The game that provides the best overall odds for the player (leaving out card counters) is craps not blackjack. All you need do is simply decide what YOUR overall game at the table is. If you pick the right casino, make the small line bet and then back it up 10X you have structured a game that is better than every other pit game the casino offers you including blackjack. The game is not what they offer you ... it consists only of the wagers you take. That said, for me the best bet in a casino is to leave. I simply do not enjoy participating in financial transactions where I know I am giving up an edge and I no longer enjoy poker as much as trading.
martingale has been studied endlessy by black jack players. MIT team looked at it and quickly rejected it. I mean why go through all the trouble of counting cards if one can just double down after every loss! "Blackjack, however, is less advantageous than a coin flip. In 100 hands, a basic strategy player will experience, on average, 43 wins, 48 losses and 9 pushes. Since a martingale bettor ignores pushes and lets his bet ride, we can ignore them in our analysis. For every 100 win/loss decisions, a basic strategy player will see about 53 losses and 47 wins. With these win/loss proportions, the odds against losing 10 consecutive decisions are only about 500-to-1. Now 500-to-1 may seem nearly impossible to many people, but realistically, at any given time, a series of losses equivalent to yours is happening to dozens of players in Atlantic City, and to hundreds of people every day of the year in U.S. casinos. Itâs happening right now to one out of every 500 people who are playing. How many tens of thousands of people are playing blackjack right now in U.S. casinos? " "The martingale is a systematic method of chasing your losses. Thereâs no other way to describe it. This is about the most foolish way to gamble. You violated the single most important rule for gamblers: If you canât afford to lose it, donât bet it. "
I have found some interesting links. Apparently there were a few people who beat the casinos for years/ decades and they lived to tell the tale. http://listverse.com/2010/01/24/10-gamblers-who-beat-the-casino/ Out of the 10 the 2 most interestings are Marcus and Thorp. Thorp was the father ot card counting and the author of Beat the dealer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thorp "Since the late 1960s, Thorp has used his knowledge of probability and statistics in the stock market by discovering and exploiting a number of pricing anomalies in the securities markets, and he has made a significant fortune. Thorp's first hedge fund was Princeton/Newport Partners. He is currently the President of Edward O. Thorp & Associates, based in Newport Beach, CA. In May 1998, Thorp reported that his personal investments yielded an annualized 20 percent rate of return averaged over 28.5 years." Marcus has a blog about cheats: http://richardmarcus-pokercheats.blogspot.com/ Here is his take on Johnson: "My Take: Do I believe this is on the square and that it is plausible that someone beat Atlantic City blackjack tables out of fifteen million without cheating? Well, at first glance...no...but then again, if they let him bet several hundred thousand bucks per hand it would be possible. I wonder why there was no mention of how much he may have been betting per hand in the other casinos besides the Tropican in these news reports."
bearmountain, It seems we're talking from different angles on this Martingale issue: I wasn't implying it was a credible strategy, only supporting the contention by the early poster that this gentleman could have elected to adopt it for whatever reasons. I was playing blackjack professionally around 25 years ago, prior to the MIT team's era I believe (I haven't read the book, just serial extracts). Based on my experiences, I regard their story as more 'docu-drama' than an accurate account.
He would run a martingale strat. He plays perfect blackjack and has a .5% deficit. So if he starts with 12k bets he has a 6% of hitting max loss ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why not start the martingale when the shoe is reach, using the card counters stratergy ? cheers john
I see what you mean dunleggin. Hopefully this guy one day will write a 'tell all' book! As an aside, I find it amusing that there are a dozen or more posts in this thread on the pros and cons of having this guy whacked(killed) by the casinos.
There have been some. No one I feel like outing. I don't see any reason to believe this guy has an edge at blackjack, though. I think the casinos just nitted up and decided they didn't want to take big action after all.
Monte Carlo or bust: Casino stung for $11 million uses well-endowed female dealers in basques to distract players Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...s-basques-distract-players.html#ixzz1ObtVrCyJ Is best defence against these to jerk off before commencing business