Double Exposure

Recently had a situation occur; D inadvertently showed her down card immediately after myself and another player got our 1st 2 cards. Her hand reveled a hard 16. I had a hard 12. The TC was -1. Player to my right had two face cards. I told him to split. He looked at me like I was some kind of idiot. I doubled down. The other player made some stupid comment. I got a 5. D busted with an 8. Not sure if I was correct to double. However, I would have split the faces 'til the cows came home. This was on 6D.

Any comments?

In a normal play the dealer's open card of 6 is the worst for the dealer. Now you can consider the dealer's open card is 16. This is much worse than 6. You can see the dealer will bust on any card of 6,7,8,9,10 or 8/13 (or 61.5% for TC = 0). Since the dealer's busting possibility is over 50% you would avoid playing busting hands and double (without busting) or split on any situation if allowed. That means if you have a pair, always split including a pair of face cards. But I would stand on hard 12 to avoid busting. For doubling a hard 12 you have 4/13 (or 30.8% getting face cards) of busting or giving up a total 61.2% (doubling) while the remaining non-busting doubling situations are not a sure winning thing. I would also double on any two-card total of 5,6,7,8 such as two cards of 3 and 4 (a crazy play when you double on 7). I don't have a solid calculation on different TC situations. So this is just my opinion.

the dealer reveals the next card and you know it will not put you over 21. If you know the dealer has hard 16 split and resplit any pair except 5, 5, which you should double.

I'm not convinced that 5/5 should NOT be split under this circumstance assuming it is a DAS DOA2 game.

The only time you should split 5, 5 is when you know that the first card to be dealt to you . See pp. 93-103 of Beyond Counting by James Grosjean.

If you can split and resplit and double after split you have more potential for getting more money on the table.

Computer simulations show that 10 is such a strong foundation and two 5s are such weak foundations that your expected value is greater from doubling even if you can resplit and double down after splitting.

Stealth Bomber,

HCBS is given in several sources, for example in Table 6.1 on page 90 of the 1966 edition of Edward Thorp's classic Beat the Dealer. There, Thorp gives 12 as the minimum hard standing total when the dealer is known to have a hard 14-16.

Hope this helps!

Dog Hand

and most of them are beginners that dont even know basic strategy. They probably read it somewhere or heard someone mention it. There are plenty of good doubles, you just have to wait for them. Why double on a potentially busting hand and lose twice your bet; if the count encourages it, then just hit.

But I want to know, if what I did was or was not a positive EV move. Not that it really matters a lot because it will probably never happen to me again.