This is a great example of “seat of the pants” intuitive analysis. Rick's experience helps him to know his team members and he is on the right track when talking about compressed playing levels.

Using the tools in this chapter, Rick will now have a concrete method available to confirm his suspicions about Player 2. Signal 9 can be used to determine whether Player 2 had indeed tightened up on his play.

End of excerpt from Dynamic Blackjack

Experience

I used this procedure some years ago to look at one team’s results. One problem we found is dealing with trials that were unusually long. Generally, players are advised to keep sessions to about an hour. However, there are circumstances where this simply is not possible — for example, flying to another country on the casino’s dime. They will expect you to play long sessions.  We handled this by normalizing long sessions to one hour.

A second consideration is the differing game conditions. If a player is playing different rules, penetrations, and betting ramps, the results must be normalized before they are compared. Fortunately, the team had assigned a factor to each set of conditions. The factor was calculated by creating a SCORE for a standard set of conditions, and then calculating the factor for each set of conditions by dividing the SCORE for that set of conditions by the standard SCORE. So, if a game had a factor of 1.2, then the SCORE was 1.2 times the standard set of conditions. Thus, the win rate was 1.2 times the standard game. To normalize results, each of the actual results was divided by the factor for that game. In this manner, the strength of the game was removed from the results making comparison of results reasonable.

Software

Obviously there is a fair amount of work involved in following this procedure. As I am not fond of grunt-work, I put together a simple program to make calculations for signals 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9, which is available free at www.qfit.com/book.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger