Question about Down Under Blackjack

Quote: bobbartop

Somewhere in the description it says that Barona is spreading it, and I think somewhere in the state of Washington. But I have personally seen it at two places in central California, Eagle Mountain has had it for a few months and now Table Mountain started dealing it maybe three weeks ago. Eagle is a small casino but the game does get play. They offer it at a lower minimum which attracts more players. They have five decks in a continuous shuffler. At Table Mountain, it is a six-deck shoe. Table Mountain is a much larger casino servicing a large city like Fresno. I asked and it has been received well there. Yesterday it was $5 to $300. A lot of action while I was there in the afternoon. Naturally, Friday and Saturday nights are busy nights at both places.

This is a very interesting game, in my opinion. And it should be good for the casinos because I can't imagine the average recreational player ever figuring out how to play it properly. It's confusing. But for the more determined player I think it has much potential.

Good info.

Thanks !

I notice there is only one situation in the entire Basic Strategy where a player would split tens, and that is against a 7 in RED Mode. I was trying to think of another situation that would be close to that. I thought of TT vs T in BLUE Mode, but apparently that's not close enough. Fun game.

Quote: SM777

Has this game actually gone live anywhere yet? It's been 5 months since the conference, are any of those winning casinos up and running?

Interested to see if this can catch on like a Free Bet, or BJ Switch did in the past.

Table Mountain Casino outside of Fresno California has it running.

Sorry this took so long. ChesterDog was kind enough to send me a hard total strategy with a small hole card, which I agree with.

It looks like I made some transcription errors in creating the old strategy. Here is a corrected one, based on 4 to 8 decks.



Comments?

I calculated this. For small hole card , this includes double 8v10 ( edit: I meant to say double 10 vs 8) and some doubles on soft hands. There are some minor differences on the split portion of the chart as well.



There are also at least two important errors on the Medium Hole Card chart. if there is any interest, I will post that as well.

Quote: gordonm888

I calculated this. For small hole card , this includes double 8v10 and some doubles on soft hands. There are some minor differences on the split portion of the chart as well.



There are also at least two important errors on the Medium Hole Card chart. if there is any interest, I will post that as well.

YES, there is interest. Please post.

Thank you, and thanks to Wizard. Thanks everyone.

Quote: gordonm888

There are also at least two important errors on the Medium Hole Card chart. if there is any interest, I will post that as well.

Thank you for your help. I'm interested.

Quote: Wizard

Sorry this took so long. ChesterDog was kind enough to send me a hard total strategy with a small hole card, which I agree with.

It looks like I made some transcription errors in creating the old strategy. Here is a corrected one, based on 4 to 8 decks.



Comments?

I notice there are a few differences between Wizard's (Chester Dog's) hard totals and Gordon's. I appreciate that this is a lot of work for all of you and I didn't expect to see any more posts in this thread so quickly. Thanks again to all.

I'll be offline for a couple days, I am looking forward to your findings and taking the knowledge up to Table Mountain.

Where is Romes in this thread? He's got a good brain, he should like this stuff.

Did Gordon say "double hard 8 v. Ten"?

Quote: bobbartop

Did Gordon say "double hard 8 v. Ten"?

I meant to say Double "10 v 8 + small."

The two bad mistakes in the Medium Hole Card charts both involve the player having a hard 17.

You should definitely HIT H17 v A+medium. Fer Chrissakes, the dealer has, with equal probability, an 18, 19 ,20 or soft 17 and you advise we stand on H17? . I get for "H17 vs Ace+medium": Stand = -0.8202 and Hit = - 0.5927. That's a large difference for a situation in which the player never stands or doubles on anything below a hard 17. This single correction is worth almost 0.06% in House Edge.

Also, you should not Hit a "H17 vs 2+medium. I get Stand= -0.491 and Hit = -0.5949, so its not even close. This is another case where the player will get a H17 over 13% of the time because he never stands or doubles with less than H17.

Also, the posted strategies for 10 vs 2-A+Med and 5,5 pair vs 2-A+Med were very different. Such an inconsistency was a flag that there were still more problems so I calculated the following strategy for medium cards. On the chart the dark toned squares are the differences form the posted strategy:



I am not really sure about 10,10 vs 7 (or 6), because I was unsure of the rule interpretation: if you hit a split 10 with another 10 whether that 20 will win against a dealer 22. If it does win against a dealer 22 then you should split 10,10 vs 7 +medium. However, the value in splitting 10s is that you will frequently resplit to a total of four hands and the dealers 7+medium will bust with a frequency greater than 50%. I think someone needs to look at that particular hand very carefully -with a composition dependent code or with a sim model, because it is such a wild hand.

Just for chuckles, here is the strategy for Down Under BJ when dealer has a High Hole Card. The posted version of High Hole Card strategy had only 3 errors (shown in the chart below in dark shaded squares) - making it the pristine virgin of the DU BJ strategy charts.

I think, all together, that over 80 squares in the posted strategy charts were in error!



Interestingly, on this chart, is that you should double on a soft 20 vs 5,6 + high. Not a lot of games where you double on a soft 20, but a 5+high means the dealer has a hard 15 80% of the time and a soft16 the other 20% of the time.

Also, I calculate that you should split A,A pair vs 8 + High. Of course, i could be wrong, but i spent a lot of time checking and double checking that one.

House Edge

So what is the ding-dong House Edge for this game? An alarming fraction of the posted information on this game was wrong (much of it originating in the apparently-botched math report) and so there is no particular reason to trust the posted values of House Edge. I know of three efforts by forum members (one of them me) to calculate the House Edge for Down Under BJ using my Vers. 2.1 strategy -the one which I've just posted. Obviously, the prevailing view is that this does not look like not an AP opportunity - in fact, my suspicion is that the HE is not as low as the 0.5% that the game owners claim - even with optimal strategy.

Let me make it clear that I am not criticizing Mike Shackleford - he did not do these calculations and this is not his dumpster fire.