Bad Players

I just spent 3 day on the gulf .I played a 4-d game,s17 , 75% pen doa,and das. Now thats as close to a beatable game as i have seen. But I lost a thousand dollars. I can resite basic as good as anyone I use the K.O count, with 4-d IRC -12 key count -1 and pivot is 4.The count often would reach 4 and many times as high as 10. I have read so many books I feel like a librarian. I have come to the conclusion that their are either a whole lot of people who don't know what their talking about or lying.BAD PLAYERS WILL KILL YOU PERIOD!!! Every book talks about how BJ is beatable in the long run most of us play in the short term. I will state all the nay sayers statment in advance and answer them.
1) Change tables: did it
2) change casino's: did it
3) play in the middle of the night :did it
4) for all of you who say well if it hurts you then can't it help you no because it changes the count in the short term then they reshuffle and the count starts again.If removing a cut card makes as much difference as Wong says then bad players remove many good cards
5)Don't play at a full table: casino's shut down tables in the middle of the night to cut labor cost which in return fill up the remaining talbes.
All the books I have read have a benchmark single deck 65% pen s17 doa das that game doesn't exsit any more and if you read the small print at the bottom of the page in these books it states that it is nearly imposible to find this game. Maybe in that single deck game with one or two players it makes little differnce but in todays game it will make a lot of difference. By the way Big Player is right YOU DON'T TIP DEALERS. I watched these people lie through their teeth to get player to make bad move and brag about it after the player lost all their money and left. They are roude hateful people that couldn't do anything else.

It sure seems like bad players hurt us more than they help us, but it's just selective memory that makes you remember the hurts more than the helps. I hear you also about short term vs. long term but that's just the way it is. BJ can be beaten but it's not as easy as days gone by. My hat is off to anyone who can make a real living playing this game. Some iof the things you write about, like not playing at a full table, are for the hardcore pro, IMHO. The theory is that you get less hands per hour (and thus less profit per hour). If you play with regularity (no ex-lax jokes please), you'll get your hours in. Is it better to go from casino to casino in search of an empty table than play at a full table? Or play only from 1 am to 8 am Monday-Thursday? Maybe so for a pro but not for most of us. Bj is not easy money. It's a grind. Unfortunately, the casino doesn't run out of money or patience but we can or do. I think it's best decribed as a roller coaster.

You played maybe 3,000 hands. The N0 for good games range from 10,000 to 20,000 hands. That means you would have to play than many hands just to have an 84.1% chance of being ahead. You would have to play 4 and 9 times as many hands to have about 97.8% and 99.9% chances of being ahead, respective.

As far as other players go, you would prefer to play heads up -- not because of the others players' skills but because they slow you down, reducing your win rate.

Naturally, there will be occasions when a player's bad play causes you to lose a hand. You will remember those until your dying day. What you won't remember is the many times you benefitted from their bad plays. These tend to even out.

I'll give an example. You have a pat 20. Player on third base has 16 and dealer is showing a 6. You caught a glimpse of the hole card and know it is a ten. You also used a multi-level count and know that the two remaining cards in the shoe are a 5 and a 10 -- but you don't know which is next. You know the player has an unnatural compulsion to hit. Half the time his play will help you and half the time it will hurt you. Guess which times you will remember.

Yeah it happens, but as everyone's said; how many times do people remember the "Wow! you saved the table." after a ploppy hits a 12 with a 6 showing during a screaming count pulls a 10, dealer flips a 5 then 3 then bust. As far as losing $1000 during 3 days that shouldn't be that bad, sucks, but not bad. The casino is just holding it for you until next time. If your doing everything right you'll get it back. It's the nature of the beast

request a $25 minimum. If you can't afford that you'll just have to grind it out. Playing with others allows you to let them eat the cards in negative rounds more easily and you have to take full advantage of this. At this particular casino tipping will accomplish nothing except reduce your expectation. I disagree with Linux in these regards.

1. Tipping for lower stakes players is a waste of money. It accomplishes nothing except to increase the dealers income and reduce yours.
2. The 4D game with 1 to 1.25 decks cutoff s17 ds rsa as described is pretty good...especially if you can either use a huge spread and/or sit out the deeply negative shoes. There are better double deck games at Beau, IP, and other places for up to 2x$200 top bets.

I agree with Linux that if you are trying to build bankroll and are also worrying about sizing to specific kelly factors and not factoring in expenses you might be just spinning your wheels. That said if you drove in, the rooms are comped, and casino coupons are enough to cover your costs of travel then you're gonna be OK in this regard. Many casual non-pro players go to Vegas for their vacation as they would have spent that travel money anyway and this way at least they can accrue enough EV to offset that expense.

I like your post about the NO. But I don't understand were the 84.1%comes from?

The N0 value is the number of hands you have to play for the expected value to equal one standard deviation. If you use the bell curve figure in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation, as a model for the distribution of outcomes after playing n hands, the expected value is going to be in the middle. When n = N0, 1 sd = EV. Therefore, 0 is going to be at -1 sd on the horizontal axis (EV - EV = 0).

Every outcome to the right indicates winning money and every outcome the left indicates losing money. If you add up the percentages of the winning outcomes, you get 84.1%. (The values in the figure have a rounding error so they only add up to 84.0%; the values at the bottom of the page are more precise.)

To get down to -2 or -3 standard deviations you need to play 4 or 9 times as many hands, respectively.

This is not an attack on Jacks&Aces. It is just my opinion as to why I think that he will experience more losing sessions and trips than winning ones.

I don't want to come off as anal retentive about spelling and grammar errors when posting on discussion boards. The topic should be the meat of the discussion, not a few writing errors. There will likely be a writing error or two in my post here.

But, when I see a post such as the initial one of this discussion, I cannot help but wonder if this person could ever possibly be a successful advantage player. Card counting requires attention to detail at a fast pace in an active environment with many distractions. Only a few errors in several hundred hands of play can wipe out the advantage.

There are easily one hundred misspelled words, grammatical errors, and punctuation errors in the post. Unless English is a second language to Jacks&Aces, and he writes much better in his mother tongue, I would venture to say that he lacks the control and attention to detail to be a successful card counter.

Moreover, the ability to recite basic strategy, while being essential, is still only the first and easiest step in learning to count. The memorization and ability to quickly apply indices for strategy and bets accurately in a fast paced game amid conversations and other distractions are much more difficult to master.

Jacks&Aces has obviously read good books by good authors. Those books all give excellent explanations in different wording with different examples as to why bad players do not have a long term effect on a good player's expectation, and why a losing trip for a good player will happen often. Sorry, Jack.

Regards,
The damn old duck.

In Blackjack if you have a 1% to 1.5% edge you will win on trips more often than you lose since you don't have all that EV locked up in an 800-1 payoff and quads.

I don't even play video poker, so your analogy is irrelevant to me.

In Blackjack if you have a 1% to 1.5% edge...

That if is my point. I don't believe that he has such an edge in the first place because judging by his writing, he doesn't appear to be detail oriented enough to play in a manner disciplined sufficiently to earn it.

If you lost $1,000 � what stakes were you playing ?

If you were playing at (non-existent) $2 tables � that loss would be hard to stomach.

But � if you were playing $10 0r $15 tables that kind of loss is barely noteworthy.

What was your MAX bet ? If it was $100 then all you lost was 10 biguns�

That can sometimes be won or lost in a twinkling.

I'll remember the one when I had three max bets out and the player to my left had a hard 15 with the dealer showing a 6 up. He hit and busted with a 10. The dealer then drew a 5 for a 21 to beat my three good hands.

AGAIN: If you lost $1,000 � what stakes were you playing?
If you were playing at $5 tables of course it would be crowded with bad players. You would be lucky to even get a seat. Then you would have to spread at least 1-10 to win. That's a $50 top bet. A loss of 20 top bets is a normal swing. You might be able to play perfectly and bet perfectly yet still go through losses like that for months. Many players on this board tell their horror stories so go back and read some. I'm down 88 top bets from my all time high but as Alfred E. Neuman says: "What, Me worry?"
and: "You can be on the right track and still get hit by a train!"