risk and back-betting questions ??

i've become a simulator freak. i use Sage BJ and, although it's easy to use, unfortunately it doesn't calculate risk or my standard deviation. so i have the following questions which, perhaps, somebody can help me answer.

1) how much is risk reduced by only playing TCs of +3 or greater, rather than only wonging into 5-deck shoe games of +2 or higher? is this a good way of reducing risk, or does that only lower your expected win rate without any compensation?

2) I ran a simulation a while ago with a conservative, lousy player who wonged into a table at TCs of +2 or higher. this lousy player won 70% of what a counter would've won, assuming that both have the same bet spread corresponding to the count. also, the lousy player correctly took insurance (the "lousy player" simulates the position that the back-betting counter would be in).

here's my second question: would the lousy player have significantly higher risk than the counter?

3) who would have more risk. a counter playing at the table (play-all) or a back-betting counter who back-bet my hypothetical 'lousy player' only at TCs of +2 or higher? assume they both use the same bet spread (they bet the same amount at TCs of +2 or higher).

i suppose that i haven't given enough information to accurately answer these questions. namely, i have not indicated specific bet spreads or described how lousy the lousy player is. but perhaps somebody has enough understanding of risk to give me his best guess.

ok....i guess i could answer these questions myself if i had a simulation program that gave me risk results too. what's the best program for risk simulations? yeah, i know i should ask in the other posts.

thanks

the cheeze

"i suppose that i haven't given enough information to accurately answer these questions. namely, i have not indicated specific bet spreads or described how lousy the lousy player is. but perhaps somebody has enough understanding of risk to give me his best guess."

Yes, we need more info, but,in general, you don't ask the right fundamental question. Risk, as defined by standard deviation, is more or less irrelevant when considered in a void, separate from return, or EV. Suppose you could have 1% EV and 10% risk or 2% EV (double the win) for 11% risk. Which would you choose?? I hope you took the second choice! Yet, you'd have more "risk," which is more than warranted for the extra return you're getting.

Now, if two players sit at the table and one plays-all, while the other plays just the positive counts, the former will actually have more "risk," simply because he plays all the hands. The latter will have the bulk of that risk (negative-EV bets are all one unit and don't contribute much to overalll variance), but with much higher EV, therefore the DI (Sharpe ratio) is much more attractive.

Get the idea?

Don

I don't know about the Sage BJ simulator, but with my BJ Vision simulator, I can simply set the bet for 0 at levels below counts of +2 or +3 and put in a bet of $5, or whatever, for counts above the cutoff and get the results of a Wonging session.

My old simulator wouldn't accept a bet of 0, so for that one I'd just enter 1, betting 99 for levels over the cutoff, giving me a very close approximation for flat betting above the cutoff.

In a shoe game, can one reduce risk of ruin by only playing at TCs of +3 or higher (all else being equal, e.g., bet spreads)?

in my sims, i notice that the advantage of playing at TC+2 is very small and sometimes negative until the simulation runs for a long time (under the conditions i play at). of course, more hands are played at TC +2 than +3, so i'll be losing a small percentage in the long run. but would i have enough lower risk to justify only playing in TCs of +3?

thanks
the cheeze

"In a shoe game, can one reduce risk of ruin by only playing at TCs of +3 or higher (all else being equal, e.g., bet spreads)?"

Not by much. Ultimately, of course, if you never play, you have no risk of ruin! But, ROR is a function of the quotient of EV and variance, and, therefore, as you refuse to play at advantageous counts, you aren't necessarily playing optimally. I'm being vague here, because you don't really specify if, for example, when you would wait until a higher count, you would now change your unit size (which is not the same as keeping spread unchanged).

The question is not as straightforward as you might want it to be, unfortunately.

Don

From your posts on "outside USA" I know that you play in a crowded casino in Southern Germany. Under these circumstances it's not advisable to wait for a TC of +3 to bet because you will have very few big bets which means many losing sessions.
Even if the advantage is only 0.3% at a TC of +2 these plays with moderate bets will actually have a stabilizing effect by their mere number.
But there is an easy way to reduce the risk in your game:
Stop backbetting on ploppies!!

Francis Salmon