Re: On RA insurance TWO INSTANCES
TWO INSTANCES - where I would be inclined to use some of this arcane RA-insurance tactics - 1) If I'm fighting for survival (tournament, shortstakes, etc.) or 2) If I have an excellent game/pene and I'm winning with "lite scrutiny" from the pit. zg
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Here is MathProfs reaponse to a similar original post last year -
Risk Aversion and
Insurance
Posted By: MathProf.
in response to: Cover +
Risk Aversion w/ Insurance Betting (The Grifter®
Partial insurance always reduces your variance. Now, if
you knew that insurance were a break-even proposition
(because 1/3 of the unseen cards are 10s), you would want
to try to reduce your variance.
Half-Insurance (which can be implemented by insuring one of two
spots) will reduce your Variance even on stiffs.
(Actually, about one-third insurance is optimal.)
If your choice on Insurance is all or nothing, then you
would take full insurance unless you have a stiff.
Over-insuring weak hands will actually raise your variance.
Clearly, with a big enough bet, there is some value in
trading off EV from insurance with risk aversion. You
could create different risk-averse indexes for
different types of hands.
But there is one danger.
If you are not keeping a 10-count, then there would
be slightly different insurance indexes for
different hand compositions. The HiLo index for 10-10
(which is the "best" hand to insure for risk-aversion)
is a actually somewhat higher, especially in
single-deck. The insurance index for 9-7 is actually lower.
I think cover considerations outweigh any fine
mathematical points in these insurance decisions, especially
in Nevada.