AlexD30
05-23-2004, 03:15 PM
Stop play in a damaging location, transferring your play to a new deck, shoe or table whenever it's convenient. Experienced gamblers know that trends exist, and that a persistent downturn will sometimes seem unbeatable. Track wins and losses and stop playing that shoe as soon as the house gets, say, 10 bets ahead of you in any series (for instance, if the house has taken 16 bets vs. your 6). The advantage of this method is that it's more consistent than quitting after 4 loses in a row.
We all have to beat a safe retreat when a dealer gets hot or our "luck" runs cold. Computer simulations presume that a player will stick it out through thick and thin, betting bravely onward regardless of repeated punishment and waiting patiently for a negative trend to reverse itself. Human beings just don't play that way. For years, I applied this technique of bailing out of a bad situation and got great results.
Walking away from a costly string of losses is not merely an option for a real gambler (as opposed to someone who bases his "knowledge" of casino games upon computer simulations), it's a fact of life. No simulation exists which can imitate more than one or two components of real casino play at a time, and their most critical omission is human nature. The one advantage of a computer simulation is that it enables you to test a variety of strategies against the same set of outcomes, but even when analysis of a million plays indicates that you would have won more without the bailing out when the house gets 10 bets over you, you can't say: "OK, I'll never walk away from a game again" because uninterrupted betting is an impossibility in real life.
Walk away from a shoe (or a series) if the house pulls 10 bets ahead of you, winning 15 bets out of the first 20, for example. At -10, you won't have to move very often, whereas at -5 you'll be abandoning non-profitable situations pretty frequently, taking your action to another location and resuming your play. Personally, I favor frequent moves and "natural breaks" -- they alleviate boredom and keep me alert, and reduce the temptation to wobble off the rails.
No human being betting real money in a real casino should "bend over" when he is the victim of a clear house bias, and few of us do. Anyone who has ever played BJ knows from experience that trends happen, but the math brigade keeps denying it. And presumably, the mathemaniacs are the only gamblers in the world who'll keep shoveling their chips into the dealer's tray while the cards defy the odds in bet after bet.
I am always puzzled why it seems to be perfectly acceptable for the house to study past streaks and outcomes to predict the future, but players are not permitted by the "rules of math" to do the same. If you run a streak analysis of, say, 100,000 hands of blackjack, you will find a streak distribution pattern which is obviously similar to the pattern from any other sample of that size, assuming the same number of decks, the same rules, and the same style of play. For most of us, the past provides the only basis for predicting the future. I have an advanced computer program that runs analysis on past results/events/streaks. Have run that program many times over and over on different blocks of computer-generated hands of blackjack, updating the chart with each recalc. There's very little change between one block of "hands" and the next as long as the rules and numver of decks are consistent.
We all have to beat a safe retreat when a dealer gets hot or our "luck" runs cold. Computer simulations presume that a player will stick it out through thick and thin, betting bravely onward regardless of repeated punishment and waiting patiently for a negative trend to reverse itself. Human beings just don't play that way. For years, I applied this technique of bailing out of a bad situation and got great results.
Walking away from a costly string of losses is not merely an option for a real gambler (as opposed to someone who bases his "knowledge" of casino games upon computer simulations), it's a fact of life. No simulation exists which can imitate more than one or two components of real casino play at a time, and their most critical omission is human nature. The one advantage of a computer simulation is that it enables you to test a variety of strategies against the same set of outcomes, but even when analysis of a million plays indicates that you would have won more without the bailing out when the house gets 10 bets over you, you can't say: "OK, I'll never walk away from a game again" because uninterrupted betting is an impossibility in real life.
Walk away from a shoe (or a series) if the house pulls 10 bets ahead of you, winning 15 bets out of the first 20, for example. At -10, you won't have to move very often, whereas at -5 you'll be abandoning non-profitable situations pretty frequently, taking your action to another location and resuming your play. Personally, I favor frequent moves and "natural breaks" -- they alleviate boredom and keep me alert, and reduce the temptation to wobble off the rails.
No human being betting real money in a real casino should "bend over" when he is the victim of a clear house bias, and few of us do. Anyone who has ever played BJ knows from experience that trends happen, but the math brigade keeps denying it. And presumably, the mathemaniacs are the only gamblers in the world who'll keep shoveling their chips into the dealer's tray while the cards defy the odds in bet after bet.
I am always puzzled why it seems to be perfectly acceptable for the house to study past streaks and outcomes to predict the future, but players are not permitted by the "rules of math" to do the same. If you run a streak analysis of, say, 100,000 hands of blackjack, you will find a streak distribution pattern which is obviously similar to the pattern from any other sample of that size, assuming the same number of decks, the same rules, and the same style of play. For most of us, the past provides the only basis for predicting the future. I have an advanced computer program that runs analysis on past results/events/streaks. Have run that program many times over and over on different blocks of computer-generated hands of blackjack, updating the chart with each recalc. There's very little change between one block of "hands" and the next as long as the rules and numver of decks are consistent.