Card Counting Spanish 21 vs. Card Counting Blackjack

????? Can't decipher if there was a question from aceside, or if there was an erroneous statement that Moraine needs to address. ?????

1. In Spanish 21, you may surrender only after the dealer has checked IF THERE IS A MONKEY IN THE HOLE. The insurance side bet therefore has nothing to do with surrendering on 17 vs. Ace.
2. Correct me if I am wrong.  I remember that Katrina Walker ignored  the topic of insurance, which is DIFFERENT FROM FORFEIT, completely. (Her book does not include a deviation index for Hi-Lo users.)   
3. You may follow Katrina's lead to drop any idea of insurance buying when playing Spanish 21.  But if you are really interested in the insurance side bet, Moraine Mono's book on AceMT mentions +5.5 AceMT True Count as the deviation index for insurance buying.

I intended to say surrender, not insurance. In Spanish 21, player surrenders 17 vs. Ace at higher true counts, but you are saying the opposite. Player hits 17 vs. Ace at lower true counts. 

Hello aceside,

To avoid the kind of wild goose chase that we recently experienced while discussing the 100% IC for Foret Lanyang's X-Count and other Ten-Counts, please identify the name of the S17 Spanish 21 basic strategy that you had used (including author or publisher's names), and what is your understanding of the recommended play for 17 vs. Ace under that basic strategy in a brand-new shoe.

I often rely on Gronbog to resolve this kind of argument. This is not hard. I am sure other people will jump in this discussion too.   

https://wizardofodds.com/games/spanish-21/

There's a rumor going around that I might have played a little Spanish 21.

17 vs. A is one of those plays where you surrender at low counts but not high ones. The reason why is you know he doesn't already have a 10 under there, and there's a good chance the dealer will have to draw to a stiff. That's the only basic strategy surrender play in the S17 game, but surrender 16 vs. 10 and 16 vs. A. go +EV at low positive counts, when you're starting to put money down. There are plenty of index plays and for best results they should be modified to account for the bonus hands; 6-7-8, 7-7-7, and 5-7 card 21's. 

Spanish 21, in general, is not as good as a solid double deck game or a S17 shoe game with surrender, pen being equal. It's good for cover, it's good to avoid heat in stores where they either don't recognize Spanish 21 AP or they don't fear it, and there are some exploitable sidebets on the game. It also used to be very common in the Northeast with lots of available tables and was often the best game you had available to play right then and there. 

I have been waiting for you to say something here. Regarding the surrender decision on 17 vs. A, I guess it’s not so straightforward. It depends on whether dealer hits or stands on soft 17.  I will take a look at this part soon. 

In Spanish 21, every hand has a good fighting chance to win if the player can still draw cards. Think twice before you surrender. The two hands Automatic Monkey mentioned 16 vs 10 and 16 vs. A, (whcih could also serve as candidate hands for aceside's Fabuloso 3) players are not recommended to surrender unless the AceMT true count is +1.5 or higher.  

Card counting pros talk about "Bankroll" a lot, but seldom talked about the "STUDENT LOAN" needed before becoming a professional card counter.  Money is money, either you label it as Pre-pro Educational Expenses or as Bankroll. They all come out of the same pot of seed money available to you before becoming a pro.

Cut to the chase. If you want to become a Spanish 21 card counting pro, you may only find two books in print to read for a total cost of less than $100.  Even if you want to spend more, you may not find any additional educational venues. . 

But if you want to become a blackjack card counting pro, you may face quite a few thorny choices.  Among hundreds of blackjack books that you may find on the net, there may be 4 or 5 recommended "must-read books" for a total cost of $250. There may be some recommended computer simulation programs that may help determine your personal EV and your Risk of Ruin, etc., once you embark on a pro career. In addition, there may be numerous prep-schools/academies/boot-camps waiting for you to enroll.  If you lavish yourself with everything recommended, your pre-pro educational expenses could easily exceed  $5,000.

Question: With the same amount of Seed Money Budget, say $10,000, you have, what will be the Career Risk of Ruin comparison between:

Spending $100 on pre-pro education with $9,900 left for bankrolling a Spanish 21 card counting career

                                          Versus

Spending $5,000 on pre-pro education with $5,000 left for bankrolling a blackjack card counting career?

Answer:  What's the BS that Moraine is talking about? Sorry, the rest is unfit to print.

Cut to the chase. If you want to become a Spanish 21 card counting pro, you may only find these two posters, Automatic Monkey and aceside, to read for free. 

You left out Gronbog whom you often rely upon to get you out of a jam?

I always found the term Risk of Ruin to imply something new and unique regarding money management.  Actually 5% RoR can be thought of as representing 2 standard deviations.

This term, Risk of Ruin, has been frequently used by financial experts. I haven’t fully understood it, nor these two terms, hedging and portfolio. I understand standard deviation. Can you explain a little more into what you say above? 

Just checked the two books on Spanish 21.

Risk of Ruin = The probability that you will go broke.  (Per Katrina Walker) .    

Risk of Ruin = The probability that you will lose your entire bankroll. (Per Moraine Mono)

Moraine has nothing to say about "hedging" and "portfolio", but has one simple word "DON'T" for taking out a "STUDENT LOAN" to finance the pre-pro educational expenses in blackjack or Spanish 21...

In Blackjack or Spanish 21, it’s impossible for a player to go completely broke because the beneficial rule of surrender helps the player to survive.

Let’s use Blackjack as an example to consider. A typical Blackjack win/push/loss rate is 42%/8/%/50%, and the expected value is +1.15/0/-0.97, respectively. If a player uses a bankroll of $10,000 to bet all on one hand of blackjack, what is the ROR? 

Wow! aceside, you are genius. ALMOST!  

John Larry Kelly, Jr. would have agreed with you completely that "in Blackjack or Spanish 21, it’s impossible for a player to go completely broke,"  if you also clarify that you only meant to say "provided the player bets according to Kelly Criterion."

In casino, as a rule, the easier the game, the bigger the house edge. 

If you asked me some 20 years ago: WHAT SHOULD SMART PEOPLE PLAY IN CASINO? I would have answered without a doubt: blackjack. But that answer is no longer correct. The correct answer today should be Spanish 21. The reason is simple:  Just by comparing the basic strategy of Spanish 21 and of blackjack, Spanish 21 is obviously much, much harder than blackjack.

Once a counter has learned the Spanish 21 basic strategy, counting Spanish 21 is actually much easier if the counter finds a workable card counting system.  How could it be so? 

Reasons are many, Automatic Monkey noted less heat, which is so true now, but may change in the future.  These two reasons, however, would be forever true and indisputable:

• For every deck exposed,  a counter has FOUR CARDS LESS to stare at. Counting an 8-deck shoe with 25% cut off in Spanish 21 counts only 288 cards at most, while an 8-deck blackjack shoe with 25% cut off counts 312 cards -- a difference of 24 cards, which amounts to 1/2 of a Spanish deck.
• The High Cards in Spanish 21 -- Ace and 3 Face cards (Monarchies/Monkeys?) are very recognizable. It is unlikely that an 8 or 9 card would be seen as a 10-valued card. Aging counters with poor vision can still stay in the game, and enjoy an extended card counting career.

To sell your books, you must convince the audience here. In Spanish 21, player surrenders 17 vs. A at higher true counts, where higher bets are placed;   and player hits 17 vs. A at lower true counts, where lower bets are placed. But, you are saying the opposite. What say you? 

Win loss results from a blackjack session are distributed as a standard Gaussian distribution.  Gaussian or bell shaped curve has a mean (average), mode, standard deviation, and variance.  Two standard deviations from the mean contains 95 percent of possible outcomes of a session.  So if your ruin is 5% (2 std devs), then 1 in twenty sessions you will lose your bankroll.

No, you've confused a number of notions above. If you have BJA3, reread chapter 8 to get some clarification on the subject. First, the 5% (two SDs) that you refer to is two-sided (actually 95.44%), which means 2.28% in each tail. So, since we're concerned only with losing (left tail), a two-SD loss would occur only 2.28% of the time, for a given session (which has an end), if we're guaranteed to complete the session. Nonetheless, if you read about the "premature bumping into the barrier syndrome," you'll also realize that you have the (almost) right description of 5% ROR, but for the wrong reason. That is, for any given session, you aren't guaranteed to be able to finish the requisite number of hours. You may go broke earlier than if you were always able to complete the session.

In any event, the other problem is that ultimate, or lifetime, ROR has nothing to do with a session; rather, it is defined as the probability of going broke. Period. There is no time constraint. The period is open ended. You either win all the money in the world or go broke trying. So, when we refer to playing a fraction of Kelly with x% ROR, we're referring to lifetime ROR, not session, or trip, ROR, which is a different formula.

Again, reread the chapter carefully and slowly, to clarify these notions.

Don