Taj London: Advantage PlayerMonday, December 29, 2008
KIOSK
Testing the system
Until now, I had taken it on blind faith that counting cards works, but there was no way I was going to put into practice without testing it first.
Now, according to card counting strategy, when playing blackjack using basic strategy, the house has an approximate 0.5% edge over the player. This is the average edge over the long term. However, it has been proven that when the deck is heavy in high cards (10's), then the advantage actually swings in favor of the player. The richer the proportion of 10's, the bigger the advantage to the player.
Why is this, you may be asking. Simply because, the higher the proportions of 10's, the more likely you are that your double downs will work, you will get a blackjack and the dealer will bust from hands like a 6. Conversely, the lower the proportion of 10's, and the more small numbers, then the advantage swings even more into the houses favour.
Convinced? Well it makes sense, but why should I believe it! So I set up a rather simple test to determine whether or not what they were saying was the truth.
So, I took my brand new 4 decks of cards and removed 20 low numbers (2,3,4,5 and 6 - removing four of each). This left me with a deck that had a True Count of 5. (Yes I know that you don't know what true count means yet - I'll cover that in a later post). When the true count is +5, that means that the player has a 2% advantage over the house.
So, using my stacked deck, I started to play one on one with the dealer. The results, surprisingly positive! I was making more than I was winning. I sat there for a couple of hours playing well over 200 hands and recording my win loss ratio and I was winning money! (well theoretically anyway). With my minitest under my belt - I found new confidence in the fact that counting cards worked!
Of course, all you experienced card counters and statisticians out there know that a sample of 200 hands proves nothing. To get a true sample you need to play thousands, even millions of hands to get a true proof. You also need to work out the percentage advantage you have. Unfortunately, at this point of my career I'm sad to say that I acted like an idiot blinded by all the easy money I was going to make. I possessed no understanding of the meaning of the term 'long run', all I could see was short term gains.
Now, according to card counting strategy, when playing blackjack using basic strategy, the house has an approximate 0.5% edge over the player. This is the average edge over the long term. However, it has been proven that when the deck is heavy in high cards (10's), then the advantage actually swings in favor of the player. The richer the proportion of 10's, the bigger the advantage to the player.
Why is this, you may be asking. Simply because, the higher the proportions of 10's, the more likely you are that your double downs will work, you will get a blackjack and the dealer will bust from hands like a 6. Conversely, the lower the proportion of 10's, and the more small numbers, then the advantage swings even more into the houses favour.
Convinced? Well it makes sense, but why should I believe it! So I set up a rather simple test to determine whether or not what they were saying was the truth.
So, I took my brand new 4 decks of cards and removed 20 low numbers (2,3,4,5 and 6 - removing four of each). This left me with a deck that had a True Count of 5. (Yes I know that you don't know what true count means yet - I'll cover that in a later post). When the true count is +5, that means that the player has a 2% advantage over the house.
So, using my stacked deck, I started to play one on one with the dealer. The results, surprisingly positive! I was making more than I was winning. I sat there for a couple of hours playing well over 200 hands and recording my win loss ratio and I was winning money! (well theoretically anyway). With my minitest under my belt - I found new confidence in the fact that counting cards worked!
Of course, all you experienced card counters and statisticians out there know that a sample of 200 hands proves nothing. To get a true sample you need to play thousands, even millions of hands to get a true proof. You also need to work out the percentage advantage you have. Unfortunately, at this point of my career I'm sad to say that I acted like an idiot blinded by all the easy money I was going to make. I possessed no understanding of the meaning of the term 'long run', all I could see was short term gains.
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