Splitting to maximum hands

All the casinos I've played in have limited the number of splits to having four hands in play on one spot.

Let's say you get an unusually long run of eights, for which BS says to keep splitting (hey, let's have fun, the dealer upcard is a 6 and the count is through the roof, so it's party time).

 

You start with:            88 

so you split them and get: 88  8 

split and get:             88  8  8 

split and get:             88  8  8 8 

hit and bust the first:    888 8  8 8 

so now you have:               8  8 8 

and you hit to get:            88 8 8 

... I have split three times to four hands on several occasions.

On many of these situations, I have busted a hand or two. On any of these in which I subsequently received another card on which I had been splitting, I was not allowed to resplit if splitting thrice to four hands was the limit.

Why would you hit a hard 16 against a dealer's 6? To answer your question, I think you would not be able to resplit after the original four hands, even if one of them had busted.

I believe G. Bastard's question is in general to casinos that allow re-splitting of pairs, and has nothing to do with other conditions.

Many casinos allow re-splitting of pairs. Some include aces, some don't. Some casinos do have more options available to the player for their games that have more decks, so it is not unusual to find a casino that will not allow re-splitting of pairs on single or maybe double deck, but do allow re-splitting pairs on their shoe games.

Games allowing re-splitting of pairs usually have a specified limit to the number of times the player may resplit. Most commonly, this limit is splitting three times to create four hands. I would venture to guess that the reason a limit is set at all, is to keep a player from re-splitting tens too many times in an ultra-high count. I guess that would be a final security measure in case the pit and eye were not doing their job properly.

Other from that, the house would be giving up a negligible amount of edge by allowing infinite re-splitting once splitting three times is allowed, since the frequency of opportunity to re-split to more and more hands would be rapidly diminishing.

G. Bastard was asking if, once the allowed number of re-splits had been exhausted, could the player re-split again if any of the split hands busted bringing the number of split hands on the table back down below the maximum allowed number of hands.

His question appears to me to be only about the limit of re-splits, and would not be affected by number of decks or penetration.

Ok, I got carried away with the setup. Say it's against a dealer 9 in a neutral count, then. O the embarassment.

Despite my confusing the issue with the setup, that was the information I needed. Thanks!

Well, that simplifies the coding a little bit.

I had a pair of eights against a dealer 3 today. I split, and got another 8, I split again and got a deuce on the first 8, so I doubled that hand, catching a ten. The next card was an eight, and I split to four hands. Then I got a ten of the second 8. The next hand was an eight again, but I couldn't resplit, Now we have five 8's on the felt. The next card was an ace, so I had one hand of 20, another of 18, one 16 and one 19. The dealer flipped a 10, for a 13. What did he get on the draw? You guessed it, there was at least one other 8 left in the shoe.

I thought of your post when it happened.

Whether or not anyone else may think it is irrelevant, how many decks are being used?

Given the following circumstances:

1) A casino sets a limit on the number of hands into which a pair can be split.

2) A player receives the required cards to reach that limit of re-splits, and does so.

3) The player plays out and busts on one or more hands. The player now has less than the maximum number of allowed re-splits remaining.

4) The player receives another card on which to split.

GB was asking: Will the casino allow the player to now split again?

The answer is no. My understanding is that GB is not asking about a particular casino or game. The only factor in which the number of decks could influence this scenario is that if it is single deck, once the hand is split into four hands, it would be impossible to split further unless tens were being split. Penetration would have nothing at all to do with this question.

If I came off as rude by giving the title of my previous post Irrelevant, I apologize. It was not my intention.

My question was just about splitting to multiple hands. I've split to four hands in a 2D game (bunch of nines came out), although I didn't bust any, so didn't get to find out whether I could split off a fifth.

You may pick as many decks as you want; it was hypothetical, for purposes of programming it.

I suppose my question is irrelevant in a 1D game, at least when 8's are concerned (you could do it with 10's, but it's not likely ever to come up; you'd need a count of +10 against a dealer 6 before the tens started pouring out at you, to justify all the splitting).

I should've read yours before I posted mine. :-) Oh well.

> Most commonly, this limit is splitting three times to create four hands. I would venture to guess that the reason a limit is set at all, is to keep a player from re-splitting tens too many times in an ultra-high count.

I would have thought it was just to prevent cards covering the table and dealers getting confused when it comes to taking and paying the bets (it's bad enough when two adjacent players split to 3 or 4 hands). Even when re-splitting tens in ultra-high counts, I don't think the four-hand limit would cost a counter that much.

If you played MA-BJ, then you would realize how your comment does not hold true. With 7 players and 21 spots, it gets pretty hairy with DDs and multiple split hands.

I can see how the situation would be even worse with multi-action but how does that make what I said untrue? I'm not sure if you're agreeing that the reason for limits on splitting is to prevent things getting "hairy" or not. If not, what do you think the reason is?

Back when basic strategy was first developed, and later card counting, games were single deck games. Splitting pairs was already a common rule, and people liked it. The casinos no doubt loved it too, since it meant more money on the felt, and folks didn't play the proper strategy. Then came basic and card counting. Basic strategy demonstrated that plenty of splits were advantageous to the players. I doubt if the casinos liked that at all.

The casinos probably wanted to restrict this rule, but it was too popular to stop altogether. So, once they moved to multiple deck games, they limited splits to a total of four hands.

Now that's just my guess, but the only reason I can think of that would cause a casino to prevent a player from putting more money in action is that it isn't to the casino's advantage to do so.

With multi-action BJ, each player gets one hand to play out. It is played against 3 different dealer hands. Only one dealer hand is on the table at any one time.

I don�t see how this is at all relevant to the issue raised by Magician.

how many decks? Then I would like to ask a follow up question that is dependent on the number of decks. Do you understand?