Renzey, it will be my pleasure. I've been meaning to add it for some time now, but I had to put this new forum together in a rush. I really appreciate the valuable help you are providing to visitors here. It will be added in the next few days.

cheers,
Neil

but...

I don't understand how they can both be right. How can progression work if one hand has no connection to the next? If that were the case, then there would be no difference between upping your bet randomly and upping it after a win. I guess I need to read the books...

S :?:

Swanson has focused on an inescapable point that pro-progressionists look right past. If your chance to win the next hand is not related to recent results, then you cannot make a profit on all those larger bets that came right after a series of wins, since their chance to win is the same as at any other time. This has been found to be true during analysis. Yes, it's true that during winning streaks, you win impressively with a positive progression, and during losing streaks, you lose only moderately. But here's the equalizer; when you win and lose the same number of hands, as in WLWLWL, etc, you lose money rather than break even! Look carefully at this list of three different sequences of outcomes for 10 bets. WWWWWWWWWW, LLLLLLLLLL, and WLWLWLWLWL. The first two are total streaks. The winning streak wins much more money than the losing streak loses. The third is a total "chop" with 50% wins, but loses money. Now, how many more possible sequences are there for these 10 bets? There are 1024 in all! Of those 1024, only 1 is all winners and only 1 is all losers. But 252 of them will contain 5 wins and 5 losses! Now, here's the thing: With any progression, the losses sustained on all the losing streaks added to the smaller losses accumulated thru all the chops will exactly equal all the profits gained thru all the winning streaks - IF - you win as many total bets as you lose, such as in a coin flip. Ahh, but blackjack is no coin flip! Alas, in blackjack you come out a half percent shy of even on raw won/lost tallies. This means that in actual blackjack play, there will be a slightly higher number of sequences containing excess "L's".
So at the bottom line, progressions merely cluster the winning sessions into where the winning streaks are, then spread out the losing sessions across the losiing streaks and choppy streaks. But the bottom line remains magically, artistically, mathematically and poetically -- the same. You can verify this by applying your favorite progression to the following smaller, but complete sequence distribution of wins and losses.
WWWW, WWWL, WWLW, WLWW, LWWW, WWLL, WLWL, LWWL, LWLW, WLLW, LLWW, LLLW, LLWL, LWLL, WLLL, LLLL. There is a complete six page layout and explanation of this in my book.

Fred, Your WLWLWL scenario assumes that all possible scenarios occur with equal frequency. I believe -- and my manually-dealt studies confirm -- that streaks of winning or losing hands occur more frequently and are longer in duration than is predicted by simulation. Card counters seem to be blind to the existance of streaks, yet a common complaint is, "I won a bunch of consecutive hands while the count was negative, and then got hammered when the count sky-rocketed and my big bets were on the table."
Since the cards don't know if we're counting or progressive betting, the WLWL patters are the same for each player (assuming no changes in Basic Strategy due to the count) and short term fluctuations in WL outcomes can have a totally different financial effect for each type of bettor. Progressive players often win when counters are losing, and vice-versa. Progressive players also apply "Quit Points" during play, such as quitting the table after four consecutive losses, or walking away from choppy tables -- much like card counters quit play when the count swings too negative. In both cases, the WLWL patterns for any particular shoe are altered by our actions, since we aren't participating in the game through the completion of the shoe.
The bottom line is that real-life blackjack play produces streaks that, in my opinion, don't conform to theoretical prediction.

LOL Ted!!!!!!!!!!!!! :lol:

Yeah, that's true. They sure have 2 opposing sides to this. Both are right in their form.

Fred, I think some people need to hear it explained simply why a shoe rich in high cards favors the player and low cards favor the dealer. Too many simply think, "well, it's because the player's likely to get a 20" without considering that the dealer is just as likely to get 20 as well. Also, there are a lot of anecdotal stories about the count getting high and the dealer still winning most hands, so some conclude "counting doesn't work".
Without stealing too much thunder from your book, and because I don't want to paraphrase what you say in it, could you briefly comment?

On Excess High Cards: When the shoe contains a surplus of high cards, both the dealer and player are equally more likely to receive good hands. But the player makes more money with high cards than the dealer. The most glaring example is a dealer's blackjack vs. a player's 20 -- and then the other way around. One way the $10 player loses $10 -- the other way he wins $15. Another example would be a pair of Aces for either the dealer or the player. The dealer must hit a soft 12 -- but the player gets to take one card to 11 -- twice! Also, when the shoe is more than 33% Tens, Insurance becomes a moneymaking bet for the player rather than for the house. That's because it pays 2-to-1 odds but will win more often than one time in three. How about when you double down? What kind of card are you usually hoping to catch? The more 10's and Aces there are, the better you do with your doubles -- yet, the dealer can never double down.
Now what about when the shoe contains lots of small cards? How could the dealer ever possibly break if there was nothing available bigger than a 5? Etc, etc.

Bug -- Yes, if you have no knowledge of the cards that remain, then you might as well bet the same amount on every hand since without that knowledge, you'll always be 43% to win the next hand, 48% to lose it and 9% to push it. Is flat betting boring? Probably. Do progressions make it more fun? Yes. Do they help after everything washes out? Mathematics, thorough logic and studies of the frequencies of streaks say that they do not. The results of some players have indicated that they do. As for me, I'll bet the "don't" on that question. Yet, card counting has been proven beyond a doubt to beat the game. If you fixate on progressions and they end up not helping, you've locked yourself out of becoming a winner at blackjack, when known winning strategies are entirely available.

Walter Thomason said:

I suspect that because manual shuffles occur using the used cards from the previous shoe of play, the cards aren't truly randum after the shuffle, and this lack of randomness causes more clumps of winning or losing streaks to occur.

So - People who use progressive techniques in casinos where the cards are shuffled my machine are kidding themselves if they think they have the odds. That's why the casinos love progressive gamblers.

Just for the hell of it I have decided to define the term "empirical studies".
They are studies which have been made by experimentation and observation. They are not scientific studies. I didn't know what it meant so I looked it up in my Funk and Wagnalls. I have just had a disturbing thought. Suppose, just suppose that Renzey and Walter don't know what they're talking about. Suppose that they are 85% correct in both of their theories. So each of us gravitates towards either Renzey's counting or Walter's progresssions. And in 10 years another guy comes along and explains the problems with each system. But, by that time we have all lost our money.
What do we do? Get a refund on our books, or what? I gotta figure this way. The last BJ book has not been written yet. In the course of the next several years there will be many more to come with major improvements in both systems. That's the way the world works, my friends. By the time I master the card counting system they will probably introduce a 20 deck shoe with automatic shuffling. PS. I just ordered Fred and Walter's book's.

I just finished reading BlackJack: A winner's handbook by Jerry Patterson... he talks about count profiles, and count reversals being used to determine the amount of like-card clumping in a shoe. I was wondering if anyone had any experience or ideas regarding the use of count profiles, as it is a completely new subject to me and I wanted to make sure it was actually useful.

Renzey- That's what I had the most trouble with regarding card clumping. When Patterson explained that if you were at third base, and your second card was a low card, then the dealer took his hole card, and the player at first base hit and received a low card- He argued that you could assume that the dealer's card was low if you were in a "clumpy" game b/c you were in the middle of a low-card clump. But I found it difficult to follow b/c as you said you would never know when the clump would start/end. On the topic of shuffle tracking... is it possible to track a shuffle with 6 decks, where the decks are split into two piles of 3 decks each and then shuffled (this process is repeated for a total of three shuffles).

I retired 6 years ago after 32 years in the mechanical engineering field with a major electronics firm. I'm 60 years old and have been playing serious blackjack and poker since the 1970's. I have a wife of 38 years and two grown children in their 30's. The rest is as bland as vanilla ice milk.