The 1st technique sounds good (except those 2% disadvantage hands). But still. Do ve really have so big advantage when holding just 1 ace? Something is telling me that this is not right. Any opinions?
I won't attempt to reproduce the math as that has been done numerous times by those who are far smarter than I am. However, common sense tells us that an ace would provide a huge advantage. For starters, we have a 4/13 chance of having a blackjack, which will result in a 1.5 unit win. This alone gives us a 46% EV (if I calc'ed that correctly). We also have a 2/13 chance of having a solid made hand of 19 or 20, and for remaining cards, we have a good double down opportunity 5/13 of the time (vs dealer upcards of 2-6). We will get another ace 1/13 of the time, which is a mixed blessing because at most places you only get one card to split aces, but is still not a bad situation to be in.
if we play 6 hands and know that one of them will get an ace as 1st card , our overal advantage will be:
51% (for the hand with A)- 2.5 (5 hands of roughly 0.5% disadvantage)= 48.5%
I'm not quite sure if you understand what I'm wondering about. Did you read that book? ( I did- AP way- in a book store)
When do you hit instead of splitting against a ten?
I'm just saying that I have read many reliable posts that give the advantage of a known ace at over 50%. Yes, this would blend to a very high advantage over 6 hands, and in your example, the 48.5% total advantage sounds right. If I'm not mistaken, this would be an average advantage of a little over 8% per hand, so we would use that number to size bets, and also factor in the greatly increased variance. You can probably find more in-depth info on BJMath.com if you do some poking around.
I have not read this book, but I plan on doing so. The math regarding a known ace for a first card is not new, and there are a number of published methods for gaining this knowledge.
To Mr Lee - I would hit vs splitting aces if I was at an index that tells me this is the correct play. I am not aware of any such index, which means that I always split aces.
I saw an episode of ESPN's Cold Pizza that featured Semyon Dukatch (sp?) and he was talking about some techniques from that book. The segment was cut-off abruptly and they went to an extended commercial break. When they came back, they were on a different topic. This was at the ned of November.
Seemed very odd at the time. Almost like ESPN got a threatening phone call from one of their casino partners like Harrahs (owner of the WSOP).
