Sneaky_gnome69 said:
I see a difference but in the end its still gambling when counting cards.
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In the end its still gambling because you are still taking a risk and even counting has its risks.
So do you consider the casino a gambler? I have walked out of the casino with more money than I walked in with on at least one occasion. So the casino is taking a risk by letting me play, they can still lose.
In the short term your results are indistinguishable from luck. It is the long term that counts. So in order to ensure you are a successful card counter, you have to play enough hands to get to the long term. How many hands do you have to play to get to the long term? Let's do a little math. The standard deviation on a hand of blackjack is 1.16. Let's assume you're a proficient card counter and play with a 1% overall advantage over the house. You play one hand betting $25. Your EV for that hand is $0.25 ($25 * .01). But due to the SD your result will probably be somewhere between -$28.75 and +$29.25 (.25 +/- 25 * 1.16). The thing about standard deviation though, is that it only increases by the square root of the number of trials. So lets say you play for an hour or two and you've played 100 hands. Your EV is $25. The SD will be 11.6 (1.16 * sqrt(100) = 1.16 * 10), so your actual results will probably be between -$265 and +$315. We can see you could easily be down after 100 hands. But now let's say you've been playing for a few years and you've played 1 million hands of blackjack. Your EV is +$250,000. The SD is 1160. So your actual results will probably be between +$221,000 and +$279,000. When I say "probably" that is within 1 standard deviation, or 2/3 of the time. 66% of the time you will be between those two numbers. What about the other 1/3 of the time. Well half of the time you would be below and half above. So only about 1/6 of the time would you have made less than $221,000. But let's looks at 2 standard deviations. 96% of the time you will be within 2 SD of your expected result. So 96% of the time you would have made between $192,000 and $308,000. Only 2% of the time would you have made less than that. And you can expect to be withing 3 SD of your EV over 99% of time (I think it's 99.6%)! So you would *never* be down after a million hands. In fact, you would never have *only* made $100,000 after a million hands.
This is why advantage players, do not consider it gambling. They know in the long term (or in "the end" as you phrased it) they will be ahead. Incidentally, this is why the casinos don't consider what they do gambling either.
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