I am constantly amazed at how little most blackjack players understand about the game. I see it at the blackjack table. I confirm it at my public events.
Whereas most poker players have read many good books on poker and can tell you whose books they read and what they know about the game, few blackjack players can do the same. I ask the same questions at my public events, “What books have you read?” “Whose system are you using?” and so on, and I get blank stares. They can’t name a single book they’ve read. If they have any answer to the question as to how they play it’s often incomprehensible voodoo seat-of-the-pants hunches stuff.
At my most recent event in New York, a woman raised her hand in answer to my standard question “Are any of you advanced players?” I was surprised. She’d walked in first and we’d talked about the game and she was clearly in the dark about the game.
So I asked her what system she used.
“Basic strategy,” was the answer.
Basic strategy was never considered an advanced strategy, even when MIT’s Edward Thorp introduced the concept (which he’d taken from Baldwin, McDermott, Maisel & Cantey’s 1953 treatise on it) in 1962’s Beat The Dealer. Thorp told you it produced a “0.12 percent” advantage at casinos with single deck games dealt to the very bottom (every last card dealt to the players) – a game no longer offered anywhere. In casinos that shuffled the one-deck game before all the cards are dealt, he said basic strategy gave you a disadvantage of about 1 per cent. (See page 18 of Beat The Dealer.)
So even in 1962, basic strategy was acknowledged to offer crummy returns. In fact, Thorp suggested that card counting was preferable (also now an antiquated and faulty approach to the game).
Now this woman who said she was “advanced” stated she played in Atlantic City. So she’s playing 6- and 8-deck games.
Yet by 1969 Lawrence Revere, in Playing Blackjack As A Business, warned that most of the card counting systems of his day were “worthless” against 4-deck games. And by 1980, The World’s Greatest Blackjack Book, done with computer simulations by IBM’s Julian Braun (the same guy who supplied data to Thorp and many other old school authors), warned players against playing 6-deck games. That book considered 6-deck games unwinnable, using the old school methods.
The few players at my event who knew what method they were using (other than those who took a “Hail Mary” approach based upon hunches) also said they were using basic strategy. So by definition they were losers. The old school books said so. I don’t have to prove it (although I have, in detail; I’ve torn the old school approaches apart in my books so everyone understands exactly why basic strategy and card counting are, to be kind, ineffective).
Yet where most players really show their lack of education is when it comes to betting. One player offered this home-grown method: “If I win the first round, let’s say it’s a $5 bet, I then take the chip I won and put it on top of my bet and I add another $5 chip, for a $15 bet.”
“Why?” I asked.
The answer was incredible.
“Because I often win six hands in a row.”
Really? That’s astronomically unlikely. And his scheme (not detailed here) had him risking all his won chips on the next round. Crazy.
He’s risking everything’s he’s won plus an extra chip on the theory he’s going to catch “the Big Kahuna,” the big wave of consecutive wins that just doesn’t happen more than once in a very blue moon, if that. So he’s going to lose more on a daily basis than he should because his bets are nonsensical.
You should only raise your bet based upon a positive likelihood of winning in the next round. I’ve given you a number of methods you can use to mathematically determine that probability.
The most skilled players, in fact, should be using a betting method, my Precision Betting Method, that guides their bets precisely. In other words, that guy was raising his bet threefold going into the second round. Ideally, that should only be done when your likelihood of winning goes up threefold.
The truth is your likelihood of winning three hands in a row, from a global view, from the view of a lifetime of blackjack, is significantly less than 50 percent. Yet this guy was banking not only on that, but on going on to win six rounds in a row.
The thing that galls me about all the otherwise intelligent people who are playing stupidly is that the math is there to learn. Yet so many blackjack players are bucking it and playing homemade methods that make no sense. Why?
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Richard Harvey is a renowned blackjack researcher and innovator, expert player, coach, columnist, blogger and bestselling author of Blackjack The SMART Way (the NEW Gold Edition), Cutting Edge Blackjack (the NEW Third Edition), NEW Ways To Win MORE at Blackjack and the CD audio book Richard Harvey’s Blackjack PowerPrep Session. Have blackjack questions? Send them to rharvey2121@netscape.net. For more info see http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
