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Gaming Guru
Is Playing by the Book Better than by Experience?5 November 1996
Other experienced players know what's in the books and charts, but deviate slightly based on intuition gained at the table. They remember, for example, doubles often winning on hands like ace-five against a dealer's three-up even though the experts say hitting is a teensy bit better, so they slide out that extra bet. How much do the fine points really matter? To get an answer unbiased by my own hopes of just reward for study and/or practice, I set up my computer to play blackjack automatically and at warp speed. The computer simulated an eight-deck shoe, cut-off three decks from the end. House rules allowed "players" to double-down on any two cards and double after splitting, but not to resplit or surrender. Six spots were occupied at the table; the key player was in the fourth position, always betting a single unit on one spot. One set of tests was designed to determine the house advantage for the two modes of play. The computer ran games in each mode for 25 million rounds. That's more than 1.5 million shoes. I expected to find that drifting from basic strategy raised the casino's advantage. Surprise! The two modes of play yielded almost identical results. The house edge in both cases was roughly 0.57 percent of the initial bet per hand and 0.51 percent of the average total (including money for splits and doubles) per hand; that's 5.7 cents and 5.1 cents per $10 at risk, respectively. A second set of tests was designed to investigate possible impacts of the two modes on individual players after single shoes. Here the computer ran 10,000 shoes in each mode. Here are what I consider the two most significant conclusions to be drawn from these tests. You may form your own conclusions. Just be careful to recognize that the tests involved particular house rules and small departures from mathematically optimum play. Findings might differ considerably for alternate playing conditions - say, six-deck shoes with resplitting - and if deviations from basic strategy involved gross shifts such as doubling rather than standing on 16 verses five-up or splitting fours against a dealer's nine. As the punter's poet, Sumner A Ingmark, astutely admonished: Recent Articles
Best of Alan Krigman
Alan Krigman |
Alan Krigman |