Blackjack Observation

When you count cards in BJ, what you've done is devised another game (a card counting game), and are playing it using BJ outcomes, but separate and apart from the game itself. This game gives you an edge over the BJ game. The casino doesn't like you playing this other game and will stop you when they suspect it. BJ was once thought to be an unbeatable casino game. The math involved said it was unbeatable. Some math people now say, 'no, we always knew it was possible to beat BJ'. No, you didn't. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, especially when you want to CYA.

My question is this. Why can't a game, separate from the game of roulette, be developed to play within the game itself, that would give you the edge. Like what happens in BJ. Not counting, but something compatible with roulette. BJ was once mathematically unbeatable too.

No, blackjack was always mathematically beatable -- just nobody knew it. The difference between blackjack and basically every other casino game is that, in blackjack, the next hand does not have the same odds as the last hand. That's because cards come out of the deck and aren't shuffled back in after each hand. The only other game where that's true is baccarat. Roulette, poker, dice, VP, slots, keno, etc. -- those all have exactly the same odds for each play. There's no way to beat them using a method predicated on the odds changing over time because they don't.

The point is, sometimes in blackjack the odds are in your favor. Not often, but sometimes. Card counting helps you know when that is, and that's why you bet more when the odds are in your favor. If you bet enough when the odds are in your favor, and little enough when they're not, the weighted average will be positive for you. No other casino game has that property, because there is no other casino game where the odds are sometimes in your favor frequently enough to matter. That's not to say that they're *never* in your favor, but that's basically what advantage play is -- seeking out player-advantage situations and playing them until they're no longer advantageous.

I'm open-minded but skeptical. The trick is finding something about roulette that hasn't yet been analyzed. Before Thorpe (or whichever genius on the boards claims to have known about counting before Thorpe), blackjack was thought of in the same way.

If you do figure it out, my advice is to explain the alternate game fully to me, and then tell nobody else.

If you were playing heads up with the dealer in a SD game dealt to the last card, and you knew the remaining cards were
3 eights and 2 sevens, how much would you bet ??

Quote: buzzpaff

If you were playing heads up with the dealer in a SD game dealt to the last card, and you knew the remaining cards were
3 eights and 2 sevens, how much would you bet ??

Shouldn't you bet the moon? The dealer has to bust.

Quote: MathExtremist

No, blackjack was always mathematically beatable -- just nobody knew it.

Then it was unbeatable, according to the experts of the time. The earth was never flat, but all the experts believed it was.

Quote: waltomeal

Before Thorpe (or whichever genius on the boards claims to have known about counting before Thorpe), blackjack was thought of in the same way.

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There were people counting cards for decades before Thorp. Some even wrote books about it in the 50's. Thorp was well aware of them. What he did was prove it worked with a computer and that made if feasible. Before then, counting was dismissed as a parlor trick and not taken seriously.

Quote: MathExtremist

but that's basically what advantage play is -- seeking out player-advantage situations and playing them until they're no longer advantageous.

It wouldn't at all be the same for roulette as it is for BJ. Whole different set of circumstances.

Quote: EvenBob

There were people counting cards for decades before Thorp. Some even wrote books about it in the 50's. Thorp was well aware of them. What he did was prove it worked with a computer and that made if feasible. Before then, counting was dismissed as a parlor trick and not taken seriously.

The basic strategy was basically worked out in the 1950's using adding machines. As pure mathematics it is not very groundbreaking, and would have easily been understood in the 18th century, but without modern calculating devices the bookkeeping would have been overwhelming. The digital computer allowed the calculations both for basic strategy, and different counting schemes to be evaluated at a reasonable pace and without fear of error.

When Edward thorpe tested out his strategy in Vegas, they were smart enough to know to reshuffle a lot, and to put extra people at the table.

It's not so much that Christopher Colombus was the first European to sail to the new world, it now looks like a number of people beat him to it. It's the fact that he could do it repeatedly, and he could teach other people how to do it. Plus he wrote a book about it. I think of Edward Thorpe in very much the same vein.

Mathematically, BJ was always beatable, and "they" knew it was, and knew how. They just did not have the tools to actually achieve it in practice until later.
In a way, the same is true about roulette. If one had an ideal eye, capable of exact measurements of speed and direction of the ball and the wheel, and an ideal brain, capable of performing billions of calculations per second, then, barring quantum effects, one would know exactly which number the ball will hit the moment it is released from the dealer's hand.
It does not sound humanly possible at the moment, but, that seems like exactly the situation with BJ before the practical counting techniques were invented.