My biggest RC ever results in bigest loss!

It was on 6D, pen at about 72%, using AO2, wonged in at 1.5 TC, myself and just two other players at the table. At about 50% pen the RC peeked at 53. Was already severely wounded without yet having a winning hand. I pressed beyond my usual 15 unit max bet X 2 because I had seen only 4 aces at mid point of the pack and I never seem to encounter any heat. By the time it was over and all dust settled, I had dumped 124 units on this one shoe. D got four, ace-under BJ's. I managed to catch one BJ and the only one other ace showed itself somewhere else on the table for a total of 6 aces falling from the entire shoe. When the shoe was done, the RC was still at 34. What an endless barrage of 4's, 5's and 6'es! I even ran dangerously short on Ben Franklins during the pummeling process.

I can�t believe how it can become so brutal sometimes. Has anyone ever seen a count this high?

I play Uston APC. Highest running with Ace surplus was 63 on 6 deck. I have experienced what you describe, three sessions in row (Super wipeout) It took more than a year of serious recreational play to recover

Our counting is different, but I have seen +50 at least twice in the past year. Another poster a few months back reported something just like your debacle. I think he had a RC of +57 and got ripped.

I posted a query about this a while back on ap.com, but the discussion went nowhere, even though several of us had noted that on extreme high counts things often seem to be unfavorable, or at least not as favorable as things are at more reasonable counts...

While I didn't see anything near that high (I was playing DD) this past weekend I saw a TC of +13, and I got my clock absolutely cleaned. I, like you reported, saw way too many 12-16 hands, with the dealer always showing a 10 or A up. Stand I lost. Hit, I busted. Not a chance.

My old Boy's Life magazines (Boy Scouts days) used to have this section at the end called "grin and bear it."

Seems to be appropriate... I am absolutely certain my Urologist will come back in another life as a BJ dealer... :)

With my 7000 hours spent at the tables I came not even close to witness such a high count.Highest I can remember was somewhere in the thirties but I have had shoes that ended at say +27 and only 1 deck to go.I know how it feels like.
However I don't think there is any basis to believe that at a very high count we have disadvantage again as the "rat" asserts.Of course we lose many hands because the dealer will frequently have a ten or an ace but when he has a low card we will be more than fully compensated for that.
A count of +53 sounds very suspicious. Couldn't it be that you were the victim of a card-mechanic who put all the pictures behind the cut-card?

Francis Salmon

However I don't think there is any basis to believe that at a very high count we have disadvantage again as the "rat" asserts.

For systems which ignore the ace, you can get a situation where the remaining pack is composed mainly of tens and every hand becomes a tie. In such a situation your edge does actually decline.
However, most people use ace-reckoned systems, and with these, from an EV perspective, things just get better and better.

I mistakenly thought that Stealth Bomber was speaking about hilo, now I see it's AO2 which makes +53 much less unlikely. It corresponds to a high-low count of +30. So after all, I dont think he was cheated.

Francis Salmon

Was a large casino with many tables and ASM's.

I have seen a count at 50 a few times. What's most amazing this time is not so much that the C was 53 but also that it had only dumped out 6 aces from the playable pack.

I did not say "disadvantage" as in we start losing more. I said "unfavorable in that things didn't go as well as at more common high counts."

For example, suppose your RC is +50, with exactly 50 cards left. All of them could be 10's, and you could push every hand, which is worse than what we would normally expect with a high count, since there are normally aces that would give us an edge on the 21's that will show up at such a count.

The analysis I have seen shows the same thing in the other direction as well, in that once the TC drops to a significantly minus level, dropping further does not hurt us nearly as much as the initial drop from 0 to (say) -3.

I was a bit off on the "frequency" however. In looking at my notes when I got home, I saw a 50+ shoe at the IP in Biloxi during the late spring/early summer last year, and a 40+ shoe at the Grand in Biloxi the Summer before. I've been playing mainly DD in the last year, with just a few 6d shoes when my son or wife want to play with me... I've seen more than my share of 12+ counts (TC) in those games, and while I can't analyze the results since I don't have any hand-by-hand data, my "impression" as that I don't do nearly as well at 12+ as I do at 5+ (5+ means TC of 5 and above).

I can recall a 12+ count where I won almost every time, and hit three snappers on succession, plus mainly 20's for the rest. I can also remember 2-3 12+ counts where I got nothing but stiffs. My wife watched one such session where I surrendered 6 consecutive hands..

Hope that clears up what I meant. I'll take 12+ over a minus count any day. But I might well choose +6 over +12 as well, based on when good and bad things have happened in the past. :)

While I was playing in that recent 50+ fiasco, and thinking about it just now, one thing to remember as that as the RC rises, so does the TC, and so does my bet. But if the RC continues to rise, small cards are still falling, which tends to wreck max bets since it is like playing in a negative count where the small cards are expected. So I guess that in reality, it is the "getting there" (to a big RC) that is painful, because you pass over the threshold to toss out a max bet, and the little cards keep coming to drive the count ever higher. Obviously we do better as the count falls, rather than as it rises, so in reality this certainly affected my overall "impression" as the game was played.

maybe that makes more sense.

(and btw yes I am talking about hilo +/- 1)

I am sure that last year sometime somebody posted a chart of how your edge starts to decline at a certain TC ( for hilo ). It never fully gave back the players edge but the edge most definately does not continue to improve with every +1tc.

I believe I saw that myself, or at least mention of it. But even worse, while the count is actually climbing, I'm often tanking for obvious reasons, which was something I had not thought about before...

The remaining 28% had 14 aces, if I understood your post correctly. Even if you've never shuffle-tracked before, you should've been able to play the next shoe with an incredible advantage. Aces comprised ~1 in 6 of the remaining cards in the shoe. It's not likely that most of them would end up behind the cut-card again.

It sounds as if the shoe you'd just played was down in the 1-in-500 range. Only four aces seen by mid-shoe (when twelve is "normal") doesn't happen very often, unless the game is rigged.

It never fully gave back the players edge but the edge most definately does not continue to improve with every +1tc.

We know that a mildly positive TC is favourable. We know that the highest possible counts are favourable. The edge for an infinite deck of aces and tens is 68%.
In the intermediate stages there is some non-linearity in shifts in advantage associated with the fact that the ordinary deck structure begins to warp, but this is real navel-gazing stuff.

Norm didn't do this, because the statement isn't true! For an ace-reckoned count, such as Hi-Lo, as the TC rises, there is no practically attainable true count such that a lower true count yields more edge.

Some sims might show weird things because the samples aren't large enough, and the standard errors are too big for counts, say, in the +15 to +20 range, but, for ace-reckoned counts, the higher the reasonably attainable true count, the higher the edge. Period.

Interestingly enough, the phenomenon is displayed on the negative side, where, once we descend below about TC = -13, the edge starts to become better for the player, although, of course, it is still very negative.

See, also, Revere, p. 134, for a discussion of this same concept.

Don

I was too low on money to continue after such a pummeling. Had to go and get $ from the wife. Needless to say, she was not too happy. It was only about 25 minutes after I had just left our room and she had just fallen back to sleep. The time was now 4:30AM.

Couldn't shuffle track any way because the pack was shuffled in a Shuffle Master. Though now that you mention it, guess I should have come back to the table just to see how that pack of cards performed after the shuffle. That could have been an opportunity to see how well or not so well the machine shuffled pack was actually shuffled.

The reason the typical ploppy thinks that a "non interruption of the flow of cards" is linked to them winning more $ is because they notice the losses much more than they notice the wins as a result of a player making a "weird" or "non-typical ploppy" play decision.

I think the same happens to us at a much more advanced level. Even though we are some of the best players in the world, we are still snowed under and mentally challenged by this kind of result. Thus, we assume there may be something wrong with betting large in high counts.

My point is; we just notice, feel and remember the bad results more than good results from very high count situations.

Someone has almost certainly posted a graph recently in which the data-points move upward as the TC increases until they reach a certain high TC and the line drops off somewhat. Blue-eyed Samurai and I may be thinking of another topic.

Regardless, I did have to smile at the notion that Norm couldn't have done it simply because the statement isn't true. You made my day! :)

And we're no more likely than the dealer is to get the BJs in the high counts. When they do come our way, the 3:2 payoff will more than offset the times they didn't.

human nature being what it is. Have to remember that standard deviation/variance applies to high counts just as much as negative counts.