"Beyond Counting" and "Blackjack Attack"

A poster who occasionally signs as "stalker" keeps posting a link to an old post of mine, thinking that it will embarass me. His post keeps getting busted because he adds a few choice insults to it. I'll spare the postbusters some sleep and save space by putting it up again, in its entirety.

The context : The bunch of malcontents that abuse this website with professional zeal had badmouthed Schlesinger and his work once too often. As one who has often crossed swords with the ol' Don in the past, I felt that a general statement would be useful from someone that wasn't a sycophant. Which is what I did, although, as I already admitted to my "stalker", it is obvious I went a little overboard! As I wrote a week ago, it's never right to praise Elvis by demeaning Jerry Lee.

So, read on, armed with the perennial pinch of salt.

Post script: James Grosjean is now a member of the Masters of Blackjack team that currently hosts the "new and improved" Don's Domain.

There are 3 kinds of texts

that are useful to the advantage player :

1. The texts that contain the whereabouts of a juicy game. Such a text is, for instance, the CBJN when it informs about a 2:1 promo. However, chances are that by the time you are reading this, the game is long gone! Unless it's a private e-mail, forget about it.

2. The texts demonstrating that specific casino games are beatable. Beat The Dealer is the prime example: After that one came out, it was no longer a surprise that Blackjack can be beaten. Lots of books followed BTD with elaborations on the theme, offering more powerful systems and more insights, but without anything astonishingly new. A book that demonstrated novel weaknesses in casino games is the relatively recent Beyond Counting.

3. The texts that teach how to attack a beatable game, whatever that game might be. The prime example here is Blackjack Attack, offering insights which apply not just to BJ but to any beatable game.

I am putting all this down just to show the fallacy in the claim that "the pros are laughing with Don Schlesinger's book". Things are like this:

A pro is NOT looking out for text #1 : He is actively seeking out the juicy games himself or through his associates. At worst, through the grapevine, which nowadays may be an e-mail. He is certainly NOT looking to see such information published! As a matter of fact, he is pissed to find out about a good game opportunity on a goddamn internet message board, such as bj21.com, 'cause it means that game's now gone.

A pro is also NOT looking out for text #2 : What kind of "pro" is he when he's waiting from some kinda book to enlighten him about front-loading or legal past-posting?! The pro learns these things the hard way, meaning by himself, by the teachings of other pros or through the school of hard knocks. Grosjean's book did NOT teach the true pros much. It merely brought to the masses of casual players out there the information that the pros already knew - albeit in a very disciplined, concise and precise manner. Any pro who only found out by that book that there's a way to beat craps, was no pro really.

A pro is actively searching for guidance that will help him improve and better materialize his advantage against a beatable game, in other words text #3 : Bankroll requirements, risk taking, risk measurement, elimination of unnecesary work, focus on the essentials, ways to achieve discipline - all these things are vital for the professional player. [Look up the dictionary definition of pro, aka professional player, to understand this better.] Which is why it is laughable, if not completely ridiculous, to claim that "pros are laughing with Don Schlesinger's book"! On the contrary, that book contains precisely what the serious professional player wants to know.

--Cyrus

It's just as inaccurate and wrong-headed today as it was the day you posted it. Big surprise.

The bunch of malcontents that abuse this website with professional zeal ...

Just because these unemployed wankers are boorish, insolent, and snotty, that doesn't necessarily imply they're really who and what they pretend to be. If they were, I just think they'd have better things to do than drop by just to moon us. I'm still mystified why they think anyone here should care. If they don't have anything better to do with their time, this vast knowledge they pretend to have must not be doing them much good, either.

Blackjack Attack is a great book for people who count cards. Since 99.9% of the people on this website are card counters it is a very good book for them to read. I don't think the book offered much to the high levels pros (who count cards) since they can run their own sims and knew much of the material already since it was first published in BJ Forum. In my own case, I read it, liked it, and haven't looked at it since it first came out.

I think you have really missed the boat on Beyond Counting. I am certainly playing games in the casino that I was not playing before reading Beyond Counting. When I go on a BJ trip I take Wong's book Basic Blackjack, because you never know when you will walk into a casino and they are offering 6,7,8 pays 3-1 or some such rule. That book covers many of these odd rules so I carry it. More importantly I carry Beyond Counting because sometimes in a casino you look at a game you've never played, and have an epiphany. Aha! I think this game can be beaten. When that happens you go back to your room and open Beyond Counting. That book will tell you what your information is worth.

You say that Beyond Counting brought the masses what the pros already knew. Maybe you knew the value of a card in 3 Card Poker, Caribbean Stud, Let It Ride, Monopoly etc. but I didn't.

Playing Blackjack as a Business was the first book I read and I used it to learn to count. Because of that I would give it credit for earning me the most money. But I read that more than 20 years before Beyond Counting came out. Without question Beyond Counting has earned me more money than all other books combined.

Do I laugh at Blackjack Attack? Certainly not.
Has it earned me any money? I'd have to say no.

Your post does holdup well but does have unaddressed points:

As one who has often crossed swords with the ol' Don in the past,

That apparently was long ago and IMHO you were luckily spared his usual venom. Since then apparently you have trod the line very precisely.

Grosjean's book did NOT teach the true pros much. It merely brought to the masses of casual players out there the information that the pros already knew - albeit in a very disciplined, concise and precise manner.

Not much about the how-to but much that is vital about the weighting between non traditional recomendations, and what the return from non-traditional plays. Much remains to be done, for example in the area of hole card prediction accuracy weighted against the count decision--sometimes the count can be high enough to ignore a hole card prediction of lesser accuracy.

, elimination of unnecesary work, focus on the essentials,

The focus on essentials is overhyped in BJA in that conditions can change what is essential. Witness the venom dumped on Caccarulo for proposing the extension of the i18 initially. It is strange how Caccarulo accepted this treatment with no known appology ever being made public.

Bankroll requirements, risk taking, risk measurement

Actually there is a fundamental flaw in all of the work in BJA when very high advantages are involved, that people really knowledgeable about math already know (perhaps I should link to a recent post about Wolfram's recent criticism of demands to always make math proofs in formal form too--but that would only be an aside and perhaps would be disruptive--even if possibly necessary?--I don't want to just feed Cyrus'es thesis here.). When advantages are in ranges above 7%, risk models based on the normal approximation break down. The long run index is so low that purely binomial effects start to take precident over the usual standard normal and fully continuous ones. Works on this tend to be quite technical, where perhaps one of the few down to earth explanations was in one series of calculator manuals published by Texas Instruments for their programable calculators in the early 1980s. Those texts were very detailed and gave alternative T-test distributions for smaller populations. There can be quite a bit of difference that is totally ignored. (well I tried to raise the point once about this and was flamed by mathprof in reply that this was just disruptive). This can be very important, to be able to quickly estimate risk and bankroll in such situations, especialy when they are temporary and are of the sort that a pocket calculator in a bathroom stall may be the most in calculating resources that you can use ASAP, and getting to a computer to run a sim is totally impractical.

Now for an outrageous, but true example of why you might not want to wait to specify or prove things too much:

This was highly dangerous and reported to me by a Russian emailer, where the new North Korean casino, near Mt. Arryang, was using an original bets rule, with no hold card, but was allowing riders on split hands. This involved losing only original bets to a natural; you had a free hand betting on ploppie's splits.

I doubt the Democratic People's Republic of Korea would have taken it too well if my correspondent had taken along his laptop...etc. etc, etc.^2! But with the usual clone attitude my friend would have been pointed to waiting on this super opportunity until the proper sims had been done etc., rather than having frowning but polite NK secret police helping him wire transfer a bundle to his bank account. If he had been a clone he could have been killed for obvious reasons.

Lucky for him they thought it dishonorable to question an apparently lucky win. And this is still a counting, and not a further non-traditional advantage play, example (hint;-).

Your post gives me the opportunity to elaborate on Don & I a bit more.

"[As one who has often crossed swords with the ol' Don in the past]. That apparently was long ago."

Seems only yesterday Fine Tuner was calling me names for that! How time flies.

"IMHO you were luckily spared his usual venom."

Don Schlesinger doesn't suffer fools gladly, ar at least those he takes for fools. He gets easily angered. And I was very surprised when I saw that. In fact, I've made it very clear, in numerous posts, that such an attitude goes against everything a serious player should live by.

Nonetheless, I have come to firmly understand that Donald Schlesinger's qualities outstrip his shortcomings by such a long stretch it isn't even in the same city.

"Since then apparently you have trod the line very precisely."

Line, what line? What line is that?? The line to Moscow is dead since 1991.

"Witness the venom dumped on Caccarulo for proposing the extension of the i18 initially. It is strange how Caccarulo accepted this treatment with no known appology ever being made public."

Cacarulo indeed suffered at the hands of Don at the time. Once more, I was against Don's stubborn stance. You can take Don's attitude as an old grouch's who doesn't wanna know anything new or as someone's who's tired of seeing bullshit fly left & right. I believe it's the latter. The proof is the extensive written acknowledgement heaped on Cacarulo by Don in the 2nd Edition of BJA : if Schlesinger was just another old unrepentant, he'd have gone the way of John Scarne, if you know what I mean.

(Don Schlesinger was asked about ace sequencing a few years ago and he denounced it as voodoo. Turns out, in fact, he didn't know what ace sequencing was! He thought it was just some crackpot scam. When the details were explained to him, he recognized it as a legitimate technique and also acknowledged that it is outside his area of expertise. He's tough as nails to come around but he has never, but never, failed to ultimately recognize and endorse a legitimate advantage technique.)

"Wolfram's criticism ... Texas Instruments ... a Russian e-mailer ... North Korean casino..."

I'm outta here.

but the rest is totally true as well. You defended yourself well, but the russian counter who sent me that email would have been a dead counter if he had been in anyway clonelike. And different distributions really do apply if the long run index gets really low such that your kelly=1 bankroll is under 50 units. Normally the standard normal approximation is considered applicable as long as the population is over 35 members. But the difference, standard normal, versus binomial, distribution, can be large in blackjack with very high edges.

In my russian friend's example, he had no loss potential unless the ploppy he was riding busted on split hands, playing them as a rider. Now at risk of resetting the Grossjean v. ML SCORE flames, I leave to you:

The long run index, use the estimate of ploppy basic strategy posted here.

The SCORE---far above anything that Grossjean or El Burro had in mind I dare say.

The refereeing of the fight over how you count hands played per hour and the observation time per hour.

Need I add how the extra ingredients in SCORE, playing to a $10K bank and standard blackjack hour, complicate what is simple just using the long run index?

In all of the above the advice in BJA (I or II) would have been deadly if followed considering the likely consequences of a North Korean backrooming.

There are similar opportunities that could kill a clone out there.

I didn't think so.
Stick to something you have knowledge of please.

For some damn unknown reason included extensive t-test tables, for testing statistical inferences, that are usually overlooked for sampling studies of small populations. They are a hidden little source of interesting math information.

Well, not for a lil' while at least...

In what I described above there really is a good blackjack game in North Korea, as described in that email I mentioned. But it would be too risky for me too to go there.

Dear Cyrus,

You have completely forgotten a category which I use all the time.
I frequently study books that I have used in the past. I am always reading Journals of my profession about stuff I already know about. Sometimes I will be reading something and go " What if " The category is "Inspiration". Sometimes new ideas are just old ideas viewed from a different perspective. I wrote up a paper shortly after I received my degree in which I mathematically proved that the difference between a static charge and a current was only the frame of reference as per Einsteins theory of special relativity. I received a reply that said " duh " with a previous article attached and date "1963" a dollar short and 35 years late. Oh well "back to the drawing board" but you get my point. By reading what the masters have written many people get inspiration for how something may go in the future. I nominate this as a catorgory # 4

Dirac had a paper relating magnetism to the relativistic effects on an electron in 1931. Whatever the paper you reffer to in 1963, they only had to add a bit of Mach's principle to it.

Take the standard lose only one bet to a dealer natural rule for no hole cards:

Only a player's initial bet is lost when the dealer's initial card is an ace or a ten, and the dealer ends up with a natural. This is strong for a rider strategy player in that they can now attack against aces and tens. But...

If you mention this rule to the pit and they forget that a dealer natural is involved you have:

Only a player's initial bet is lost when the dealer's initial card is an ace or a ten. But then...

Now if you convince the pit that a rider's bets are not the initial bet...

A poster who occasionally signs as "stalker" keeps posting a link to an old post of mine, thinking that it will embarass me.

i don't have to do anything, you do quite fine on your own. my original posted stated that you claimed bja was worth more to a pro than beyond counting. i then proceeded to post the link to prove my point.

His post keeps getting busted because he adds a few choice insults to it.

not true. check the trash yourself. no insults, just business as usual at bj21.

Which is why it is laughable, if not completely ridiculous, to claim that "pros are laughing with Don Schlesinger's book"! On the contrary, that book contains precisely what the serious professional player wants to know.

of course cyrus fails to point out that this alleged "quote" was never made. you see, facts are really not necessary when cyrus is on a roll.

the quote originally was that pros are laughing at don schlesinger, who has turned himself into a cartoon character. i stand by that statement.

i've never debated the fact that bja is a good book for counters or that don isn't a great teacher for neophtyes. it's when he tries to overstep his limitations that the fun really begins!

as pro21 points out, beyond counting has taught the average pro how to look for advantages in non-traditional venues. perhaps not a genius such as yourself (after all, you claim to know things about the book that not even the author knows!), but do you think your hero DD' (who i have nothing against, btw) knew of any of these techniques before this book?

imo, grosjean's work on 3cp (especially 1cp) is the most important revelation to both the serious and casual player in at least the last 20 years. please point me to the page number in bja where you can make that claim.

you're well on your way.

"imo, grosjean's work on 3cp (especially 1cp) is the most important revelation to both the serious and casual player in at least the last 20 years. please point me to the page number in bja where you can make that claim."

I could point to whole chapters, aamof --- but I forget : you knew all about optimal wonging since 1982. Also, the ruin formulas, br requirements, etc.

You choose to weirdly pit BC against BJA, I choose to stock both books. Have it your way.

"i've never debated the fact that bja is a good book for counters"

Right.

you knew all about optimal wonging since 1982

doubtful but there was a letter in BJF that touched upon this and involved 80% of the work needed for a precise answer, as per BJA chapter 11, in 1983.
Also, the ruin formulas, br requirements, etc.

I know: touchy subject, but you will find an exponential version of trip ruin in a 1985 undergraduate paper at St. Schoolastica University (St. Paul MN) press, from Merilee Jones, Traintracks to Oblivion, and there of course is what you misslabel the Atari tapes tale, when DS admitted he did recieve a disk and my mention of Arnold's letter from 1982---at least get my claims write. They are available on this board, and despite DS's claims to the contrary recently, he stipulated that: maybe his computer guy used your disks, but he did not. DS tries recently thereby to withdraw past stipulations. So don't post your warning lable please.(Maybe relabel: "Clarke going over confused early stuff he had, DS may have read once way back when"---more accurate and still nasty enough to suit you I am sure ;-)

And you will find a series of papers in the estate collection of, the later papers of Paul Samuelson, (there are several urls for this) where the exponential version of trip ruin is mentioned from the MJ paper. Samuelson used another last name in his papers for MJ.

BC against BJA

Actually not so weird if you recall how DS originaly objected to the publication of BC by rge. There are several posts archived where he did this.

Cyrus you posted on how you were willing to follow the evidence against DS before, now for some admissions of my own. After following DS recent computer ineptness I have to accept his claim he did not directly use my programs, even though it is likely, especialy from his begging for a program to use etc., back then, they were used by his "computer guy." DS has trouble finding updates to Netscape 6.2! DS has problems keeping his online software updates from reinstalling browsers! DS had problems using the Mandrake Linux distribution CD!

DS don't do computers except with Parker or Viktor carryfully supervising him!

That said, we both agree on the ridiculous vindictive that he spills on new concepts. You simply have to admit that the bitter old man not wanting to learn new tricks portion of his mind, that you mentioned before, sometimes wins out, when he posts. And I don't believe Grossjean will be able to hold back his temper on Don's domain over similar for too long IMHO!

"There was a letter in BJF that touched upon [optimal wonging] and involved 80% of the work needed for a precise answer, as per BJA chapter 11, in 1983."

Shit. Why didn't anyone notice that??

"You will find an exponential version of trip ruin in a 1985 undergraduate paper at St. Schoolastica University (St. Paul MN) press, from Merilee Jones, Traintracks to Oblivion."

Shit, agin. Why isn't anyone paying attention to those papers??

"DS admitted he did recieve a disk and my mention of Arnold's letter from 1982."

No, he didn't! Unless I blinked.

"Now for some admissions of my own. After following DS recent computer ineptness I have to accept his claim he did not directly use my programs."

That's a good start.

...The rest of your post doesn't agree with me.

"DS admitted he did recieve a disk and my mention of Arnold's letter from 1982."

No, he didn't! Unless I blinked.

"Now for some admissions of my own. After following DS recent computer ineptness I have to accept his claim he did not directly use my programs."

ARRRRRRRRG! STOP THE MADNESS! NOT THIS DISK SHIT AGAIN!

DOES ANYONE HAVE A COUPLE OF CASES OF OLD OBSOLETE UNUSABLE ATARI DISKS LAYING AROUND? I WOULD LIKE TO HIRE AN AIRPLANE TO FLY OVER THE LAS VEGAS STRIP, DUMPING THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF STUPID OBSOLETE OLD UNUSABLE ATARI DISKS EVERYWHERE. IMAGINE. ATARI FRIGGIN' DISKS BOUNCING IN THE BELLAGIO FOUNTAINS. ATARI DISKS BEING BURNT UP IN THE MIRAGE VOLCANO. ATARI DISKS IMPALED ON TOP OF THE PARIS EFFIEL TOWER. ATARI DISKS COVERING THE LIGHT FROM ATOP THE LUXOR. ATARI DISKS FALLING THRU THE CRACKS IN THE FREEMONT STREET EXPERIENCE. ATARI DISKS FALLING FROM ...