Where do I win?

Let us look a little more deeply. The next chart displays only true counts of +5 to +15. The red bars indicate the amounts bet on Lucky Ladies assuming that you always make the side bet. The other colors indicate the amounts won. You will note that the red bar is taller at true counts of +5 and +6 indicating these are bad bets, and shorter at higher counts indicating positive EV bets. But the winning amounts have been broken down into the five different payouts.

What we see here is that half of the return comes from the winnings for unsuited 20s, represented by the green bar. This is good news, as variance would be too high if a rare event was behind most of the overall payoff.

The cyan colored area at the top of the payoff bars represents the 1,000:1 payoff for a pair of heart queens and dealer Blackjack. The payoff is 1,000:1, but it occurs only about 1 in 70,000 hands in a six-deck game. The total amount is relatively small, but our actual results will vary an appreciable amount depending on whether we receive 0, 1, or 2 of these hands after playing a huge number of hands. What this means is that although we have a theoretical edge, at counts of +7 and +8, a major part of our advantage depends on a rare event, and this adds to our risk.

 www.qfit.com/Book/z240Chart.gif

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger