It’s amazing how many math mistakes were made by the old school blackjack people, and how those mistakes have been repeated by today’s old school blackjack writers without thinking.
I showed you not long ago the quote from the original old school book, 1962‘s Beat The Dealer by Edward Thorp, in which that MIT math professor, on page 18 (look it up), promised a “0.12 percent” advantage with his version of Baldwin et al’s basic strategy method, unless the cards were shuffled before the end of the (single) deck, at which point it would produce approximately a one percent disadvantage.
In other words, it’s a losing system. So why did Dr. Thorp, a man NPR recently profiled and called “a genius,” think he’d come up with a way to win at blackjack?
Thorp had used computer simulations (big mistake) in doing his research, done by IBM’s Julian Braun, who also did simulations for 1980’s World’s Greatest Blackjack Book, which promised that basic strategy would enable you to “almost break even.”
Again, an admission that it’s a losing system.
So why didn’t they warn you that they’d not created a winning system but a losing method (since they were well aware of this), instead of telling you it was the “correct” or “perfect” way to play? They knew the math, the results produced by their method, “basic strategy,” was not positive.
They might not have been true blackjack players (Thorp most decidedly wasn’t) but they were smart enough to know they’d not cracked the blackjack code, with the math they themselves presented in their books.
Old schoolers are wrong, too, in their global look at blackjack statistics.
No. 1, they’re fond of telling you “always assume the dealer’s hole card is a 10.” But, with 16 out of 52 cards being 10s (amounting to less than 31 percent of the deck), no smart mathematician should tell you the probability is there is a 10 in the hole. The likelihood (69 percent) is there is NOT a 10 in the hole.
No. 2, they’re fond of telling you to stand on your stiffs (hands of 12-16 points) when the dealer has a 4-6 showing. But look at the chart I’ve provided, from my book Cutting Edge Blackjack.
The dealer’s 4, with the highest busting rate (43 percent), do NOT bust most of the time. So any smart mathematician would tell you NOT to expect any dealer up card to bust. Because most of the time (even the weak ones) they score. In fact – looking at the chart again – you can see the lower dealer up cards tend to score higher than the high dealer up cards!
Finally, global math – blackjack looked at from a simple statistical view, over the course of a lifetime of blackjack rounds – is the wrong way to creating a valid and accurate game strategy. Every smart card player knows you have to be in the moment and look at the cards that have been dealt to react to the realities at hand to make the most correct move.
FYI: There’ll be a Richard Harvey University Seminar on June 12 in Connecticut. Tickets are available at www.blackjacktoday.com.
Richard Harvey is a world renowned blackjack researcher and innovator, expert player, coach, columnist, blogger 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.
