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Today I went to the casino and was totally surprised by a dealer who had 4 blackjacks in a row in a 8-deck table. I'm wondering, mathematically speaking, what the chance (in %) would that be?
I doubt it.
It happens. Dealers and players sometimes get four naturals in a row. It just doesn't happen very often.
I once had blackjacks on all the three hands I played with max bet. The dealer's up card was a ten. Now, you can easily guess what his second card was!
Francis Salmon
Although card-clumping is nonsense, you do get some minor effects due to the not completely random nature of most multiple-deck shuffles.
Initially adjacent cards will tend to stay in close proximity to each other, so blackjacks will tend to preserve through shuffles with slightly greater probability than would be expected by chance. This is not the basis of a practical winning method because it is such a small effect, but with extreme longshots such as 4 bj's in a row, it can skew the odds (consider that a shift due to non-random effects of 0.00001% can result in a an 0.00002 occurring twice as frequently).
See studies on non-random shuffling effects by Snyder, Malmuth, Carlson, Fuchs, Wong and others for more data on this.
I recall some casinos offering the super 7's bet got shafted by this effect. Group's of sevens preserved through the shuffle, combined with extreme good luck for the players, recorded an abnormal number of jackpots. This effect mostly evens out over time, but the flux around the number of expected hits of sevens is greater than would be implied by a pure math analysis. Funny how these joints expected to rip-off their players with another high-vig sucker bet and got shafted themselves.
You will see about everything.
Saw the same thing as Francis recently, three players at the table, +6 count and four blackjacks come out.
Saw a dealer at the MGM hit 6 straight aces when starting with an 11.
I have lost over 20 hands in a row.
I have gotten 4 blackjacks in a row in a negative shoe.
4 player hands. 3 blackjacks. Dealer also had BJ (ten up). I actually didn't think it was all that unusual at the time. +6 TC. Other player hand was 2 faces.
My only thought was "how can I subletly pull back these bets". There were two decks remaining in the shoe, so this hand dropped the TC by 5 points.
Got a max bet out and pull and blackjack on it and all I can do is push! I am pulling my bet back and waiting for next shoe. The dealer and pit will both understand your feelings. They need not know that the running count just dumped by 10. I think pulling back on your bet after a no win blackjack just does not look that strange that it would bring attention to you unless they are already suspicious.
Weird how my cell phone seems to go off at the strangest times. Of course, I keep it on vibrate mode so that I do not offend the other players.
Pretty quick call as I was back in 2 hands later to catch the last hand of the shoe (and a +8 RC).
That's like 1 in a trillion! That's enough for you to win powerball twice in a row! I'm sure the casino cheated on you
I do not know about a trillion to one but I do know that 10 in a row is usual enough that it happens to everyone who puts in a few hundred hours a year, several times each year. How it happened was lost a few then started a next shoe which went positive and I kept losing. When the count went back down I left and the dealer told me that was 12 in a row. Took his word for it, had dinner and then after dinner I know for sure I lost the next 8. So perhaps it was 19 or 21. The real important thing was I finished the day a winner.
But, I would much rather win the lottery.
I actually didn't keep count, but I did once go through an entire 6D shoe without winning money on any rounds. I was playing 2 hands and had a couple times where I won one hand and lost the other. Most hands were losses, however. I estimate that I played about 28-29 rounds (75% pen assuming 2.7 cards per hand, or 8.1 cards per round).
You see weird things at a BJ table. I once was playing a 6D shoe and 4 consecutive cards on my first spot were all the King of clubs. There are only 6 of those cards in the shoe, and 4 straight went to the same spot. The fact is that if you play enough, you will see unusual occurences once in a while.
If the odds are 1,000:1 against something happening, then a semi-serious player who plays 300 hours a year at 60 hands per hour, will see that exact thing 18 times each year, or about once every 20 days. A 10,000:1 event will happen twice a year on average, and a 100,000:1 event will happen every 5 1/2 years. If they play at least 30 years, then pick a random 1,000,000:1 event and you would expect that to happen as well to more than 1/2 the players.
Rare, but none of these events are unprobable if you are an experienced player. 20 losses in a row will indeed happen once in every 100,000 hands or so. I've also seen 6 aces dealt accross the table to the players. Now if it was a one deck game I would say the dealer was probably cheating:)
