The card situation above is very educational about how the number of decks in the game affects the game’s predictability.
It’s similar to a recent column but different enough to ask you this question again:
Did the third baseman (the player with the last turn) take the dealer’s bust card? In other words, should that player not have hit his hand of 13 points? It’s true, given this flow of cards, the dealer would have busted had that player not taken the 7 (the dealer would have drawn to 3-2-7-K and busted with 22 points).
But look at the spreadsheet, which reveals the undealt cards remaining before the third baseman took the 7. (Low cards are defined as 2s through 7s and high cards, 8s, 9s and 10s.) It shows you:
In a 1-deck game, 70 percent of the remaining cards (Aces and low cards) would have favored the dealer’s not busting (and the third baseman’s not busting with one hit card).
In a 2-deck game, that number would have been 61 percent of the remaining cards, again justifying the third baseman hitting.
With 6- and 8-deck games, the proportion of Aces plus low cards goes down to 56 percent and 54 percent; the low cards, 48 percent and 47 percent. With 8-decks, the wisdom of hitting becomes less clear.
In other words, as you add more decks to the mix, the imbalances represented on the table impacts the mix of the undealt cards less and less, graphically and mathematically demonstrating why pitch games (single and double deck games) are much more predictable than shoe games (multideck games). That makes the pitch games that much more profitable for the state-of-the-art player.
Richard Harvey is a world-renowned blackjack researcher and innovator, expert player, coach, columnis, 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.
