I hate to throw cold water on the work prior mathematicians have done. Far be it for me to disagree with anyone.
Yet I humbly beg the old school establishment for one chance at disagreeing. Not everyone in the old school movement is perfect. I know, from what I’ve read, most of you are but some of you are human and sometimes err.
So might I suggest sometimes your math is off? For instance, you tell players to “always split Aces” yet, to me, the math suggests otherwise.
I know you’ll point to your millions of phony blackjack data…er, simulations, produced by your random number generators, with which you claim the game can be neatly tackled by a one-size-fits-all strategy. Yet may I humbly suggest that real players don’t bet on the collective results of millions of phony blackjack rounds?
The odds of winning in any given round are far different than those obtained by a simplistic statistical survey of many lifetimes of phony blackjack rounds. Isn’t it smarter to get in touch with the odds of the moment, which leads to greater precision, than base decisions on what might occur, in sum, over the course of many lifetimes of theoretical action?
Nor can your much-vaunted “testing software” test the effectiveness of flexible strategies; you’ve admitted yourselves that that’s too “complicated” to do. You can only compare the choice of one move versus another. In other words, either you program your computers to always split Aces on the one hand, or always play the two Aces together (and in that case always playing them to the bitter end).
So look at the reality represented in the graphic and tell me if a majority of cards helps or hurts players when splitting Aces?
Surely you know that in splitting Aces you get just one card upon each. And my research shows the dealer’s average winning score is 19. So let’s see how you would compete with the dealer given that reality; the question can be put this way:
Of the 13 possible cards that might fall upon split Aces, how many would help?
I don’t believe we’re splitting cards to lose, so what we want most are 10s or secondarily a 9 upon each Ace, to give us a good shot at winning. Yet, how many of the 13 card types fit that bill?
Well – I know the old schoolers are so much better at math than your humble servant – but it looks to me that only 5 of 13 cards would give our Aces a clear shot at winning. That’s 38 percent of the deck.
Isn’t that a minority of the cards? Doesn’t that mean that you have roughly a 3:2 likelihood (by just this standard alone) of drawing a card that will lead the dealer most times to beat you?
Furthermore, old school writers: aren’t you fond of claiming the likelihood of a player’s drawing two 10s in splitting Aces is 31 percent? But may I suggest that this is not so?
Although this might seem the case with randomly generated data, in the real game the 10s are not clumped together and they will not be dealt one after another. My research shows players have only a 9 percent likelihood of getting two 10s when splitting Aces.
Does that puny number justify “always” splitting Aces? Not so much.
And might I suggest that most players have grey matter with which they can analyze the cards on the table and decide with great accuracy when splitting Aces is wise or not?
And FYI: splitting Aces requires doubling one’s bet. Is it really smart to double your bet, doing this restricted move whether foolish or not every time you can, given the math above?
For those who persist in counseling players to always split Aces, may I offer this advice? Go play some real blackjack, with YOUR money on the line (and not some millionaire’s who finances your mistakes), chart your results in always splitting Aces, and then we can talk.
Most humbly yours, etc. etc.
For more info see http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
