Suppose six friends head to a casino on a slow day. They find an open blackjack table. Since they all have the same amount of money, they agree to simply pool their funds - they will split the money back up at the end of the night.
Assuming they can’t (or don’t want to) count cards, should each person independently play simple strategy? Or, is there a more efficient strategy because they are six playing as one?
In more general terms, simple strategy is forecast as producing the best outcome for 1 hand against one dealer. But if you have n hands, should you play each independently, or are there better outcomes available?
If there is any case for working together, does that mean that yahoos who get all bent out of shape because someone hit/didn’t hit when they were ‘supposed’ to aren’t actually yahoos?
Or am I misunderstanding the question?
Screw it, I’ll be over at the craps table. Much more fun.
If they can’t count cards, the most effective strategy is for all of them to independently play optimum strategy. There is nothing that anyone can do to help or hurt anyone else.
The yahoos are still yahoos. They want you to play simple strategy well because they believe it impacts the outcomes of their playing simple strategy well. Unless you and the yahoo are splitting your winnings, that’s a corollary to my question. In my world, player 1 may stand each and every hand as soon as it is dealt, because “the collective” needs 3 wins per round to break even, and her stand makes that statistically likely. This would drive a yahoo nuts.
That’s simply not true. Suppose an obnoxious case: you are player 17 in a 17-seat, single deck game. The first four players have blackjack, the other twelve exhaust the remaining 10 values, 9s, 8s, and 7s. You are dealt a 4 and a 5. The dealer shows 6. Simple strategy says to double down. Simple strategy will get you killed.
The existance of the other players consumes a finite resource - cards in the deck - which changes the odds for others. Thats true whether you count what they get or don’t.
One cannot hit to make it more likely that another player will hit a certain card; that seems true. But hitting shows cards, and gives the rest of the players knowledge of the deck. And knowledge of the deck is advantageous. In that sense one can help another player.
When I originally posed the question, I was thinking no counting cards on the table. But, that seems silly - the cards on the table are one of your biggest resources. So, how about this as a definition for what the n hands don’t do: they don’t alter their “original bet” per hand based deck position, and they only consult current hand for strategy decisions.
They affected me just by sitting down. Simple strategy lost weight to the house - if the cards aren’t shuffled, I will never get a blackjack and should always hit almost all the way to 21.
I think ‘counting cards’ means keeping track of all of the cards dealt from a shoe, that is multiple plays not just what you can see in a single play. Casinos will ask you to leave if they think you are counting cards in the sense I just described.
Casinos will let a single player play multiple hands at a time, which is essentially the same thing you’re talking about - in fact, it’s better in that one person is controlling everything. They probalby wouldn’t do that if it gave a player a significant advantage/positive expectation.
A multi handed game could be at a disadvantage against the house, but at less of a disadvantage than a single handed game. It does seem plausible that the answer is out there as an answer to what to do (differently, if anything) in the mutli-handed game.
Assume all six will be playing a fairly equal method, either correct Basic Strategy or a typical tourist strategy. The best thing they could do to bring their actual outcome closest to Expected Value is to play on different tables. Player hands played against the same dealer hand have highly correlated outcomes; mostly they either all win or they all lose. For an example with two players, the chance that one will win and the other will lose is only about 11%.
Basic strategy shows the mathematically best play for each hand vs each dealer upcard assuming you have no other information available. Occasional random departures (mistakes) from correct strategy will have almost no effect on your long term outcome; random mistakes will cancel each other out, but if you make consistent non-random departures from basic strategy the negative effect will accumulate and you will lose more money.
In your post #9 you seem to be wanting to make up a card counting system on the fly; that ain’t gonna work. Card counting systems don’t just alter the amount of the bet, they also alter the way you play some hands. For every situation there is a mathematically calculated correct play. I suggest your heat of the moment hunch will often be wrong and will tend to be wrong in a consistent manner, thereby costing you money.
Sorry to say it but your posts #4, #5 and #10 simply make no sense whatsoever. They look to me like you have been reading some woo woo get-rich-quick-and-easy book by somebody like John Patrick.
How many separate decks are there usually in the standard casino game (and how often do they refill/reshuffle the whole shoe?)
Going by what’s been dealt the last hand or five is a waste of time if there are enough cards for 100-plus hands. IIRC from what I’ve read, the card-counters watch the table for a long time (or play minimal bets) while waiting for the cards to possibly trend to high or lower numbers.
100 hands x 3cards x 6players=1800 cards; 36decks, what, about 18 inches of cards? I assume those big shoes they deal from then would hold almost a foot of cards, 20 decks?
16 10-cards, 4 aces per deck times 20 decks - 320 cards. How many would you need to see go by in half a shoe, how much of an imbalance to say your odds are higher or lower by a usable amount?
I assume when they get down to less than 1/4 of the shoe they reload so even if you counted perfectly, you wouldn’t know for sure what’s coming next.
Could you explain this further? It sounds like you’re saying that having one player stand regardless of cards would be beneficial to a “combined players pot” strategy. Which is wrong. But I’m not sure I’m interpreting it correctly.
That last bit is what I was missing, very helpful.
I’ll disregard the aspersions on my sanity. I haven’t read anything - woo woo or otherwise - to indicate an answer here. My thought process started with, as you said, simple strategy being the best outcome for a single player with limited knowledge. I wondered if it was also the best outcome for multiple players (or multiple hands) with the knowledge those hands entail. Looks like the answer there is yes, thanks.
I meant “always stand” as an example of an alternate strategy, not as a specific. Certainly a poor alternate strategy individually, I was just trying to restate the original question of whether a non-simple-strategy alternate exists in a multi-handed game.
There’s a rarish mechanism that can become relevant: when the deck is exhausted in the middle of a hand, using the (shuffled) discards is necessary. This is the one case where one’s strategy may need to vary for the community interest.
For example, suppose casino rules allow resplitting Aces (*), Dealer has a mediocre up-card, last player to act has a pair of Aces and the deck is down to six cards or so, mostly Aces and Tens. You want the player with a pair of Aces to be able to draw those Aces and split repeatedly. You don’t want the deck to run out early in his play, and present him with shuffled discards poorer than normal in Aces and Tens. Thus, with a border-line decision, a team player other than the one with Aces should double-down or stand pat rather than split or play as to draw two or more cards. For example, you might stand with 7-7 rather than splitting. Or double on 9 or 11 rather than hitting.
If there’s no risk that the cards will run out (and in fact casinos do time their shuffle-up to make run-out very uncommon), then your decision doesn’t affect the probabilities for the other hands.
(Also, in “Big Player” card-counting team play, when the deck was rich, the non-Big players were under orders to avoid card-wasting splitting, so as to delay the shuffle-up which would end the Big streak.)
(* - when I played regularly the Four Queens Hotel was the only Las Vegas casino that allowed such resplits, IIRC.)