The dealer’s edge in blackjack comes strictly from the fact that if you bust, the dealer does not have to draw and take a risk of busting. That’s a huge advantage.
The player gets most of it back through the ability to vary his strategy after seeing the dealer’s up card.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, but I think you’re saying that the reason people lose money at casinos is not the house advantage or poor selection of when to hit|stand|double|split, but is that they bet at the wrong times in the wrong amounts.
This isn’t right - you can’t change the expectation of how much you lose by changing the order of your bets.
On the other hand, you might be saying that people just bet too much money, therefore lose too much. Can’t argue with that.
CurtC: You’re close…
What I mean is this:
Play a coin flipping game. 50/50 chances (Which is better than a Casino) at $1 a try.
Say you have a $10 bankroll.
You now are betting 10% of your bankroll each time.
So, if you go broke (and you will, 50% of the time), you lose.
Now, if you double your bank, know what most people do?
THEY DOUBLE THEIR BETTING SIZE!
So, back to 10 units again.
According to Kelly Criterion (Bet in accordance to your advantage), most people shouldn’t be betting at all.
Even awesome card counters have true stories of HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE negative fluctuations. And they HAVE to cut bet sizes to stay afloat.
Curt is right.
If a casino deals 1 million hands of blackjack, with an edge of .5%, and $1 bet per hand, then they’ll make $5,000 in profit. It is irrelevant whether or not those million hands were dealt to a million different people, half of whom lost their entire bankrolls, or if they were dealt to one billionaire.
House profit == money wagered * house expectation. ‘Gambler’s ruin’ has absolutely nothing to do with it.
The Kelly Criterion is important to the individual who wants to be able to keep on wagering without losing his stake. It is completely irrelevant to the house.
Sorry Sam, we’re both right.
Personally, I never look at it from the house’s POV.
The fact is, most amateur gamblers, and even “experienced” card counters bet too high relative to their bankrolls, which does cause them to go broke, even tho the expectation doesn’t change one bit.
Weird isn’t it? You can go broke betting a break-even or even positive expectation game!
True, when calculating by EXPECTATION, a casino offering a Break-Even game would win nothing.
But, that’s assumming every gambler has an unlimited bankroll. In practice, gamblers increase bets the longer they are at a table. (It’s called “THE RISE” in the lingo)
I agree with your math, re: The million hands… And again, when looking at it from the Casino’s standpoint, who gets the million hands is irrelevant.
But hey, I don’t own a casino… And you don’t either, probably.
All I have to say is, 95% of the people on this board overbet their bankrolls, which causes them to tap out sooner at a casino.
Well, I was responding directly to your claim that:
No one gains extra advantage from you overbetting your bankroll. The house doesn’t care one bit how big your bankroll is, as it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to their bottom line.
Unless you’re making the argument that overbetting bankrolls takes WINNING players out of the game, and therefore limits the amount of action the house takes from winning players. In that case, the correct thing to say would be that overbetting your bankroll limits the house’s liability somewhat, exactly like it would if they just barred you.
Yes - but it wasn’t a big casino or anything - some traveling company rented out a local hall of some sort and held a weekend casino sort of deal.
They could, but no one would stand for it. Most casinos are dealing multi-deck (6-8) shoes, sometimes mechanically shuffled, at this point. If you’ve sat through the process of shuffling and cutting, you know it’s just not tolerable to put up with more often than once every two or three hands (which occurs only with single deck deals, and which is probably tolerated by players only because of the hope of card-counting advantage with a single deck). Swapping in a new shoe every deal, rather than dealing down 2/3 of the way into an 8 deck shoe(which probably yields a minimum of 15 deals, even at a full-ish table), is hardly going to increase the casino’s hands-per-hour – and hands-per-hour is what rules the roost (and maintains the profit margin) when the house has (or usually has against most players) a built-in percentage advantage on each hand.
At best. At worst, they deal you whatever they want to deal you, and bust you exactly when it’ll gain them the most profit. Like everything on the Internet, they’re very difficult to regulate.