You are playing on an honest and deeply dealt DD game. Twenty minutes into playing, the cards were running good, and you won 25 units. Then the cards turn and slowly you start to lose. What do should you do?
Lance Humble once alluded in his book that he quit after winning $400 before losing all back. Is there any truth to quitting theory? It seems to be true on my personal empirical experience.
You are playing on an honest and deeply dealt DD game. Twenty minutes into playing, the cards were running good, and you won 25 units. Then the cards turn and slowly you start to lose. What do should you do?
Lance Humble once alluded in his book that he quit after winning $400 before losing all back. Is there any truth to quitting theory? It seems to be true on my personal empirical experience.
How do the cards know you've been winning and now it's time to lose?
Suppose you flip a fair coin 10 times and it comes up heads each time. Most people falsely believe that it is "due" to come up tails and will bet accordingly. However, by definition, a fair coin always has a 50% chance of heads or tails regardless of previous outcomes.
Quitting while you're ahead is not an advantage player's strategy (except maybe to avoid detection). Certainly, you might lose money if you continue, but you also might make money. In fact, if you are an advantage player, you are more likely to make money.
It simply doesn't make sense to temporarily stop playing just because you are winning. What is the difference between continuing playing or stopping and waiting two hours to start playing again? The answer is that in the latter, you've just lost two hours of expected value. You still have the same risk of losing in either case.
So, unless you are quitting the game forever and don't want to risk your winnings, keep playing. The more hours you play, the more money you make.
Throughout your playing career, you will experience winning and losing streaks. However, you will not and cannot know when a winning or losing streak will begin or end until after it has happened.
Sup Doc!
Good as defines: deep penetration and rules? Or, the run of the cards?
No such thing as the "run of the cards". Think like a counter.
If he had said negative variance instead of the cards turned, you would have been fine with it. Let's not get hung up on terminology when we all know the game is streaky...that's why bankroll is so important.
Paname Rick said it all. Whether you call it netative variance or turn of the cards, you will know only after it happened. It can therefore not be a criteria for session length.
Francis Salmon
As I said ( quoting Grosjean) that your BR takes a major hit. That's the context I was using to frame it. Do you agree?
Your session bankroll should be sized in a way you can afford to lose it all (also psychologically). And when you have no ammunition left you have to stop whether you want it or not. So there is anyway a natural barrier here.
I think the question of the poster pointed in the other direction: he wanted to shorten a winning session "before losing it back" which is rather unprofessional.Also, the desire to accumulate winning sessions is understandable but it will produce a bad ratio of expenses to time spent at the table.
As Panama Rick said the only valid reason to abort a winning session is to avoid heat.
Francis Salmon
Francis,
So, there is no point of avoiding or evading a negative variance at a given table. One just simply sit tight and take the beating as it comes. Moving from table to table is useless, given that all cards are purely random?
If this is the case, session bank roll is irrelevant? one might as well bring the entire bank roll!
Session bankroll should always be replenishable. Nobody in his right mind gambles his fortune except in melodramatic films!
Francis Salmon
Francis,
So there is such a thing as "quitting point" to avoid self ruin. If one experience continuous negative variance at a particular table, by not moving to another table, would be like shooting one's own foot? If variance is determined by the randomness of a particular set of decks in play, then one's decision to play or not to play at a particular table would affect the result. If such is the case, wouldn't it be wise for one to scout for a table where the players are winning?
May be this "Inquiry" is too confuse at the moment!
If such is the case, wouldn't it be wise for one to scout for a table where the players are winning?
No. Your question should be rephrased "where the players were winning?" That they were winnings has no relevance as to whether they will continue to win. Going back to the example in my previous post, if a fair coin comes up heads 10 times in row, what is the probability of the next outcome being heads? (By definition of a fair coin, the answer is 50% -- the coin is unaware that it has come up heads 10 times before and should continue that trend or that it should change because it is "due" for tails.)
Do you think that there is some supernatural magic that causes a table or player to win or lose? Some people have a name for this magic, luck. Advantage players prefer to use the mathematical concept of variance. This is because we can quantify how often you will win and lose; we just don't know when.
Hi Rick,
Thanks for the explanation. However, are you suggesting that a person's experience of "variance" at a particular playing session is his personal one that is "fixed" and will not change regardless if he changes table to table or not? That kind of sounds like fate.
"Some people have a name for this magic, luck. Advantage players prefer to use the mathematical concept of variance."
I actually think the term "variance," used in that context, is pretty much endemic to blackjack counters -- more specifically, to counters who surf the internet a lot. As you know, variance is really a specific number. For a given game and bet spread, it's a constant. It may help us grapple with that luck thing, but it doesn't come close to defining it. In fact, for most distributions other than the normal, you need more than just two parameters (mean and variance) to describe what's going on. You may need the third moment ... fourth moment ... etc.
Variance is one number -- a constant; luck varies. I think we should go back to calling luck what it is -- luck, or (more accurately) &!%^# luck!
ETF
Hi ET Fan,
Are you inferring that luck does exist?
Thanks for the explanation. However, are you suggesting that a person's experience of "variance" at a particular playing session is his personal one that is "fixed" and will not change regardless if he changes table to table or not? That kind of sounds like fate.
I'm saying you can't predict what will happen in the short term, whether it's at this table or the next. Just because people were winning or losing in the past does not mean that trend will continue.
If you have nothing better to go on, then you should look for tables where players were losing, not where they were winning.
Big cards are more likely to help the player than the dealer. Small cards are more likely to help the dealer, so all else being equal, a table where the players have been losing is more likely to have had small cards being dealt, which will mean that there are more big cards left to be dealt to you (assuming no intervening shuffle).
Of course, barring an extremely unusual situation, you should base your decision on actually observing the cards that have been played (back counting), or other factors like rules, pen, number of players, casino tolerance for bets at your level, etc.
