I for one, don't believe in voodoo..
or ghosts, or psychics, or alien abduction, or the get rich schemes on television, etc......but I know for a fact that card counting works. I was very skeptical early on, and wondered if all the simulations and background math were perhaps just mistaken or a scam. However, In 1979 I dealt myself 14,000 hands of blackjack over several months on my lunch hour and recorded every single hand. I used high low with a few index numbers and spread 1-4, with northern Nevada rules, dealing 7 rounds. I wrote down every single hand with the bet size, the win or loss, splitting, doubling, insurance, etc. I had both strong winning and losing streaks, but came out winning more than 2 units per 100 hands. Not a huge sample, but very encouraging at the time. I expected about 3 units per 100 because of the favorable conditions I gave myself, but variation with so few hands is quite a bit, so a difference is expected.
I was also playing in casinos at the same time and by 1985 I had logged more than 1500 casino hours, mostly Reno, and was well ahead with close to 3 units per hour. That win rate was higher than what my long run expectation should be in live casino play, with cover betting and less than ideal conditions, but luck is a factor in regard to the specific win rate with so few hours. What is very impressive is to see superimposed charts of 10 sims of 100,000 hands of single deck. They all win, but some might show less than 1 unit per 100 hands and another might show 4 units per 100 hands. It is also amazing to see the very lengthy winning and losing streaks that even the computer will have. Taken together with 1,000,000 hands a series of sims like this almost always come out within .2% of expectation. For example, with one series of single deck sims with about 6 sets of 1,000,000 hands, the average return with the particular count used, rules, pen, etc. the average win rate % was 1.6%. None of the individual 1 million hand sets was more than 1.8% and none were below 1.4%
In perspective, the interesting thing about these sims is they were done in about 81 by a friend and fellow counter who was an engineer/programer at Boeing. He was wondering, just like me, how well this counting stuff really worked and over several months he wrote his own sim program and ran the sims on a Hewlett Packard scientific computer at Boeing. (It took 20 minutes for 1 million hands, which is really amazing for being done back then.) What he did was confirmed by stuff I later saw in Blackjack Forum, and today's sim programs. Counting works, my friend. But you have to do it right, and maybe stick it out over a few hundred hours, if you hit losing streaks early on. I was lucky, and never had a very strong losing streak early in my playing days, and all my early practice play that I wrote down helped me understand how arbitrary streaks are, and how to ignore them.
Sorry everyone, but after not posting much for months, and with adrenaline from being pissed at the attacks, this is an outlet.
Oh, one more thing. I have personal direct knowledge of a bj team that has been in operation for many, many years, with many thousands of hours of play. I can say that the investors have been rewarded. Later, bjdavid