Take a good look at the single-deck card situation above and tell me how you’d react upon seeing it.
Hint: Players who’ve taken my seminars would likely leave the table.
Yet the man who popularized old school blackjack, Edward Thorp, author of 1962’s Beat The Dealer, a then-MIT-math-professor, had this to say (on page 17):
Thorp – a man who’d only played about 10-15 minutes of blackjack before writing most of his book and who only played (by his own admission) 30 hours later, at the behest of shady underworld figure Manny Kimmel – thought the seven-card hand was normal.
That’s because he did his research with computer simulations, produced by a computer’s random number generator. His data indicated a seven-card hand would occur roughly once every 3,000 hands.
This reminds of the book event I did where a shifty young man sidled up to me afterward and in hushed, worried tones, tried to seek my assurance that his blackjack research, done with computer simulations, was valid.
“What you said about random number generators, that only means you can’t know anything about shuffle tracking, right? That’s the only thing you’d miss about the game?”
“Wrong,” I said. “You’d miss everything.”
Random number generators do not reflect true card behavior – even when it comes to hand types. As my research has proven, casino-style standardized shuffling does not randomize the cards.
What does this mean? There are certain hand types that rarely if ever occur – such as the one Thorp was dealt, above.
It’s real easy for a computer’s random number generator to spew out hands like A, A, A, A, 2, 2 etc. – hands where the cards come out in order, as a group, sequentially. Yet that would essentially never occur in the real game. Real cards in the real casino game never get that thoroughly mixed up and rearranged in that fashion.
So Thorp thought the hand you see above was in the normal range of things. Actually, if you saw that hand once in a million hands that would be a lot. You should effectively see NO seven-card hands in a single deck game. That rarity of that event would send me heading to the door if I saw it occur at the table.
In fact, I believe Thorp was being cheated. (He claimed to have been cheated numerous times, by the way, in his few casino forays.) And he provides evidence of that when he notes:
“…the dealer was having a very strong run of luck. Every player at the table was losing heavily.”
And here’s where Thorp’s digitally simulated data also fails him. My real-blackjack card data shows that it is essentially impossible for everyone to be losing from round to round, at a multi-player table. There’s another red flag his missed because his computer-simulated phony blackjack data misled him.
Even if he won that one hand, with a 21, he should have left the table!
Another misimpression: He assumed the dealer had a total of 19 points. He wrote: “…he might have a 19” – indicating what he assumed was the case. This is why he drew so many cards, he explained.
A 10 in the hole only occurs 31 percent of the time. So why would a math professor assume the dealer likely had a 10 under the 9? There was a more than 2:1 likelihood the hole card was NOT a 10 and the dealer did NOT have a made 19-point hand.
This is the kind of nonsense you get in old school books, based upon phony blackjack data. Follow their ways at your own risk.
I do no single out Thorp except because his misconceptions were adopted by just about every old school writer who’s followed him.
If I were you, I’d only follow the teachings of a blackjack expert who’s studied real blackjack card data. If they did not, they can only claim to know how a computer’s random number generator behaves.
——————-
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 rharvey2121@netscape.net. For more info see http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
