Weak Systems

Over the last few years, several simplistic, starter systems have been devised. The claim is that you can learn to beat the casinos with little effort. I believe these strategies to be every bit as dangerous as progression systems and other gambling scams without proper warnings.

I once made a post titled, “Which is better, negative expectation or positive expectation?” No, it’s not a trick question. There have been many statements from those who consider this a no-brainer — that any positive expectation, any advantage over the house, no matter how small, is better than no advantage. Like many other Blackjack questions, the correct answer to this question is — it depends. It depends on your goals, your situation, and most importantly, what you need to do to get that positive expectation.

Let me provide an example. You visit Las Vegas once or twice a year. You like to play Blackjack and plan to play 1,000 hands. You are not willing to learn a simple count strategy for an occasional trip. You would like to win of course, but it is more important that you do not exhaust your budget before your trip ends and wind up walking the Las Vegas Strip waiting for the trip to end. Your budget is $500 and you will play the $5 tables. The sims are for six decks, 4.5 out of 6 decks dealt, S17, DAS, four players. The two strategies compared are one of the new simplistic systems that I will call WS, using optimized bets and 1-16 spread versus Basic Strategy flat-betting (i.e., also optimized bets).

·         WS (perfectly played) will win 39.7% of the trips and go bankrupt 54.5% of the trips.

·         Basic Strategy will win 45.1% of the trips and go bankrupt 0.9% of the trips.

So using WS, you will bust before the end of the trip half of the time instead of 1 out of 100 with Basic Strategy. In addition, you will actually end up a winner more often with BS. In the long run, WS will win more (about $95 a trip more). But if your goal is to make it through the trip without busting and having to leave the casino, the negative expectation strategy is a better match. And, this assumes that you actually managed to learn WS perfectly.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger