If counting cards works for the long run is there a better strategy for short games? Games that aren't any longer than a half hour?
For example...when my wife and I go out she plays the slots for a little bit and I play blackjack, when she's had enough we go to a different place on the strip or downtown and do the same thing.
Variance overpowers the short term. All of the short term sessions eventually add up to the long term. The cards do not know that you left and came back, even if it's somewhere else.
Anything can happen in the short term. A competent card counter has the advantage every time he or she sits down at a table, assuming a fair and honest game with proper rules. That's all one can expect. This does not mean that a counter will win every session. If having an advantage meant a win every time, the casinos would go out of business because no one would ever win.
Consider craps, where the house advantage is 1.4% for a pass line bettor and even greater for most other bets. Despite that, a significant number of people are going to walk into casinos today and win money at the craps tables. If that didn't happen, eventually no one would play the game and all the tables would go dark.
Not even the casino expects to win every time so we can't either.
Many of us would not consider thirty minutes to be a "short session." Be that as it may, assuming you are playing anonymously and don't become known to the pit, near the planned end of your session you can widen your bet spread dramatically. You will be gone before any action can be taken against you.
I have to slightly disagree with the the other posters above for the reasons which follow.
Card counting requires two things:
1. A large enough bankroll to get the probability of ruin down to an acceptable level; and
2. LOTS of action -- i.e., many hours at the tables (note that's tables -- plural).
If you only play a half-hour session, say, once a week or once a month -- that's not enough action to EVER get you out of the statistical "short term."
IMHO, while you "should" do better counting cards, anything can happen in the short term; so you might as well play a reasonable, not-too-steep, press-on-win progression.
BUT -- and that's a BIG "but" -- if you and your wife go short term casino-hopping every night or 3 or 4 nights a week -- aggregating 3 or 4 hours of play every night, then you've pretty much graduated to "long term" status and playing the count now makes a big difference.
Only you can really determine if your total action qualifies as "long term" or not and if your bankroll (which I assume is replenishable) is large enough to withstand a string of losses with max bets out.
you're only going to play blackjack for one hour in your entire life, then by all means feel free to use any sort of betting method you wish. Most people though seriously underestimate the amount of blackjack they will play during the course of their entire lifetime. All those short sessions tend to add up to a considerable amount of play. If you look for good games the "long run" is only a couple of hundred hours of play. Play BJ for 12 hours per 3 day trip and take two trips a year for 10 years and you're in the long run.
BP
