses, a general gravitational constant, and the squareof the distance between them, right? So no matter how far away two objects are, they are exerting force on each other (there's even a force between Uranus and your anus) (sorry, that joke isn't as funny to those who don't speak US English), therefore if you were to launch an object in projectile motion off the earth, no matter how hard or how far, it's bound to return to earth because the gravitational attraction will never go away and sooner or later it has to overcome the outward momentum of the launched object, right?
Wrong. There's the matter of escape velocity, and that's the speed at which the gravitational attraction pulling the projectile back towards earth decreases rapidly enough that it will never win. And that's exactly how Kelly betting works- yes, there is always the probability of an infinitely long losing streak, but it takes an infinite length of time to hit one, and by that time your bankroll will be infinite too! Under Kelly betting your bankroll will increase faster than your chance of hitting a prolonged losing streak big enough to wipe it out will.
Of course, this does not mean you are immune from bankruptcy, for your infinite losing streak could begin on your very next trip to the casino. (You should have seen what happened to me playing a video poker promotion last week! Oy! I couldn't buy quads! :cry: ) But it does make you immune from certain bankruptcy.
You don't get cash back or comps when you use the double up feature, else they would give you money for a neutral EV game that requires no strategy and that have chances to push, therefore you would only loose 23 times out 52 and get comped for that! If your machine have a negative EV, let's say 99.54, and the casino gives you cash back on your play, let's say 0.5%, then you would have an average return of 100.04% because it's like adding .005 units payout to everything. If you double up on every win, you will get closer and closer to 100%. If your basic game have a return under 100% and you want to reach a special status then you can use the double up feature and you will basically reach diamond status without spending money (in EV term), but if your game + cash back already have a return over 100% then the double feature is useless and it slows you down.