Consective losses in a row

I don't think the odds are applicable in LV Bear's case.

Remember, we're talking about the worst memorable beating a player has had in a few decades of play. It's bound to happen. And when finally does happen, you can't automatically say "yeah, he was cheated."

I'm not saying he was or wasn't cheated. Certainly the odds he was cheated are not insignificant. What I am saying is he still was probably NOT cheated.

I think my worst was maybe 20 or more hands in a row.

Dog Hand, I looked into streaks for a while when I first bought CVData. The percentages you posted for losing streaks seem awful high compared to what I got for 6D sims. You mind giving details on the condtions you ran this under? (Number of hands, penetration, strategy used, rules, etc.)

..I've won every hand in a DD game, heads-up, several times in severely negative counts, simply because I was lucky enough to get the juicy cards that were driving the count down. Conversely and unfortunately, all of us, myself included, have lost many hands in a row in extremely high counts. One shoe or pack, day or even month is not enough to draw "written in stone" conclusions about this game. If you play enough, you will see everything.

Any craps player who puts in enough time can tell you about someone rolling a dozen naturals in a row, or in baccarat 15-17 hands on one side. Blackjack is the same. The unexpected happens.

Cobbson

Absinthiste,

The game was 6D, S17, DA2, DAS, 75% pen, with one burn card. Four total players: one AOII counter at first (spreading 1:20), and three B.S. players. A total of 100,000,000 rounds, so the counter played 102,848,403 hands. The won/loss streaks are for the counter, of course.

Would you like a sim for a particular set of conditions?

Dog Hand

This is the kind of reasoning that lets them get away with cheating. Oswald Jacoby was a mathematician, an actuary, and possibly the greatest bridge player in the world. He once wrote (in Jacoby On Gambling) that if a coin came up heads ten times in a row he would look at the coin, and if it came up heads twenty times in a row he would look at the coin tosser. Bear doesn't say twenty, he says 28 -- 256 times less likely on a coin toss. And THIS ISN'T EVEN A COIN TOSS. Odds of a loss are under 50% on a random hand.

The odds are overwhelming that he was cheated, unless you think the a priori odds on a random hand are less than a thousanth of a percent -- which would be ridiculous. Cheating isnt that hard. People aren't that honest.

I don't think the odds are applicable in LV Bear's case.

Remember, we're talking about the worst memorable beating a player has had in a few decades of play. It's bound to happen. And when finally does happen, you can't automatically say "yeah, he was cheated."

I'm not saying he was or wasn't cheated. Certainly the odds he was cheated are not insignificant. What I am saying is he still was probably NOT cheated.

I have read that you can speed up a count of all visible stars overhead by simply counting half of them and multiplying by two. Applying this operating principle to bad runs of cards at blackjack, I have saved lots of money by simply quitting a session after the first half of a long losing streak. (Specks Parsons claimed to be able to this after only a quarter of the streak, but I have heard that he sometimes overstated things.)

Adhoc

An example of how my biggest losing streak worked.

I lose 10 straight hands, leave the table, go to another pit and lose the next 10 straight.
I now go to dinner, take a nap and return to a different casino 4-5 hours later, sit down and lose the first six hands.

When should I have quit to make the streak shorter and most importantly know that it would not continue at the next table or casino?

The game in really just one super long session. The only way to possibly cut a losing streak is to stop playing and never play again.