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Over the years then I have witnessed many bad tactics in blackjack and one such tactic is to play momentum. This may happen along the lines of the following. A player loses several hands on the trot and then places a larger bet. This strategy cannot possibly work unless you happen to know that the deck is favourable for the player. You cannot possibly know this unless you happen to be using a card counting system. Based on the fact that not many players who play the game will be using that then the chances of anyone playing in this fashion are slim at best. It simply cannot be done that you can bet blindly and get a long term edge at blackjack.

If you are increasing your bet blindly then you are simply placing more money onto the table when the count is unknown. So this means that the count will be unfavourable as often as it will be favourable…….almost like a coin flip. Based on the fact that you are as close to even more money as it is close to get in terms of the expectation of winning a particular hand then you will see why getting too excited about the prospects of winning the next hand simply because you have won or lost a certain number of previous hands is a rather poor strategy to try and execute. This is no different in principle to a player who bets red or black on roulette simply because there has been a previous sequence of red or black numbers.

One of the things that you need to remember in blackjack is why basic strategy exists. It exists so that the player can play each hand in a mathematically correct way. But many of the decisions are losing decisions whatever you do. Sometimes you have to make counter-intuitive plays in blackjack like defensive splitting for example. Let us look at a hand like 8-8 vs a dealer 10 which is 16 vs 10. Now this is a bad situation to be in for the player. Taken from a 52 card deck then we have seen three cards which leave 49 unseen. If we stand on 16 then any 7, 8, 9 10 value card or ace beats us straight away.

There are a total of 10 cards of 7 through to a 9 (we have two eights) and a further 15 ten value cards (the dealer already has a ten) and 4 aces. This means that the dealer will beat our total straight away 29 times out of 49. But they will also pull a combination of smaller cards to make 17 or more as well and so the chance of our standing and winning is small. If we take a card then any card will bust us unless it is an ace through to a five. Whichever way we go then our chances are slim.

But if standing has a certain value, taking a card has a certain value and so does splitting then we take the play with the best value. Quite often this involves placing more money onto the table. If you stand to lose 10% in EV on a $10 bet then you are losing $1 in expected value. However if by splitting your EV becomes -2% then although you now have $20 on the table your EV is only -$0.40 and not $2.

In this post I am going to be comparing the merits of different types of betting systems in blackjack and the prospective short term results of each. If you fail to card count in blackjack then it is very difficult to gain a meaningful edge. Some people would say that it is impossible but that isn’t true. This is because of the fact that accurate basic strategy could in fact make you +EV if you had some sort of external financial source providing you with income.

To quote an example here then imagine if you made $10 bets and had 60 hands per hour playing basic strategy. At a house edge of roughly 0.5% and with you placing $600 per hour in action then your projected hourly rate figure would be -$3/hour. But imagine if you could create a scenario where someone was paying you to play the game. Like the casino for example who paid you to simply occupy a table and play blackjack to simply attract other players to the game. If the casino paid you $10 per hour to do this then your total hourly rate for the game would be +$7/hour even though you were using your own money. In fact you could increase this hourly rate by having a smaller minimum bet if you could get away with it.

In this instance then flat betting would get you the same effect as progressive betting but if you were looking to maybe play a short term single session then progressive betting systems can be very enjoyable to use. However some of them have to be treated with extreme caution because the bankroll demands on some of them are extreme to say the least.

I watched the movie “21” the other night for the first time. This is the supposedly true story of the “MIT” team that took the casinos in Las Vegas for considerable sums of money. There were many mistakes that were made by a supposedly 25 year veteran of playing blackjack that I found difficult to understand. Firstly they divided up the winnings after every trip which as far as I could tell was just over a weekend.

It is unlikely that any team would do that after so short a playing session. Variance is huge in blackjack and it would be easy to hand out $50,000 in profits to your team members only then to lose an amount of money that took you back down to where you started. Except as the backer then you would be down the money what you had already paid to your team if you put up 100% of the money which I assume that in the film he did because the students all seemed short of their own money.

What I also found strange was that it would be difficult teaching blackjack and evasion techniques to new players let alone shuffle tracking which is highly complex. From someone who has tried and used shuffle tracking and not to mention studied this art for a long time then I can vouch for how difficult it is. This would be made even worse by trying to teach novices this art that had never set foot inside a casino before in their life. The term “shuffle tracking” was used once in the movie but that never came across in what they did at the tables.

We can all learn lessons from other sports and games to use in the current sport or game that we are playing. A thorough study of game theory will reveal this to be the case. In trading for example (I am referring to financial trading here) then the objective of all traders is to buy at a price that is lower than what they sell and vice versa. This is not always achievable but it is the goal of every trader.

However another clear goal is to also ride your profits as far as you possibly can and to cut your losses short. This principle is seen in some roulette systems where you start off making an initial bet and the use a percentage of that bet to carry on towards the next bet in the hope that the run will continue. There is logic behind this because of the fact that numbers in games like roulette are not evenly distributed in the short term.

For example in 37 spins then it is extremely unlikely that all 37 numbers would appear in those 37 spins and so this means that some numbers would appear more than once. So if you can look to possibly identify which number is about to go into a sequence of arriving more than it should based on short term variance then you have a chance of coming out ahead for the session. Clearly this method of betting will not make you +EV but it can be fun to use for single sessions of play.

If you gave someone a set of tools and asked them to calve a statue then the result would probably be horrendous. Tools without skills is of very little use and in fact using good tools without any skill reveals to us even more so that we do not have that skill and it also reveals to others around us that we do not have that skill as well. This applies to poker and tracking software perfectly. These tools help good players to be better players when playing online but the software also needs to be studied as well because it is too complex to use in a basic way.

Blackjack is exactly the same with software like Shuffle Trak and Count Analysers. They are great tools to have in your locker but they really only help good players. If you are a poor blackjack player then they will be of little use to you. The problem comes when many players who are poor blackjack players buy software like these and then expect themselves to suddenly catapult through the roof in terms of earnings.

This sometimes happens in rare instances but in most cases then it is the sheer presence of the software which installs false hope and confidence that then leads to the player losing money in areas that they previously would not have considered getting involved in. The number of skills that are required in order to make you a good poker player, blackjack player, electronic day trader etc are so varied that they require more than just the use of a piece of software to ensure success.

Having played Backgammon to a fair level, Chess to a fair level and also poker and blackjack then I think I am well versed in being able to answer the question of which is the most skilful game. I think in terms of difficulty rating then Chess figures to be higher than any of the others. In fact I recall reading some time ago that Chess was second only to Go in terms of game complexity.

However I think there are certain problems in games like poker and blackjack that are not relevant to playing Chess. In Chess then there is no variance to speak of. If you are playing Chess against a vastly inferior opponent then you are going to beat them…….it is that simple! There are no bad beats or unexpected outdraws and a novice player would never beat a Grandmaster even over a series of games. If a Grandmaster played a novice over 100 games then the score would be 100-0……there are no flukes in Chess.

In poker though then a world class player may win 60% of the pots played and in backgammon then a top player may win something like 75% of the games played against a novice but in Chess then it is 100% until the skill difference narrows. So despite Chess having a much higher complexity level, there are many factors in poker that make the game far more difficult to master than Chess or Go.

Counting speed is imperative in card counting but there are certain tricks that you can do to really hasten up your speed. The best players can and do count an entire deck in less than 20 seconds. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds at first glance because of the value of hand combinations. It is for this reason why skilled players can count an entire round of cards with the merest glimpse at the table.

Card combinations work well in blackjack because of the high-low count. Basically this means that hands that consist of high cards and low cards simply cancel. For example a hand with 10-3 is zero and if they pull a 2 and then another ten then the count is still zero for that hand. Likewise if the high-low count shows neutral cards clumped together like 7,8,9 for example. These three value cards are counted as zero and so seeing a box with 8,7 and the dealer holding a four then you know that this hand is zero also.

Reducing this to counting individual boxes makes it easier to card count than looking at the entire table which can seem somewhat daunting. Quite often you will see entire groups of cards that simply cancel each other out and once you become adept at doing this then counting 20 cards can be done in no more than 3-4 seconds. The only time needed is the time needed to verify that this particular sequence cancels and once you verify that then you can move on. It then becomes the case that counting an entire deck in 20 seconds is easy.

One of the key problems in blackjack is in escalating your bet sizes without it being noticed by the casino. Clearly then you cannot move from betting say $2 minimums to $500 maximums as a 250-1 bet spread is going to mean one thing……a very short playing career! So just how do you build up to playing $500 per hand? Well firstly if you are betting in different denomination chips then this is going to get noticed. So I would tend to start playing in $25 chips. Straight away this reduces your spread from 250-1 to only 20-1 and so going from $25 to $500 will not cause anywhere near as many problems as going from $2 to $500.

However there is a downside to playing $25 at the start and this is that you are going to be playing an awful lot of hands in negative counts at $25 per time. This is where two key strategies come into play. When the count goes neutral which means that neither you nor the casino have the edge then you need to be increasing your bet sizing. Now this will clearly increase the variance considerably but this is the price that you pay for longevity and high earnings in blackjack.

So you start to double up like a gambler in neutral counts and it only takes two double ups to reach $100 from $25. Two more double ups and you are at $400 and only $100 less than the maximum bet providing of course that the count goes in your favour. So in this instance then the really big money only goes on during positive counts while if the count goes the other way then you switch tables. This brings me onto strategy number two which is to play in casinos with two active tables. You can drift between the two so that you are not playing negative counts as often.

I was having a discussion the other day regarding the similarities between games like blackjack and poker and part of that discussion involved the use of “mathematics” in the game. Actually to put that a better way then we are looking at statistics more than mathematics! In each field then how important are statistics and mathematics?

Well it is clear that they are very important in both games but the most important thing to remember here is in how the best mathematicians who have gone into both games with their maths knowledge and little else have fared badly. In blackjack then these players were bounced out of Las Vegas in the 70’s and 80’s with alarming frequency.

To be a skilled poker player or a blackjack player for that matter involves many different things. Now this isn’t a discussion about tells or anything like that as that is too broad a subject. In blackjack and poker then there are many different skills that are required to make progress or a living from the game. It is skills like evading detection, understanding casino psychology, bankroll management and attitude to risk that dictate how well you will do.

But also it is the ability to be able to adapt to a changing environment as well that ultimately defines your chances of survival in the long term. I think that the two biggest metrics far and above all others are dollars won and time played. Each on their own is largely insignificant.