HELP WITH LUCKY LADIES

Sometimes I do like to just have fun in the casinos and not worry much about playing for profit. I play craps sometimes and others but last time I was in Vegas they had a BJ game called "Lucky Ladies that gave you what seemed to be a pretty good payout odds for a 20. Now I know the odds of getting a 20 are about 7 to 1 and they only paid you 4 to 1, but they gave you more money if they were suited and the big payout for having Qhearts, Qhearts 125 to 1. This game is double deck and with a '10s only' counting strategy how likely is it that you could reduce the house edge enough on this side bet? I started with 200 last time I was there and within 2 hours I was up to 2500. Mostly with betting 25 on the Lucky Ladies bet. I would count the 10's only and if on the last hand they were rich with 10's (extra 5 or more) then I would bet 25 on the side and get the 20 most of the time. How bad of a sucker am I for this?

Do you know what the exact payouts were for all the different hands? I can't figure out the EV without them.

Keith

any 20 is 4 to 1
same card 20 (10 10) unsuited is 9 to 1
same card 20 suited is 19 to 1
Qh Qh is 125 to 1
Qh Qh with Dealer Blackjack is 1000 to 1

Max bet 25

I don't see how you can realistically overcome this monstrous edge by counting tens. If the penetration is really good it might be possible.

This sidebet has an initial house advantage of about 25%.

I performed a calculation a couple of years ago to show when the bet becomes favorable for various counts. This can be found the green chip archives. Here is a link to the entire thread (you need green chip membership).

Doing a quick and sloppy calculation (erring heavily on the side of caution) I'd say that this bet is profitable when you have a surplus of 6.7 ten-values per deck remaining. It would also be profitable at other times, but you would have to count suits which I'd assume that you don't want to do.

In your original post you said that you were only making the bet if, on the last hand, there was a surplus of +5 or more 10-values. So by my calculation, this should be profitable if the penetration is deep enough that before dealing the last hand, there is 3/4 of a deck or less left to be dealt. I have never played in a double deck game (only 8 deck games around here) so I have NO IDEA what a "normal" penetration for a DD game is.

Keith

The player purportedly has a +EV on the bet whenever the TC is +11.

there is a 1-deck lucky ladies game I play. I use a queen side-count with hi-opt I to beat it.

The only problem is that the variance is so high that you can't bet very much. It seems good for camoflauge though because it's usually a sucker bet.

this table shows what the count has to be to gain an advantage, given the queen TC:

(the queen TC is the number of excess queens divided by the number of decks left)

queen TC hi-opt I TC
0 10
1 6
2 4
3 1
4 -4

disclaimer: this was produced by a quick and dirty simulation, so i'm not sure how accurate it is.

It must be totally different, because suits come in to play. You obviously cant have two card of the same suit if there is only 1 deck. Must be a different payout schedule alltogether.

Yeah, it's a bit different. I wonder if keeping a side-count of Qh would be the way to go for 6 decks.

Pay schedule for 1 deck lucky ladies:
250 QQ w/ dealer BJ
25 QQ
9 TT JJ KK
6 suited 20
3 any 20