Calculating house edge

I just watched Micheal Shackleford's youtube video on how he does his calculations in an Excel for an infinite number decks blackjack game. I was wondering how to make these calculations for a 6/8 deck game? I saw another post saying to subtract 0.08 for an eight deck game and 0.11 for a six deck game to get an accurate house edge. However is this case for variations of blackjack such as 'Zapit" or blackjack switch?

Hi Richard,
Welcome to the forum,
Those spreadsheets do a fantastic job, don't they. They do assume an infinite deck such that, for example, the chance of an ace is 1/13 time after time.
I have done some derivative work with that to make a constantly adjusting shoe dependent calculation, starting with x decks. My book also has tweaks for the UK rules that I play.
To be honest, it's probably best to just apply the small adjustments that Mike suggests. With the best will in the world, these calculations are academic in the real world because variance will decide the real hit that your bankroll takes.
I could share my workbook with you, if you PM me, along with some explanation as to how I changed Mike's version.

You simply can't do finite deck blackjack games in Excel without using a macro, which are very slow. You pretty much need to write a looping program in the language of your choice. It gets a little complicated when it comes to re-splitting and the U.S. peeking rule, but nothing too difficult.

Quote: Wizard

You simply can't do finite deck blackjack games in Excel without using a macro, which are very slow. You pretty much need to write a looping program in the language of your choice. It gets a little complicated when it comes to re-splitting and the U.S. peeking rule, but nothing too difficult.

Hi Mike,
Yes and no, but I'm going to mostly disagree with you.
Within your Excellent spreadsheet there were some calculations which relied heavily on the 1/13 constant probability.
It was a hell of a messy and slow job, but I substituted out those 1/13ths to be tricky formulae, calculated from a shoe that started with 8 decks. My calculations went some way towards an 8 deck solution. Granted, with some mathematical inaccuracy, but I was pleased with the outcome. I'll get my tweaked workbook to you soon.*
Agreed that to do it flawlessly would require simulation with lots of coding which could be done in VBA procedures.
I always feel cheated when my hand crafted procedures are called macros $;o)

Wizard

Thanks for the advice, I have intermediate Excel skills and also have been learning Java script recently so hopefully I'll be able to work it out.