Mathematicians are some of the thinnest-skinned people I know. Just to suggest they are wrong gets their panties in a bunch.
Yet scientists understand that mistakes get made. And they’re usually opened minded about new discoveries and theories.
I have been university trained in both fields of pursuit and have witnessed the very different way in which both crowds operate.
That being said, I’m going to suggest yet another way the mathematicians who dabbled in blackjack and produced the world’s worst game strategy (“basic strategy”) went wrong.
You’ve heard about how “the house” (the casino) supposedly has “a 1 percent edge”? Where do they get those numbers from?
Don’t they understand, first of all, that any edge the house or the player has cannot be expressed in one number? It varies, based upon:
1. The system used by the player
2. The number of decks in the game (every good book since 1961 has told you players incur a growing disadvantage with each deck added to the game)
3. The rules and restrictions in the game (can you double down on anything, for instance, or only on 10 and 11 point hands? – one possible disadvantage; can you surrender? – one possible player advantage)
4. The number of players at the table (the math changes – for instance, your likelihood of getting an Ace when Aces are overdue is 1-in-2 when you’re playing head-on versus the dealer, 1-in-8 when you’re playing at a seven-player table; also, my research revealed that your advantage grows with each additional player at the table – see Cutting Edge Blackjack for details)
5. The number of hands you see before the shuffle (the more cards you see in the mix, the more predictability you have, and predictability translates into profit)
6. Whether players’ cards are face-up or facedown on the table (again, the more you know about what’s been dealt, the greater the advantage you have in predicting how you and the dealer will fare and therefore what strategy you should take – there are, for example, advantageous 2-deck games where all player cards are dealt face-up)
7. Whether there’s a shuffling machine or the dealer shuffles (shuffling machines destroy predictability to a certain degree, depending on the type)
8. Whether the table is a “no midpoint entry” table or not (these were instituted to thwart the “wongers” but actually the rule benefits you because it keeps the wongers away from the table; they’re typically bad players who come in for one or two hands and louse up the predictability)
…And so on. There are many variables in blackjack that affect your likelihood of winning.
So only someone who doesn’t understand the many game factors that affect your ability to win would make a blanket statement like “the house has a 1 percent edge.” It’s an ignorant statement.
But, more interesting is how this false myth got spread around. Where did it come from?
To my knowledge, the crowd that invented this myth never did any research to determine what a player’s or casino’s edge is with every conceivable blackjack strategy. You’d think they had because they make the blanket statement as if there’s a fixed house edge you cannot get beyond. One would assume such an authoritarian kind of statement would be backed up with research.
Nope.
If truth be told – and I’m still waiting for the old school blackjack types to admit this – the research from which this falsehood came was a actually just a simple test of how well basic strategy fares against the casino.
They tested no other strategies. Just the foolish one-size-fits-all method we’ve come to know as basic strategy.
So how did supposedly intelligent mathematicians (who went so wrong in inventing basic strategy, as my books and columns have shown) go wrong here? How did they go from testing how basic strategy does against the house to making a phony statement about the game in general having a set, fixed “house edge,” no matter what strategy you use?
This is a question you should ask of the old school blackjack writers, whose many authoritarian proclamations oft ring untrue.
“Course if any mathematician would be foolish enough to try to prove the claim that the game presents players with a “1 percent disadvantage” – no matter what strategy you play, no matter how many decks are in play, etc., etc., – I’m all ears.
Richard Harvey is the acclaimed blackjack strategies innovator, expert player, blackjack coach 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 audio book Richard Harvey’s Blackjack PowerPrep Session. Have blackjack questions? Send them to HYPERLINK “mailto:rharvey2121@netscape.net” rharvey2121@netscape.net. For more info see HYPERLINK “http://www.blackjacktoday.com” http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
