shadroch said:
Counters win 70% of their sessions. Progressive Martingale players win 99% of their sessions. Neither statistic means very much in and of themselves.
True, both facts are based on a non fixed amount you have to gamble with over a certain amount of time.
Let us say, you have a re loadable bankroll of only 20 units. Buy in for all of it at a table with a 1 unit minimum, play double your money or bust. You win a little over half of your sessions, resulting in a net profit over time. Now let us say you have 1000 unit bankroll and you can re buy as much as you need to, but you play for a fixed amount of time. Then you generally win 70% of your sessions based on the amount of time spent. The more hands you see, the less luck matters. Luck is the only way a good counter loses money in the short run (or gains any significant amount as well), and as that is eliminated the losing sessions vanish. Therefore, the longer your sessions, the less luck is involved in the final result of that individual session. This means that if you could play for a non fixed amount of time with a non fixed bankroll, you could play until you showed a certain amount of profit.
Obviously, this is not practical, but it shows that keep tracking of your results in the real world should matter more than your projected win/loss ratio over a given session.
Both strategies (non fixed bankroll, non fixed time) (20 unit BR, double or bust) result in a net profit over time as each bet you place averages out to the same advantage in the long run. However, the later method produces more losing sessions overall due to the wildly increased variance.
I have no idea if this post ended up pertaining to anything, but I just had to keep typing. I was in the groove.