How does surrender affect risk of ruin?

I'm not sure if this have been investigated or discussed before, but how does being able to surrender affect your risk of ruin? Bryce Carlson mentioned in his book that the true value of being able to surrender is not the 0.2% increase in a card counter's edge, but the reduction of the loss of bankroll during a negative swing. However Carlson did not give any specific number on how this would apply for sizing your bankroll.

I would imagine being able to only lose half of your max bet with your hopeless stiff against a dealer 10 at a high count can be quite valuable to your total bankroll in the long run, but to what degree exactly? How much more can you max bet, if any, to stay the same RoR?

To me this logically seems to dampen the variance spikes of ones bankroll. As you stated, if you have max bets out, but you get 16v10, you can surrender and lose 1/2 max bet instead of the whole thing. Imagine a scatter chart with your bankroll as points after each trip. You could, of course, have winning or losing trips... but when you draw a line of best fit, if you're playing the game correctly, it should show a positive progression.

So as I was saying, to me, this would dampen the outliers (on both ends). Your biggest wins might not be as big (say there's no surrender but you stand your 16 and the dealer also has a stiff hand and busts a bunch - positive variance). However, your biggest losses might not be as big either (where you are forced to stand on your 16v10 and the dealer has 20 all night and you lose a bunch - negative variance).

It's tough to put in to words as a picture would simplify things much more, but I guess I'll try to draw a before/after picture of what this means to me:

No Surrender


With Surrender

*These are for the same starting bankroll and the same time period

Notice how (again this is my interpretation) with surrender it dampens the spikes as your big win/losses due to variance might be controlled a bit better. Technically, I guess I could have had the "with surrender" picture do a hair better since Early Surrender to 10 = +.24% and Late Surrender = +.07%, but I hope you get the point I'm trying to make.

This could have a slight effect on your bankroll because you wouldn't be experiencing as harsh ups and downs, and thus you might not need a higher bankroll for a surrender game as you would a no surrender game. The exact amount? You'd have to SIM it to know the exact numbers, as in the old days they used to go off the DATED 100 x big bet rule for bankrolls. Now days it's all SIM'd, or even 200 x big bet to try to be safe. While yes, I think this very clearly would help ROR, I don't think it would be a drastic difference where you could make your big bet something like 1.5xPrevious Big Bet.

Good post Numpkin this is very interesting. Thank you Romes for providing this data, this makes me like the single-deck game the Alamo offers that H17 but allow surrender even better.

Quote: theOmega623

Good post Numpkin this is very interesting. Thank you Romes for providing this data, this makes me like the single-deck game the Alamo offers that H17 but allow surrender even better.

Yes, but I'd still take a S17 game every day of the week over a H17 game =)

Thank you very much for your response Romes. I lack the software to run a complete simulation, but I think a approximation is assume at a moderately high count, where you would surrender 16vs8,9,10,A, 15vs9,10,A, 14vs10,A, and 17vsA. Add up the probability of all the above situations and incorporate it into the 1/2 reduction of max bet loss. Could anybody point me to a resource where it lists the probabilities of all players' first 2 card totals?

Quote: theOmega623

Good post Numpkin this is very interesting. Thank you Romes for providing this data, this makes me like the single-deck game the Alamo offers that H17 but allow surrender even better.

Unfortunately the single deck game at Alamo is long gone, they replaced it with a 4 deck shoe game (probably the only 4 deck game in Vegas), the only playable single deck game in Vegas is at El Cortez right now.

Romes: Agreed!

Numpkin: Thank you that is good to know as I intended on checking that game out while I was in Vegas, but I think I will just stick to double-deck now!