I’m not sure if you followed the brouhaha over pre-opening speculation that the new Cosmopolitan casino in Las Vegas would be offering what critics called inferior blackjack games but I thought I’d revisit the issue they raised, namely their gripe over reports that blackjacks would pay just 6:5 rather than the traditional 3:2 payout.
It turns out that the Cosmopolitan is only doing so at its single deck games. But I’m not interested in that casino but on the issue itself and whether it’s really the number one threat to the game, in terms of making it user-unfriendly.
We looked at this issue recently in a column in which I noted that one consultant, who’s done work in Colorado, is advising his casino clients not to get stingy on blackjack payouts for fear of losing customers. I won’t revisit that side of the story.
My interest is in why some writers and bloggers are upset about the blackjack payouts and not other casino game changes that hurt the game as well (perhaps more important). And why those writers aren’t honest about the math behind their concern.
The truth is that it’s the ineffectiveness of the old school methods that makes the lowered blackjack payouts a big issue.
I’ve shown you how the old school books that introduced basic strategy and card counting revealed their ineffectiveness if you read them carefully enough. Although couched in rosy language, Edward Thorp in 1962’s seminal old school tome Beat The Dealer said basic strategy offered you approximately a .12 percent advantage – when playing a single deck game in which every last card is dealt (a game that no longer exists). Otherwise, he predicted a 1 percent player disadvantage (in a single deck game).
The Hi-Lo card counting system (arguably the most popular old school card counting system) created by Harvey Dubner in 1963 purportedly offered players a 2 percent advantage (for a single deck game).
Now let’s do the math. You will be dealt a blackjack roughly 5 percent of the time, when the game is looked at over protracted stretches of time. (The percent varies wildly in any given session, depending on the mix of cards and the cards your betting spot is getting, vis a vis the repeating phenomena I identified in Cutting Edge Blackjack.)
That means that, over time, you’d gain a theoretical 2.5 percent added edge when being paid the traditional 3:2 payout.
Since the 6:5 payout only gives you a 20 percent bonus as opposed to a 50 percent bonus, seen over the course of many playing sessions the 6:5 reduced payout would – in theory – lower your added edge due to naturals to 1 percent.
What’s the problem? Clearly that wipes out any edge the old schoolers could ever claim to give you.
Thorp’s estimations on whatever advantage basic strategy would give you already showed you that most of the gains in the player’s advantage you might expect in his day (namely 2.5 percent from 3:2 blackjack payouts) were wiped out by the ineffectiveness of that method. He was not offering you an edge anywhere near 2.5 percent. At best, with a single-deck game no longer offered (dealt to the last card), he promised you a .12 percent edge. That means it depended upon blackjacks to just barely put it over zero returns. With a lower blackjack payout of 6:5, the results would put the edge clearly in the casino’s corner, to the tune of 1.38 percent.
Dubner’s Hi-Lo purported advantage would be reduced to .5 percent; that is, in a single deck game. For multideck games, the casino would have the edge.
This is why the old schoolers are so upset. Include the disadvantage that grows with each deck added to the game and then you’d experience a projected loss no matter which old school method you used. This is the inconvenient truth no old school writer or blogger cares to share with you.
And they do not even mention the fact a real player’s true gains and losses are not measured in theoretical wins and losses; they’re measured in monetary terms. But then again, as I have shown you in quotes from seminal old school books, the old schoolers did not test for betting variations. So how can they even dare talk about how blackjacks (with varying amounts bet on them over time) affect a player?
They don’t mention the fact, either, that a player’s likelihood of getting a blackjack (when Aces are due) varies with the number of players at the table. When playing head-on versus the dealer, a player’s likelihood of getting an Ace when Aces are due is 50 percent (1 of 2). When there are seven players at the table, that likelihood goes down to 1-in-8 or about 13 percent. That’s a crucial factor that affects the old school methods’ vain attempts to time bets to getting blackjacks. Yet didn’t the MIT teams play at multiplayer tables? Did they not understand how that affected the math? And did they not understand that the multideck games’ destruction of the profitable predictability factor hurt their chances more than any change in blackjack payouts would?
Hopefully you now understand all of this.
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.
