[OT] Counting cards. What is it?

[Cedric]

Yeah, sorry Ranger, but your friend is wrong. That strategy will absolutely not work.

Sure, you shouldn't lose 12 hands in a row, but then again, you shouldn't be able to flip a quarter and have it come up heads 12 times in a row...but it can happen.

And guess what, the odds of losing 12 blackjack hands in a row are better then the odds of flipping heads on a quarter 12 times in a row.

So, let's say you try this strategy for 12 hands and lose...

5
10
20
40
80
160
320
640
1280
2560
5120
10240

So...want to keep going after 12 losses in a row? Make it $20,480 on the table? What if you lose? Want to go up to $40,960...well guess what, you can't cause you just hit the table limit and they aren't going to raise it for you. (not all casinos have a table max, but most do).

But hey, you probably won't lose 12 in a row...so let's say you lose 11 in row and finally on the 12th, with $10.240 on the line you win! Yay...you just won $10,240!!

Now, subtract your losses from previous hands...and you earned $5.00...

Nope, sorry...doesn't work.

Most decent blackjack books will document a progressive style of betting where you only raise your bet if you are winning. It counts on you putting together win streaks now and then. Maximizing your earnings during those streaks and going back to small losses in between.

Cedric

 

[Wilphe]

It's a strategy you are supposed to use on Even Chances at Roulette.

 

[Cedric]

Wilphe...

There are no even chances in Roulette. Let's say you are playing roulette and you bet on Black...

Even chance right? Wrong...there is a green 0 (and sometimes a green 00) on the roulette wheel. As well as 18 red numbers and 18 black numbers. If you bet on either red or black and it comes up with the green 0, you lose.

So there go your even odds. And the bet pays even ($5.00 bet pays $5.00), but the odds are against you...

The house odds in almost every bet in roulette, including this one, work out to a house advantage of 5.26%. Those are "not" good odds in gambling.

Cedric

 

[Staffan]

I have a friend who's a business major who claims he knows how to make money at gambling without requiring any real skill.

The strategy only works if you have infinite money to begin with (only then are you certain to win your money back) - and if you have infinite money, you don't need to gamble to make money.

 

[Heretic Apostate]

The practice of doubling bets when you're losing is a quite well-known theory. It's so well-known, it even has its own name: "The Gambler's Ruin." Not a very encouraging name, I admit.

The basic premise is, the house has a small edge. On average, you're going to lose a certain percentage with every hand you play or every spin of the wheel or whatever. So unless you do something to increase your odds so that you have the slight advantage, you're going to lose.

As for betting on the roulette wheel, compare the odds to the payoffs. For instance, most roulette wheels I've seen (admittedly, only in Hoyle's Casino computer game) have numbers from 00, 0, 1 through 36. Let's say you bid EVENS (or RED or whatever). That'll pay off 2-to-1. Unfortunately, that's only an 18 out of 38 chance, so the odds are less than 50%.

That's about a 5.3% house advantage. Yikes... Fun to play on the computer, when it's with silicon money, but yet another reason why I won't bet in real life.

 

[alsih2o]

meta-gambling

 

[Guilt Puppy]

Yeah, I came up with that "double your bet on a loss" tactic first night I went to a casino... Eventually wrote a program to run through it statistically (using what odds I could find for basic strategy)... Even including doubling and 3-to-2 payoff for blackjack, the method still somehow ended up tilting the odds even more into the casino's favor. Not sure why, exactly (except perhaps that losses grow exponentially while winnings grow linearly, so when you reach the cut-off point of either losses or wins the losses are grossly disproportionate), but it's how the numbers came up.

A variant of this -- where you increase you bet on losses, decrease it on wins -- tends to work a bit better in practice... It capitalizes on the properties of randomness (that you will usually see strings of the same result; which is to say, that it will not be evenly, or non-randomly, distributed.) much better than the doubling method -- that's pretty much asking randomness to come whoop you in the butt.

Statistically, though, your best odds of winning big at blackjack (not including card-counting) is placing one big bet -- however much you're willing to lose. You have just short of a 50% chance of doubling this, plus a little bonus if you hit blackjack. Any other betting system requires you to play more hands, which simply means your net wins/losses will deviate less and less from the statistical norm -- in short, you'll be paying the house.

And of course, statistically, with very few exceptions, the impact of the house edge can be best minimized by not playing at all.

(As a total aside, anyone ever noticed how like D&D a poker game can be? There's that same mix of IT players who micromanage statistics and old-school players who just have a feel for the game, there's some acting involved, even kings and queens, and when people act out of turn, the dealer/DM gets really annoyed. Not to mention the ratio of men to women involved in the game... I dunno, I was watching the World Series of Poker and I just couldn't shake the feeling that like, a good half these guys had played D&D at some point or another.)

 

[Brother Shatterstone]

I've heard from numerous sources that your best bet, sorry for the pun, is to go into the casino and place all the many you can afford to gamble on one bet (Roulette Wheel or Blackjack) and win or lose you walk away as the longer your in the casino the less you will win, at least odds wise.

Your other best bet is to look for a Video Poker that has the highest payout on a full house.

 

[ichabod]

The best bet when you are going into a casino is to play poker (assuming you know what you're doing). While the house still takes a cut, there are no house odds. Just the other people at the table.

 

[Cedric]

Ichabod is right...get to be really good at Texas Hold'em and go to Vegas to play that.

As for Blackjack betting strategies...I will be the first to admit that mine is "not" the best (in fact, I prefer craps over blackjac)...but I still like my blackjack strategy.

First hand you bet $5.00.

If you lose, you just keep betting $5.00.

If you win, take the winnings plus another $5.00 and add them together for a $15.00 bet.

If you lose, go back to $5.00.

If you win, take your winnings and add them to the bet and take back your second $5.00. So you bet $25.00 and at this point have $5.00 invested.

If you win, keep the $25.00 you win and leave a $25.00 bet. Repeat twice.

If you win a 3rd time in a row, up the bet by $15.00 more dollars and keep $10.00.

This strategy tries to acknowledge the fact that you will lose more often then you win. But hopes that your wins and losses are going in streaks. If you can manage to string together 5 wins in a row now and then, you can make up for a number of losses and get some money back that way.

But if you are in a win one, lose one slump it sucks.

My craps strategy is entirely different...but I don't think I could explain it here...and I doubt anyone would want to hear it.

Cedric