Single deck

How much gain can one get over the basic strategy by playing 5 hands at a time?

This is an online game.
Rules: 1D; S17; DOA; SPL1; DAS.
Player’s hand cannot comprise more than 5 cards.

Any input will be appreciated.

VPRookie

Quote: VPRookie

How much gain can one get over the basic strategy by playing 5 hands at a time?

This is an online game.
Rules: 1D; S17; DOA; SPL1; DAS.
Player’s hand cannot comprise more than 5 cards.

Any input will be appreciated.

VPRookie

I assume you're referring to depth charging where you bet (right to left): min, min min, min, MAX and use the information from the first 4 hands to play the 5th hand more efficiently? Type "blackjack depth charging" in to google, you'll find a plethora of results/information =).

EDIT: Also, for the rules given above the Wizard's house edge calculator shows a player advantage of .00142%. There must be some other rules that balance this out (like dealer win on ties or push on dealer 22)?

Thanks Romes,

But I don’t mean this approach described by Bishop in his “Blackbelt”.

I mean flat-betting all the 5 hands and playing each hand optimally (cards are dealt face-up).
For example: if dealer shows an ace I can take profitable insurance if there are less than 3 tens in my 5 hands.

And, yes, the rules are too good. Maybe the programmer is not quite familiar with blackjack. But what bothers me is the game doesn’t seem quite random. The software provider claims RNG is used. But I wondered if re-split of pairs is allowed and split every pair of 10s I got. And I never got a ten on a split hand. Maybe the RNG deals a random card from the remaining non-tens in this situation. After all who wants a card of the same value when splitting but 10-splitters? Lol. Splitting other pairs showed the same result. I played and counted, in demo mode, for a while and didn’t find an imbalance between big and small cards. But this is just a very very small sample.

Quote: VPRookie

Thanks Romes,

But I don’t mean this approach described by Bishop in his “Blackbelt”.

I mean flat-betting all the 5 hands and playing each hand optimally (cards are dealt face-up).
For example: if dealer shows an ace I can take profitable insurance if there are less than 3 tens in my 5 hands.

And, yes, the rules are too good. Maybe the programmer is not quite familiar with blackjack. But what bothers me is the game doesn’t seem quite random. The software provider claims RNG is used. But I wondered if re-split of pairs is allowed and split every pair of 10s I got. And I never got a ten on a split hand. Maybe the RNG deals a random card from the remaining non-tens in this situation. After all who wants a card of the same value when splitting but 10-splitters? Lol. Splitting other pairs showed the same result. I played and counted, in demo mode, for a while and didn’t find an imbalance between big and small cards. But this is just a very very small sample.

Well, in a single deck the knowledge of 5 hands could be pretty beneficial, though 'most' of the time I could see it not changing basic strategy. If you're going to go through the trouble of counting and trying to play more 'efficiently' given the cards in play, I'm not sure why you wouldn't depth charge though... It's essentially the exact same thing, the only difference being the amount you're betting on your last hand.

You may have found a diamond in the rough, or you may have found the 1 millionth site to cheat players online =p. My suggestion would be to keep your stakes low, keep statistics of your play, and try to get some kind of amount of data to determine whether the site is legit or not. If it is, then please feel free to message me the site and then we'll keep it on the D/L and profit =D.

Quote: Romes

Well, in a single deck the knowledge of 5 hands could be pretty beneficial, though 'most' of the time I could see it not changing basic strategy. If you're going to go through the trouble of counting and trying to play more 'efficiently' given the cards in play, I'm not sure why you wouldn't depth charge though... It's essentially the exact same thing, the only difference being the amount you're betting on your last hand.

I think I have found the answer to my question thanks to “The Theory of Blackjack”.
On page 28 of his work professor Griffin asks the question “How much can be gained by Perfect Play?” I made some approximations (I suppose average BJ hand uses 2.7 cards) to professor’s data to find my results.

This is what I got:
Insurance gain - 0.062%
Playing gain:
– hand 1 – 0.278%
– hand 2 – 0.299%
– hand 3 – 0.329%
– hand 4 – 0.372%
– hand 5 – 0.433%

Taking into account the off the top advantage of 0.142% one could find the expectation of any hand and thus determining one’s bets.