Do you get frustrated looking for decent games?

[EasyRhino]

I wonder how many cards you could possibly get on the table at once. I mean, there's only 32 deuces in 8 decks...

 

[mjbballar23]

re

i remember remember reading a post (possibly on this website) that a simulation showed that the most cards every used in one round at a full table was something like 43 cards (the simulation was 500 million rounds). So the dealer saying that they could possibly run out of cards is total bs.

 

[Kasi]

When you're backcounting the only difference pen makes is how many good counts you see per hour.You can make up for bad pen somewhat by increasing your bets. This raises your win rate at the expense of absolute RoR, but being we're part-timers absolute RoR isn't that important, we're more worried about trip RoR. And the higher bets are mostly offset by placing fewer bets for trip RoR calculations, when we're playing into bad pen.

Always win-rate first, ROR second lol. Where does one draw the line anyway? I wish I knew lol.

Anyway, even betting the same way as you did with "good" penetration, assuming that was what you were comfortable with, and I hope it's not full-Kelly, just betting the same way with poorer penetration would probably also increase win rate and ROR, let alone betting even more than that.

So, what do you do when the pen gets better? Decrease your bet?

Don't forget doubling your bet size which halves your trip stake quadruples risk.

Don't forget the chances of finishing at a certain point after so many hands are probably at least half the chance, and likely more, of losing all of it at some point before that.

Whatever. No big deal. Just a thought. I know I'm always the voice of doom lol.

As always, good luck out there in the real world

 

[sagefr0g]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Automatic Monkey
When you're backcounting the only difference pen makes is how many good counts you see per hour.You can make up for bad pen somewhat by increasing your bets. This raises your win rate at the expense of absolute RoR, but being we're part-timers absolute RoR isn't that important, we're more worried about trip RoR. And the higher bets are mostly offset by placing fewer bets for trip RoR calculations, when we're playing into bad pen.

Always win-rate first, ROR second lol. Where does one draw the line anyway? I wish I knew lol.

Anyway, even betting the same way as you did with "good" penetration, assuming that was what you were comfortable with, and I hope it's not full-Kelly, just betting the same way with poorer penetration would probably also increase win rate and ROR, let alone betting even more than that.

So, what do you do when the pen gets better? Decrease your bet?

Don't forget doubling your bet size which halves your trip stake quadruples risk.

Don't forget the chances of finishing at a certain point after so many hands are probably at least half the chance, and likely more, of losing all of it at some point before that.

Whatever. No big deal. Just a thought. I know I'm always the voice of doom lol.

As always, good luck out there in the real world

i think what AutoMonk is getting at is pretty much in line with what i was getting at in the posts below:

http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=64715&postcount=9

http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=63811&postcount=5

i mean the idea's about betting a bit more agressively, having to live with a more difficult ROR lol ...... and the idea of stressing the trip ROR over the long run ROR.
to me that all kinda of means taking more of a gamble in the short term with the hope of getting a leg up in the short term that would translate into a bigger bankroll quicker which would help the long term prospects.........
a real picking yourself up by the boot straps concept lol.
but hopefully to address your concerns there might could be a balance between the ROR and aggressive max bet, ramp that a simulation could hopefully point out.
but your points are well taken, especially the part about what do you do when the penetration is good decrease your bets? lol
oh well it was a post by Norm (QFIT) that got me thinking along these lines from back when i was a really super conservative with bets, and i noticed that one of his sims showed a fairly aggressive ramp and max bet. when i commented on that he replied something to the order of with these games how they are nowadays you have got to play it that way to have any hope of doing better than mediocre..... my words not his but thats the gist of what he was saying.
so yeah it does seem the ole ROR gets a pretty good work out in the hopes of getting a good winrate.....
thing is well i for one have my doubts when it comes to beating full kelley's ROR=13% in the real world anyway. but i'm a pessimst when it comes to confidence in how well people truly cope with just about any endeavor. computers are just way better than people lol.

 

[Kasi]

Quote:
i mean the idea's about betting a bit more agressively, having to live with a more difficult ROR lol ...... and the idea of stressing the trip ROR over the long run ROR.
to me that all kinda of means taking more of a gamble in the short term with the hope of getting a leg up in the short term that would translate into a bigger bankroll quicker which would help the long term prospects.........
a.

You make good points too. Guess all I really mean is basically maybe don't do stuff unless you have a good idea of things.

Guess I'd like to think I'd know ahead of time exactly how I'll bet that makes me happy if the pen changes a half-deck. Or if I decide to back-count or play-all. Etc. At least get a ball park range maybe. Like if I suddenly determine I can spread 1-4 instead of 1-3 how will my unit size might change, win rate etc if any.

But I'm pretty much afraid of my own shadow so I pretty much don't do crap unless I at least think I might have a clue of what's supposed to happen.

 

[EasyRhino]

For a lazy person such as myself, if I've got my bets dialed in for a 6D game with 1.5 decks cut off (backcounting), and then I stumbled into a game with 1 deck cut off, I'm not going to change my bet spread.

I'm just going to enjoy the effects of the better pen, would would be:
1) Better win rate (because more cards will be played at high counts)
2) Lower RoR (because the win rate is higher)

It's similar to the effect of swithing from play-all in a shoe game to wonging a shoe game:
1) Better win rate (because hands are not lost in negative counts)
2) Lower Ror (because the win rate is higher)

 

[Kasi]

if I've got my bets dialed in for a 6D game with 1.5 decks cut off (backcounting), and then I stumbled into a game with 1 deck cut off, I'm not going to change my bet spread.

I'm just going to enjoy the effects of the better pen, would would be:
1) Better win rate (because more cards will be played at high counts)
2) Lower RoR (because the win rate is higher)

Thanks ER - it's always nice to know how different people go about doing whatever, or, sometimes, like in your example, changing nothing, under changing conditions.

Anyway, since you're going more conservative in this case I like it better than going the other way lol.

When you say win rate are you talking about dollars per hour or maybe average advantage % of the game?

Just a general question of what you, or others, maybe generally do, if anything, if the game, or any game, got worse and maybe 2 decks in this case got cutoff? Would you increase your bets to win more money with higher ROR?

Since you have a pre-planned specific plan for the 1.5 game, I just don't get why you wouldn't have a similar pre-planned "contingency" plan in case the game ever gets to 1 deck cutoff.

Like, just say for argument's sake, if in the first you spread 1-4 back-counting 75-300 but you could keep the same ROR spreading 100-400 in the latter game, and obviously win more, probably alot more, than keeping the first spread would, why not do it?

Do you, or anyone, know ahead of time at what point you would change anything when conditions become more favorable or would you, in this case, also change nothing if you came across an incredibly rare 5.5/6 game lol?

Just asking a bunch of stupid questions. Nothing really to do with you. I hope I don't sound offensive. There's not a whole lot of "right" and "wrong" in all of this anyway lol.

 

[EasyRhino]

Let's say you find a good 6D game. I'm not really hung up on what makes it "good", but let's say good enough that it's worth your while to play-all. And let's say your spread is $10-$100. You'll have a certain expected win rate and RoR with that spread.

Now, take the identical game, the idendical bankroll, but now backcount the hell out of it, you are no longer playing any negative or marginal counts. Your win rate increases a little and your RoR drops a lot. So, if you're AutoMonk, you realize that you can actually increase your max bet a little. Maybe it's $125. Maybe it's $150, I don't really know. But whatever this higher bet is, it would be calibrated so that the RoR is the same as your play-all was before... but your win rate would be substantially higher.

The thing is, I wouldn't do this without some careful simulation, or laborious studying of Blackjack Attack, because this is a slippery slope towards overbetting your bankroll. Most of your volatility comes from your big bets, not the little ones, especially with a big spread.

Or... you could just keep the same rought bet spread, but eliminate the bets in negative counts. Which would mean that you're me.

Just a general question of what you, or others, maybe generally do, if anything, if the game, or any game, got worse and maybe 2 decks in this case got cutoff? Would you increase your bets to win more money with higher ROR?

This is crazy talk. Saying "My RoR is already high because it's a weak game, so I'm going to make it even higher by betting more, does not for a long-lived AP make". It's the wonging that would let you get away with bigger bets, not the game's weakness.

(and thinking about it, I've committed a lot of AP sins, but not this particular one... if I wanted to be irresponsible with money, I'd start a hedge fund).

 

[sagefr0g]

........Do you, or anyone, know ahead of time at what point you would change anything when conditions become more favorable or would you, in this case, also change nothing if you came across an incredibly rare 5.5/6 game lol?

Just asking a bunch of stupid questions. Nothing really to do with you. I hope I don't sound offensive. There's not a whole lot of "right" and "wrong" in all of this anyway lol.

i sure don't know. i never really thought much about it till you started asking questions about it.
but i guess those incredibly rare great penetrations well as rare as they are, what i'm getting at is i suppose that the effect of various penetration levels is a statistical thing with fluctuation results just like basic strategy and betting levels at some true count, ect. ........ so those situations being so rare you might wonder how significant those few rare events really are as far as affecting decisions one might make.
but keep on asking those questions Kasi..... you really make us think with all that. think about things that maybe one might have just glossed over or what ever.

 

[EasyRhino]

Huh, did a quick and nasty sim. Basino hi-lo player vs. a mediocre H17 game.

with 4.5 decks dealt and a $10-$100 spread, the win rate is only $8/100, and the RoR is a whopping 19%.

with 5.5 decks dealt and the same $10-$100 spread, the win rate is $27/100, and RoR drops to only 2%

so, if you really want to go for it, you can basically double your betting level, go to $20-200, the win rate will go to $55/100, RoR is 15%. Variance goes through the roof, though.

 

[Kasi]

The thing is, I wouldn't do this without some careful simulation, or laborious studying of Blackjack Attack,

Needless to say, that's the part I liked the best lol.

I'm still wondering what you mean by win rate. Whether maybe dollars per hour so you can compare one game to the next or maybe average overall expectation of the game as a percent of total wagered? Or maybe min units per hour. Or maybe you choose to figure it out per hand?

After all none of the above becomes fixed until you choose to bet a certain amount at a certain point. The only that doesn't change is the frequency of TC's and the inherent advantage that exists at those counts.

So, if u meant, assuming you could find, that you would still spread 1-10 in the back-counting game and only increase your max bet, I doubt if you'd win very much. To bet only $10 in positive counts, say +,1 would likely be silly since probably almost half of the bets you would make would be at that count.

But all I'm really, ultimately, trying to say is it can be dangerous to make on the fly decisions since you could be way underbetting maybe and not taking full advantage of an opportunity or maybe the opposite, and like you said, why not sim several games in advance that you think you'll likely be playing in the different ways you think you will likely be playing them so you know ahead of time, more or less, what to expect and when to change unit size. Maybe cost of some basic camo plays or what happens when you don't parlay bets etc.

I think you may be at least a little surprised at some of the results.

Pick an ROR you like, and I hope it's low lol, and let the win rate fall where it may. Well, that's the basic idea of what I would try to do.

You guys are out there doing it and have my total respect and, I'm probably too hung up on all this crap, why I don't even know, but it still boggles my mind that at the level some of you guys play at, you still kind of "wing it", or so it sometimes seems to me, more than I would have imagined and, as near as I can tell, don't apparently think buying a sim is worth the price.

But I guess it's all working out so who cares maybe lol. It is a forgiving game afterall.

Heck, even WiseFrog has a sim, I think, and he only does fuzzy stuff lol.

 

[Automatic Monkey]

...
This is crazy talk. Saying "My RoR is already high because it's a weak game, so I'm going to make it even higher by betting more, does not for a long-lived AP make". It's the wonging that would let you get away with bigger bets, not the game's weakness...
.

Interesting point. You could say that a weak game (as in bad pen) backcounted does let you get away with a higher bet per count because you'll be placing those bets less often.

Let's take a High-Low player. A TC of +3 is what it is, whether it's 6/1 or 8/3 decks/pen. The difference is you'll be seeing that +3 count (guessing) 5 times per hour in the first game and 1 time per hour in the second.

You have two hours before you have to go home, and a couple of thousand in your pocket.

Now I realize you're playing off somewhat of a dedicated bankroll that you are growing and the money in your pocket is just part of that. I'm playing to boost my annual income. So I could walk into a casino and Hail Mary it every time, and if I lose all my money I say "Aw ****" and come back next week. Therefore my betting unit is based on how many weeks I'm willing to go without any pay, waiting for a huge payday (e.g., would you take 5 weeks pay every 4 weeks?) This type of play does go nonlinear in that I need to have enough money to finish out good counts and to ensure that I am playing long enough on every trip to justify my expenses, but I have a pretty good feel for what that point is by now. (10-15 max bets come to the casino with me for a day trip.)

So in the case of the bad game, knowing that I'm only going to be able to get down a few big bets before I have to leave, I'm going to bet more when I get the opportunity.

A lot of the Kelly(*) math we're familiar with was written by and for full-time pros who have either a nonreplenishable bankroll or investors they have to answer to. Of course what I am saying would be total garbage from their perspective. But we part-timers have an enormous advantage in that 1) we are never really ruined, as long as we don't do anything crazy like go deep into debt to play and 2) we don't have inflexible living expenses eating away at our bankrolls every day. So we really do need simulators to calculate reward and balance risk vs. reward suitable to our lifestyle.


(*) This is not to disparage Kelly-proportional betting throughout a spread, because that's what we need to get maximum reward-for-risk throughout a session when session bankruptcy is a real possibility. This includes risk-averse playing indices- putting down an extra max bet for an extra 0.2% advantage for that hand is rarely if ever a profitable idea. Nobody's spread is perfectly Kelly-proportional because we all max out somewhere, but deciding where to max it out is another good job for a sim.

 

[Kasi]

Huh, did a quick and nasty sim. Basino hi-lo player vs. a mediocre H17 game.

with 4.5 decks dealt and a $10-$100 spread, the win rate is only $8/100, and the RoR is a whopping 19%.

with 5.5 decks dealt and the same $10-$100 spread, the win rate is $27/100, and RoR drops to only 2%

so, if you really want to go for it, you can basically double your betting level, go to $20-200, the win rate will go to $55/100, RoR is 15%. Variance goes through the roof, though.

That's what I'm talking about lol. Same ROR (more or less) win 7 times as much.

Not bad for a self-described lazy AP player lol.

Variance might not be going thru the roof as much as you think.

 

[Kasi]

you really make us think with all that. think about things that maybe one might have just glossed over or what ever.

I was just talking about you lol.

And thanks very much for the kind words.

 

[sagefr0g]

..............

Variance might not be going thru the roof as much as you think.

it might not but then again it might lol.
but i would expect that it would for these on the fly sort of adjustments we might make in our play according to some set of sims that the conditions might fit in some short time period during a trip. the question being how often are those dream conditions going to present. i mean they would have some inheirent variance of thier own i would suspect.
perhaps it might be better to take an averaged approach of such sims optimal bets over the various possible penetrations, conditions what ever

..............
Heck, even WiseFrog has a sim, I think, and he only does fuzzy stuff lol.
.

right, well i gotta have some dream horizon to shoot for lol.

 

[EasyRhino]

Kasi, I hope I'm using it right, but when I say "win rate" I mean dollars per 100 hands played or seen. I guess you could define it as units to be bankroll-agnostic, but I'm talking about the Benjamins. (or maybe just the Jacksons).

Interesting point. You could say that a weak game (as in bad pen) backcounted does let you get away with a higher bet per count because you'll be placing those bets less often.

Ooh, that gets kind of scary. Taken to the extreme, that would mean that a player could just backcount until a good count, and then bet everything in their pocket (okay, allowing for splits, etc), once they get a TC of +3. It has the advantages of making the trips a lot shorter. But I think such a technique might only be suitable for, well, you, and maybe someone at the end of their yearly Vegas trip.

Simming it, if you sat down at the bad-pen and ultra-pen games, with the same spread, the variance[/b] is about 50% higher on the deeply dealt game. So, you could bet, I dunno, about 25% higher on the bad-pen game, and the variance would around the same... but your RoR would be, like, 20 times higher. (Incidentally, I don't know if variance or standard deviation would be a better measure here).

But I think we're getting off topic. The game with the better penetration will always have a better win rate and lower RoR, no matter what you do. That's why it pays to find a good game!

 

[Kasi]

my betting unit is based on how many weeks I'm willing to go without any pay, waiting for a huge payday (e.g., would you take 5 weeks pay every 4 weeks?)

If you haven't bought a sim yet, don't bother - it'd be a waste of money since they don't probably make that calc lol.

Don't even download a free one because it would be a waste of time.

Yet, I confess, I'm still morbidly fascinated, given the above, at how you go about your betting unit decision, in case you want to share it.

May you lose the small ones but win the big ones!

 

[Kasi]

perhaps it might be better to take an averaged approach of such sims optimal bets over the various possible penetrations, conditions what ever

well i gotta have some dream horizon to shoot for lol.

In my mind, I don't mean an average. I mean a specific sim for specific games with specific rules for specific penetrations for defined bet ramps at what counts and what spread for various number of players at the table with a near identical ROR one is comfortable with for a bankroll you are willing to risk losing. For starters lol.

Then if you want to get an idea of how things change under certain circumstances that's great.

You're dream, fuzzy as it may be, still could come true. Can sims make a bet based on running count of one round only?

 

[Kasi]

Taken to the extreme, that would mean that a player could just backcount until a good count, and then bet everything in their pocket (okay, allowing for splits, etc), once they get a TC of +3. It has the advantages of making the trips a lot shorter. But I think such a technique might only be suitable for, well, you, and maybe someone at the end of their yearly Vegas trip.

Actually I think that might be a great way to play except for betting an amount compared to bankroll for an ROR you are comfortable with. If I ever gave this crap a shot it's probably what I would do. Every once in a while I actually do do it when I'm standing around doing basically nothing lol.

You got a $38K roll? (Do i have the right guy lol?)

Go ahead and sim, say, around a $500 flat-bet back-counting bet entering at +2 and also at +3 for, say, a 4.5/6 and 5/6 S17 DAS game. If you don't like the ROR maybe change the bet around some for each of those points. You exit at lower counts than entering point but flat-bet all counts greater than entering point. Tell me what you think.

I like it because now you can't possibly be AP since you're flat-betting.

But, like you say, what it sounds like to me what AM may be doing is insanity to me. Well, anyway not exactly stuff I envision a practicing AP would do. Which I guess puts him into what I do lol. But maybe not so extreme lol.

As far as win rate and "The game with the better penetration will always have a better win rate and lower RoR, no matter what you do." may generally be true but certainly not "no matter what you do" whatever that may mean in your mind being influenced by things, amongst many other things, like number of players at the table, a factor I think may often be overlooked in the dollars per hour thing.

I assume when you talk about variance you are probably talking about it in dollars per hour like your win rate. Which is fine but keep in mind it may not be the whole story. Win rate might double yet the dollars might only increase by alot less percentage than that with the same ROR. The first dollar amount may be alot of min units, the latter very few because the unit has increased.

Like you say I guess off topic lol.

 

[Automatic Monkey]

...Ooh, that gets kind of scary. Taken to the extreme, that would mean that a player could just backcount until a good count, and then bet everything in their pocket (okay, allowing for splits, etc), once they get a TC of +3. It has the advantages of making the trips a lot shorter. But I think such a technique might only be suitable for, well, you, and maybe someone at the end of their yearly Vegas trip.

Simming it, if you sat down at the bad-pen and ultra-pen games, with the same spread, the variance[/b] is about 50% higher on the deeply dealt game. So, you could bet, I dunno, about 25% higher on the bad-pen game, and the variance would around the same... but your RoR would be, like, 20 times higher. (Incidentally, I don't know if variance or standard deviation would be a better measure here).

We've got to define what you mean by RoR. Without any additional parameters, it means an absolute RoR. That means if you have a constant initial bankroll, over an infinite number of hand that's the percentage of trials your bankroll will go to zero. The rest of the times, it will go to infinity.

Just a few problems here: 1) My bankroll is constantly being added to independently of blackjack. 2) I'm probably not going to live long enough to play an infinite number of hands, and 3) the casinos probably aren't going to let my bankroll rise to infinity. These are the real-world limitations on risk-of-ruin.

However win rate is absolute- if you play the game you have simmed, and you don't run out of money to play it with, you most certainly will earn your win rate. Emphasis: if you don't run out of money to play it with.

So being my length of time in a casino on any trip is finite, and no matter what happens I'm always going to have money for the next trip, to earn my win rate all I have to do is avoid running out of money on this one.

Let's assume I have $1K per week salary I can dedicate to bankroll, and 400 hands per week I am able to play. Therefore I can afford to lose $1K per week, although I'd rather win $1K per week. If I lose $1K as often as I win $1K, over the long term my bankroll will require no contribution from my salary but my win rate will indeed be constant, because I'm playing the hands with an advantage (For this calculation let's disregard how much money I bring to the casino, assume I can always play out my session.)

When $1K equals approximately 30 units, I will lose $1K about 53% of the time and win $1K about 53% of the time in a 400 hand session. (From these numbers you can see that 6% of the time I will do both in one session!) So as a very rough approximation my unit should be $33. My win rate in this particular game is 2.83 units/hundred hands, thus my cash win expectation is a pleasant $93.39 per hundred, or $373.56 per week. Now being I've already zeroed out the occasional $1K debits and credits from my salary, this isn't funny-money that I have to fold back into the bankroll for the equation to work, this is real income that I get to spend.

Now it's not fair to assume that I will always have enough money to finish the session, but a 200 unit ($6600) playing stake will allow me to go home cursing less than 0.5% of the time, or once every 4 years. But being I've earned $74,600 in win rate over those 4 years, my curses will be in jest.

Obviously this type of play is not for everyone and these calculations are a little rough. But hopefully it will help provide a good starting point for the other part-time players out there interested in playing for income.

But I think we're getting off topic. The game with the better penetration will always have a better win rate and lower RoR, no matter what you do. That's why it pays to find a good game!

Well, wait, both win rate and RoR are adjustable by the player for any game. One always moves in the opposite direction from the other. Schlesinger did a lot of good work along these lines and that's where we get DI and SCORE from. Better pen will result in the same win rate and lower RoR or a higher win rate and the same RoR, or a little of both, depending on how you adjust your spread and unit.

In the case of a backcounting player, RoR as a function of hands played doesn't change as much because no matter how good or bad the game is he's choosing only +EV hands to play and doesn't have to worry about the effect of -EV hands on his bankroll. A bad game sure plays hell with your win rate per hour though.