One old school writer once exchanged e-mails with me over my revelations of the huge flaws in the basic strategy approach. He argued that its recommendations were “correct” when “the cards are balanced.”
“But when is that?” I replied.
He couldn’t answer. You’ll never run into this situation at the casino.
By “balanced” he alluded to a mythological situation where the undealt cards have the same composition of cards as a complete deck. In other words, 30.769 percent of them would be 10s and each of the non-10s would make up 7.69 percent of the mix.
First of all, the guy was wrong about “balance” making basic strategy the “correct” way to play. But let’s not even go there.
Let’s look at real card situations and see if there’s “balance” at any time through a round. Every player’s turn would have to feature this “balance” don’t forget.
The reason the guy was arguing that basic strategy was correct with balanced cards is that its formulation is full of flaws. It’s based upon a global statistical survey of many lifetimes of phony (computer simulated) blackjack rounds and so dealer busting rates arrived at in this way (important to their strategy formulations) would only be true with balanced cards. (FYI: This “balanced” condition would have to be true at every point during every participant’s turn, which makes the whole argument even more ridiculous.)
I’ve taken a fresh deck and dealt the cards you see above. To demonstrate my point, I’m providing a proportional breakdown of the undealt cards (using a portion of the screen from my Probability & Imbalances Calculator, available at www.blackjacktoday.com) to show you the truth at various points during the round; there you’ll see the composition of the undealt cards after:
Graphic 1: Everyone got their first 2 cards
Graphic 2: The first baseman got the Jack
Graphic 3: The fourth player took the 10
Graphic 4: The dealer revealed the hole card to be a 9
Graphic 5: The dealer took the 2
Note that at no point were the undealt cards balanced. In fact, as Graphic 4 shows, LOW cards outnumbered HIGH cards 55 percent to 45 percent. No wonder the dealer did not bust. In fact, with Aces included, the LOW/HIGH mix (in the undealt cards) was 60 percent/40 percent. This was not a situation that called for players standing on stiffs (hands of 12-16 points) as basic strategy advises.
You can recreate this experiment with any number of decks and rounds. You will virtually never find a moment in time where the cards are balanced.
In this way you will see that 99.99 percent of the time (using the old schoolers’ admission of the need for balance for basic strategy to be right), basic strategy’s numbers are off.
For more info see http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
