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What exactly is an “automated” poker system? Well firstly when I say “automated” then I am not referring to using a computer program to make your move or anything like that but a way of playing poker where your moves are more or less automatic. Secondly the question needs to be asked if this is a profitable way to play poker if you are broadly not making adjustments? Well clearly this will be an exploitable strategy and way of playing but this then gets down to the fact of whether or not your opponents will actually exploit it. For your opponents not to exploit an automatic style then they have to be weak enough not to exploit it.

So what level of play can you get away with where this style of play can work? Before I answer that then it also needs pointing out how playing an automatic style can be very productive for the simple reason being that you can simply add more tables and so the reduced earn rate per 100 hands is offset by the fact that you are achieving vastly increased volume. I certainly think that an automated style can succeed at NL50 and especially on the large sites and networks. This is probably true of NL100 as well as long as the liquidity is very good meaning lots of tables to choose from. With rakeback and sign up bonuses involved then an automated style can do very well and especially if your post flop play is on the weak side.

In poker ecology then each element basically interacts with another. This means that there are producers and consumers in the world of poker and it is helpful to know just where you fit in on that food chain. The producers are clearly the losing poker players in whatever guise you happen to put them in. These people could even be high stakes players who are simply playing too high but whatever their level of play, if they are losing money then they are a producer. But now we have to look at who the consumers are and by consumers then I am referring to the main people who consume the money of the losing players.

In most cases then the primary consumer is the poker site itself by simply raking the games. In fact if the levels are low enough then the site is the biggest winner of all and is certainly making more money than even the best player on the site. Some high stakes players may be making more money from their games than what the site takes in rake from the games that they themselves sit in but they cannot possibly compete when it comes to how much the site takes from the total environment.

So the poker site becomes the primary consumer of wealth and then this knocks on down to the secondary consumers which are the successful poker players. These come in all shapes and sizes just like in any other food chain. For example if a lion killed a zebra then the food produced would not just go to the lion but to other types of animals as well that fed off the remains of the carcass. This is identical to the eco-food chain and it is important to know where you fit in and who you can feed from and who is likely to feed from you.

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.

Someone asked me the other day how much control you can have in a game of poker? Well firstly you simply cannot control losing money…..this is an absolute given that you will lose money. However there are things that you can control and the first one is in how you conduct yourself mentally and how you react to losing money. If you react badly then your results will suffer but this is something that you can control. You can also control the size of the pot in many cases using pot control techniques.

Another aspect of the game that you can control is the level of variance. A low variance style will mean that the dips to your bankroll will be less than if you were playing a higher variance style. In the world of financial trading then these dips are called drawdowns! Many financial traders view having low drawdowns very high up on their list of priorities and I can understand why that is. I have known many poker careers cut short by highly negative variance.

So you can control losses but only to the extent of those losses. You simply cannot control losing money because that is as inevitable at some stage as the fact that you will be a day older tomorrow than what you are today or that the sun will rise. I believe that controlling your losses is as important as making money and some of the best technical players in the world have tried to optimise their earn rate by increasing variance only to then get blown out of the water so to speak.

As an online poker player of almost ten years standing and many of those years as a full time pro then I know all too well what it takes to be able to make money. I have made many mistakes in that time and so I actually want to pass on the benefit of my mistakes and the knowledge that I have acquired over that time. At the outset of my career then I ignored the importance of outside financial factors for far too long. However the games were so good back in 2001-2004 that you were never dependent on sign up bonuses and rakeback for your income.

So what this meant was that you sort of become blasé about how you made your money. It was only when the games started to become tougher that I can could see how important it was to be able to make money from poker in other ways. These ways were sign up bonuses and rakeback. At the end of the day then you make money by your opponents making mistakes but the mistakes that players were making were getting thinner and thinner on the ground.

When you are maybe getting $1000 per month in rakeback then it simply takes all the pressure off you to have to make money on the actual tables. It is exactly the same with sign up bonuses because at the end of the day then this is money that the sites are giving to you so it is certainly in your interests to take advantage of it don’t you?

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.