The best game in the world!

The game; 6 dks. dealer stands on soft 17, double after splits, split up to four times, split and resplit aces, double down on two, three, four or five cards. Early surrendered and late surrendered, that is you can surrender against an ace. European no hole card.

I am using simple plus-minus. I very my bets from one dollar to 2 hands of $60 each. I bet two hands of one dollar on minus and zero accounts and then go up $20/hand per true count point. Wong�s blackjack analyzer says that this gives me a 0.4% edge with basic strategy and 1.8% edge when I count.

I was a recreational counter in Las Vegas for 20 years. My wife and I played as a team where she kept the count and I did all of the other calculations. We ended the year ahead 18 of those 20 years, and that is not counting hundreds of free paid vacations. I always knew how to count but she just had a better headed for it. She passed away suddenly and now I travel world and am living in Eastern Europe. I had given up blackjack completely but renewed my interest when I saw this excellent game. No one knows basic strategy over here and the players are really, really terrible!!! I have only located this one small casino that offers these extremely liberal rules. I play six days a week for three hours a day. They are all friends there now and they trust me completely. I do not believe that they believe counting is possible, or maybe they do not even know that it exists. Anyway, they don't care at all about the bet spreads. I buy them little gifts once in awhile and they appreciate a patron who is not drunk and abusive.

I only have one problem. This year I have played for 140 hours. And I am exactly $400 up! The blackjack analyzer tells me I should be pulling in over $40 an hour. That is an expected win of $5,200 in the first six months of this year.

What am I doing wrong?

They are not cheating. I have examined the shoe. At least three times a week they lay out the cards in front of me and I check that all six decks are complete. These are simple and straightforward people. I don't win against all dealers and all shifts. They never do anything suspicious. Plus I had befriended several of the dealers. I have given them opportunities to tell me if something was going on. They look at me blankly and ask me what I'm talking about.

So, what am I doing wrong?

I use matrix numbers from minus one to plus eight. Of course, I know basic strategy and my matrix number changes perfectly. I have adapted my strategy, using Wongs book, for the rules that are presented. This includes changes in matrix numbers and doubling/splitting because I of the split on more than two cards, rule. I never double or split (except A-A versus 10) against a dealer 10 or ace. I have gone back and reviewed my matrix numbers, betting strategy repeatedly. But I do not find answers to my lack of production.

Advanced thanks for any of your help.
I was a green chip subscriber until I started to travel. I may have met some of you from the old days.
Sincerely
BigRed

Hello BigRed:

You didn't mention anything about the placement of the cut card. If it is two decks or more, that virtually eliminates 95% of the value of counting the cards. If this is the case, rather than making $40. per hour, you could be making the basic strategy rate of 0.4%, which would be about $9. per hour. For 140 hours that would be $1260. If you are only up $400. then the difference could be explained by standard deviation.

but not the best in the world...: )

How do you know this? My simulations do not show a 95% drop-off at 2 dks cut. You are correct that my penitration is only 4 dks. Where did you learn about this big reduction? I would like to read the math behind it. Thanks for your responce.

Hello Big Red:

The cut card came into use to thwart the card counter. The more cards that are on the wrong side of the cut card, the more chance that the extra high cards that you need will never come into play. If you have a copy of Stanford Wong's Professional Blackjack book, you will find the pertinent information about his phenomena on page 185, Table 82.

Stanford Wong's benchmark rules against a six deck game, which includes one deck cut out of play, provides the player with a winning margin of $16. per hour. If they cut 62 cards out of play, the winning margin is reduced to $13. So for every 10 cards added to the cut card placement, we can assume at least a reduction of $3. to the winning margin. At 102 cards, the winning margin would be $1. per hour. That is how I arrived at the figure of 95%. You are right, it is just an estimate on my part.

When the player-advantage is graphed, I'm confident that it curves upward dramatically on its right-most side (where the number of cards remaining to be played is at its lowest). The loss of $3 per hour in EV is not a constant rate as the cut-card is moved closer to the front of the deck (i.e., as we move toward the left side of the graph); the slope is slowly but surely heading toward the horizonal, I believe. I think that the estimate of a $3 loss per every 10 cards is on the high side when the entire range of 53-102 cards is taken into account. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual loss when those additional 50 cards are cut off is on the order of around $9-$11 per hour.

When comparing hourly rates for various penetrations, I should also point out that they inherently take into account not only the portion of the shoe you never see (those 50 cards), but an increase in the frequency of the cards you DO see every hour (the early part of the shoe). In essence, you're trading the absence of the "deep" part of the shoe for seeing the early part of the shoe more often per hour any time you compare less penetration to more penetration. In other words, that range of 10 cards is worth more than just an additional $3 per hour, when observed strictly by itself.

Arnold Ziffel Buys a Laptop,

Here are the numerical results from CVCX for a 6D, S17, DA2, DAS, LS game... Norm doesn't have ES! The count system is HiLo, using the Ill. 18 and Fab 4 indexes. The first column is the number of cards behind the cut card, the second is the win rate for a $10K bank using optimal bets with a 1:12 spread, and the third column is the penetration in decks/6.0. As shown, when the pen is 5/6, the hourly win rate is $50.34, but when the pen is only 4/6, the hourly win rate falls to $21.43, a drop of $28.91. This corresponds to a slope of -$28.91/((5 - 4) decks) = -$28.91/deck. However, this is not nearly as dramatic as the drop in hourly win rate when the pen falls from 5.5/6 to 5.0/6: $39.22! This corresponds to a slope of -$39.22/((5.5-5) decks) = -$78.44/deck.

This confirms your hunch that the slope (delta WR)/(delta Pen) is not nearly constant: the deeper the pen, the higher the slope.

Hope this helps!

Dog Hand

 

#      $/hr    Pen 

26	89.56   5.5/6 

27	84.73 

28	83.95 

29	83.25 

30	78.69 

31	77.98 

32	77.32 

33	73.18 

34	72.66 

35	72.13 

36	71.45 

37	67.2 

38	66.57 

39	65.88 

40	65.33 

41	61.37 

42	60.84 

43	60.35 

44	59.87 

45	59.38 

46	55.67 

47	55.27 

48	54.88 

49	54.48 

50	50.93 

51	50.67 

52	50.34   5.0/6 

53	50.06 

54	49.79 

55	46.5 

56	46.27 

57	45.95 

58	45.59 

59	45.16 

60	44.74 

61	41.38 

62	41.09 

63	40.65 

64	40.24 

65	39.92 

66	39.59 

67	39.28 

68	38.94 

69	35.93 

70	35.66 

71	35.38 

72	35.11 

73	34.84 

74	34.6 

75	34.36 

76	34.09 

77	31.26 

78	31.08   4.5/6 

79	30.86 

80	30.68 

81	30.44 

82	30.28 

83	30.1 

84	27.44 

85	27.37 

86	27.18 

87	27.06 

88	26.99 

89	26.75 

90	26.48 

91	26.28 

92	26.06 

93	23.44 

94	23.26 

95	23.09 

96	22.89 

97	22.71 

98	22.46 

99	22.28 

100	22.15 

101	21.91 

102	21.72 

103	21.59 

104	21.43   4.0/6 

105	19.16 

106	18.95 

107	18.8 

108	18.65 

109	18.55 

110	18.35 

111	18.26 

112	18.11 

113	17.97 

114	17.87 

115	17.67 

116	17.6 

117	15.48 

118	15.44 

119	15.36 

120	15.19 

121	15.16 

122	15.06 

123	14.9 

124	14.87 

125	14.77 

126	14.73 

127	14.63 

128	14.55 

129	12.69 

130	12.6    3.5/6 

Here are the numerical results from CVCX for a 6D, S17, DA2, DAS, LS game... Norm doesn't have ES!

Actually, CVCX supports ES if you also have CVData. Set ES in CVData and then call CVCX from CVData. CVCX can use some CVData features. Not that you're likely to find ES outside of Africa and Russia. L

I appreciate you taking the time to run the numbers and post the results here.

It occurred to me that it might be possible to infer the hourly win-rate for a particular deck-range within a 6-deck shoe if we know the hourly win-rate of the remaining "played" portion of the shoe.

From the numbers you provided, a penetration of 4 decks should return ~$21.43 per hour, and 5-deck penetration should pay ~$50.34 per hour. In the game featuring penetration of four decks, any one of those four decks will be in play on average only 25% of each hour.

Now, in the game featuring penetration of five decks, we know that only 20% of each hour will be used by each one of the five decks. So, we'll see each of the first four decks only 80% (20/25) as often as we did in the four-deck game. Therefore, in the five-deck game, we can only expect to earn $17.14 per hour (.8 * $21.43) from the first four decks. Since your figure for the 5-deck game shows a profit of ~$50.34 per hour, the amount of time we spend playing the fifth deck of the shoe each hour must have a profit of $33.20 ($50.34 - $17.14). Since we only play the fifth deck for 20% of each hour, the hourly profit of the fifth deck alone must be $166 (5 * $33.20).

If my numbers are correct (never a sure thing), you can more than triple your hourly EV ($166 vs $50.34) when you have the ability to freely move from one deeply dealt shoe to the next, and the dealer is just beginning to deal the fifth deck (???!!!), and (I assume) you have some knowledge of the count (team play). Not a likely scenario at all, but we can dream. :)

Since you were able to generate figures for each half-deck, the same process can be used to compute the value of each half-deck, in isolation.

I'm sure someone has run numbers like this before.

Wow, thank you very much for all of your careful thought on this subject. I am actually in Ukraine, not Russia. I work for a foundation that provides medical and dental care to orphans here. The game of which I speak, is a very small, one table casino in the back of a bar (but they also have roulette and European poker which are more popular here). The maximum is $60 per head but you can play as many as you wish. But I do not believe they allow any real money to leave, before they shut down the winner. Am constantly looking for other a very high expectation games. And there are a few, but the cuts are very poor.

My simulations do not match your figures. I do have the Wong book with me and also his blackjack analyzer program. It does have a feature that allows you to program early surrender. And simulations that I am running are as follows:
For a 78 card cut; Win $/100 rounds $25 Win Rate 1.9 % Standard deviation $194
for a 104 card cut; Win $/100 rounds 20$ Win Rate 1.7% Standard deviation $176
For a 130 card cut; Win $/100 rounds $16 Win Rate 1.5 % Standard deviation $ 166

These are the cuts that I normally have to deal with. I also ran a simulation of;
156 card cut; Win $/100 rounds $12.50 Win Rate 1.3 % Standard deviation $142
All of the simulations were run to 40 million hands. The only variable changed was the cut card. These seem pretty linear. But of course we will see a curve if we plot more points. Maybe I will run some additional simulations soon. These simulations above, reflect the exact rules, counting system, and bet & matrix number variations that I actually play with. I normally deal with a 2 dk cut. But with a dollar or two, I can buy my way to 78 cards with about 50% of the dealers. There is no heat.

Remember that Wong, used this simulator to arrive at the figures in his book which you are using in your e-mail postings. Also remember that true count conversions, take into account the number of decks remaining. We do not see the extreme drop-off in profitability that you mention in your postings. But as you remember, my actual experience in the 140 hours I played this year do not reflected in this Win rate. I am actually a full two standard deviations below the 1.7% Win rate we see here.

This is a European-style no-hole card game. And all bets are lost to a dealer blackjack. Therefore there is no splitting or doubling against an ace or 10 (except splitting ace ace versus a dealer 10). I have taken this into account in the simulations above. I also play a very rapidly. I am almost always playing alone and playing with two hands. I go to four hands of one dollar when the count goes below -1. This is to move my way through the negative shoes quickly. I do not use any cover at all. All of these factors are taken into account in the simulations above.

Again that I request your knowledgeable and insightful comments. All of you guys really showed an astute knowledge of the game and I am deeply impressed. Thank you again for your comments in advance.

Gratefully
BigRed

BigRed, if you want to exchange info about great east european games please email me. Shark

that you run the sim once. Then you can twiddle with the pen and see the hourly win rate. You can adjust the pen and the win rate numbers instantly change once the sim has been run. I try to play mainly SD/DD games, and I have a very small "card" I made (printed on my computer then laminated) that gives me the hourly win rate for several penetration levels at SD (front) and DD (back) so that I don't have to try to remember. I just watch and count the number of cards dealt, repeat for a shuffle or two to catch variance, and then decide whether to play or pass...