House Edge increase for mistakes

I play a lot of blackjack and always strive for perfect basic strategy but of course I'm only human (silly me). I was curious if anyone has gone through a 'mistake' calculation or a rough round number of what I might be losing if I mess up.

If it helps to calculate you can assume a completely random mistake, I realize mistakes have different values (doubling and busting vs. hitting on 12 v dealer 6 for example).
Assuming my mistakes are mostly accidentally hitting instead of staying mostly on bust cards and that it doesn't happen often.

maybe 1% of the time?

I mostly play 6 decks, S17, splits and doubles allowed, double after split etc
but also play
8 decks, H17, splits and doubles allowed , double after split etc

I appreciate the help

Quote: gamer1741

I play a lot of blackjack and always strive for perfect basic strategy but of course I'm only human (silly me). I was curious if anyone has gone through a 'mistake' calculation or a rough round number of what I might be losing if I mess up.

If it helps to calculate you can assume a completely random mistake, I realize mistakes have different values (doubling and busting vs. hitting on 12 v dealer 6 for example).
Assuming my mistakes are mostly accidentally hitting instead of staying mostly on bust cards and that it doesn't happen often.

maybe 1% of the time?

I mostly play 6 decks, S17, splits and doubles allowed, double after split etc
but also play
8 decks, H17, splits and doubles allowed , double after split etc

I appreciate the help

Really hard to help you..... Absolutely no way to tell with the ambiguous terms you give us to work with.

" (MOSTLY) accidentally hitting instead of staying on bust cards. If we figure 75% of your errors are like those, yhen what are your other 25% errors? Will you ever accidentally hit on a 20 versus a 6? Will you ever accidentally stand with a 7 versus a dealer 6? My point is there are some errors you should do for all intents and purposes zero % of the time.

When 30+ years ago I counted for a little while, and played only standard basic strategy, I doubt that I made any mistakes in basic strategy. Errors counting is a different thing. I bet if you practice hard for not that long a period of time you can get your basic strategy errors to essentially zero.

Good luck!

Thanks, I realize the parameters aren't ideal.

I believe in statistics.

If you play 100 hands an hour at a table and you do it many times a week for hours on end, for years on end, you really think you still have 0 mistakes? when you get tired? when the dealer screws up? if you mess up and don't realize you don't have enough for a double? sure that's 0.1% of the time? 0.01%? whatever it is, I am not sure I believe anyone doing this for a very very very long time has 0 errors.

In any case, I admit I don't. Assume 1% of the time I make mistakes, although I think its really probably less than 1/5th of that, but its easy to scale the number if you simply use 1% as a basis.

Of those, yeah 90% of that time its silly staying when you should not such as 16 vs. 7 or hit on 12 or 13 vs. 6, maybe 1% of that time is something really dumb like hitting on a 20 yeah. But that will be so rare I don't think its worth calculation or just attribute to rounding error.

I like to keep track of my play and if I'm playing at a 0.005 edge normally and if these mistakes are adding .0005 vs. adding .01 that mistakes a huge difference.

I have to agree with soopoo on this.
With practice you should not be making any basic strategy mistakes. If the dealer makes a mistake that should only be in your favor,if the mistake is against you speak up and have it corrected.
If you don’t have enough money to double down it’s time to quit. If you are too tired or drunk you really shouldn’t be playing. That said I think you can make enough from dealer errors to offset your mistakes.

There are close decisions, such as hitting 12s, where it might cost a little bit to do the wrong thing. SImilarly for soft doubles. Thus doing these one way or another probably doesn't cost you too much.

Standing on 16 vs 7 would tend to cost you more. Also remember to hit soft 18s against 9-A.

For anyone learning BJ, you need to be happy you know the correct strategy for hitting, splitting and doubling. Don't worry about soft doubles until you've got everything else.

Hmm I don't think I'm framing the problem right.

sounds like you guys are thinking of 'normal' blackjack where you play basic, and alterations for card counting.

I am not card counting, not really interested in that, it never worked for me. Too easy to get caught, no longevity, etc etc. (IMHO and sadly experience of course) I've been playing blackjack for over 8 years. I know basic strategy, I am very good at it, you can quiz me and I'll get 100%. Obviously the right answer is don't mess up.

But I'm playing for pure speed. Think of it as comps at a casino. Your playing to win, I'm playing to lose. I simply want to minimize my loss. Throughput is what's important to me. I want to approach theoretical loss and get as much money through as quickly as possible without breaking myself with crazy high bets. I play more hands than you could imagine in a week and I do like to sleep and eat and stuff, so that means I need to play fast. REALLY fast. So I am not stopping for 10 seconds in-between decisions to make sure I'm right 100% of the time.

Quiz yourself, if you require <1 second for all decisions, you will get things wrong some small % of the time too, whether it be from fatigue or just brain lapse.

Does that help? In any case, I realize the problem is bizarre. I'm a smart guy, if the problem was easy I would have already found the answer ;) I'm only posting hard problems here lol.

Thanks again!

Playing a home game that counts errors. I do make some errors on purpose. I've got 277 errors out of 6,648 hands (97% accuracy rate), totaling $1,664 in errors, and I'm $12,590 ahead. I'm not convinced errors actually cost me all that because I won a lot of them but it counted as an error. I also missed out on double downs against Aces because I never do that despite the dealer not having BJ.

What kills me is at certain bet levels, I'm only winning 20% to 40% of the hands.

My session buy-ins are $1,000, so the errors seem to have cost me a session or two.
****************************************************************************************
I found a new chart for me.
It says I lost $29,440 on regular hands (all bet levels) (won 42.49% of hands) , won $15,525 on double downs (won 56.60% of hands), lost $80 on soft double downs (won 47.17% of hands), lost $648 on insurance bets (BJ vs Ace) (won 27.50% of insurance bets), won $51,578 on BJ's (won 100% of bets), $0 on side bets, lost $25,250 on surrenders (lost 100% of bets), Total Ahead is $11,686 (it must have missed a couple bets somewhere because I'm up $12,023) (won 43.71% of all hands). Average bet was $118.

Gamer.... I understand your question.... but unless we (and you!) know more exactly what the errors are all we can do is guess. Hitting 20 versus a dealer 6 is a huge loss in EV. Forgetting to split 6’s versus a dealer 7 less so. But I’ll guess for you. I am guessing at $25 a hand over 1000 hands you lose $5 in EV because of your errors.

Quote: ChumpChange

Playing a home game that counts errors. I do make some errors on purpose. I've got 277 errors out of 6,648 hands (97% accuracy rate), totaling $1,664 in errors, and I'm $12,590 ahead. I'm not convinced errors actually cost me all that because I won a lot of them but it counted as an error. I also missed out on double downs against Aces because I never do that despite the dealer not having BJ.

What kills me is at certain bet levels, I'm only winning 20% to 40% of the hands.

My session buy-ins are $1,000, so the errors seem to have cost me a session or two.
****************************************************************************************
I found a new chart for me.
It says I lost $29,440 on regular hands (all bet levels) (won 42.49% of hands) , won $15,525 on double downs (won 56.60% of hands), lost $80 on soft double downs (won 47.17% of hands), lost $648 on insurance bets (BJ vs Ace) (won 27.50% of insurance bets), won $51,578 on BJ's (won 100% of bets), $0 on side bets, lost $25,250 on surrenders (lost 100% of bets), Total Ahead is $11,686 (it must have missed a couple bets somewhere because I'm up $12,023) (won 43.71% of all hands). Average bet was $118.

Cool, where is this chart you are referencing or are you just using your own data?

Gamer, you can find the cost of every mistake when deviating from basic strategy in Don Schlesinger's Blackjack Attack 3, Appendix A, titled "Complete Basic Strategy EVs for the 1-, 2-, 4-, 6-, and 8- Deck Games"

The tables will give you every EV for any basic decision. From there, you can see the cost of your mistake.
As an example. If you look for 6 decks S17 and Dealer's up card of 6 and want to know the cost between Standing or Hitting on 12, Table A55 on page 448 says:
Standing 10-2 vs 6 = -0.154694
Hitting 10-2 vs 6 = -0.168756
It means that Hitting is worse by 0.014062 or if you prefer 1.4062%
In plain English, for every $100 bet you'd choose to hit, you'd expect to lose $1.41

Your hand of 12 is composed of 9-3
The difference is -0.020612 meaning you'd expect to lose $2.06 for every $100 bet.

For 8-4 = $2.01
For 7-5 = $2.00

Etc.

Quote: SOOPOO

Gamer.... I understand your question.... but unless we (and you!) know more exactly what the errors are all we can do is guess. Hitting 20 versus a dealer 6 is a huge loss in EV. Forgetting to split 6’s versus a dealer 7 less so. But I’ll guess for you. I am guessing at $25 a hand over 1000 hands you lose $5 in EV because of your errors.

Thanks! no split 6's vs. 7 unless your doing a counting variation I suppose?

Quote: gamer1741

Thanks! no split 6's vs. 7 unless your doing a counting variation I suppose?

You passed the test. You aren’t making any basic strategy errors. If you are , likely far less than dealer errors.

Just don't forget... If you play Single or Double Deck with DAS, splitting 6-6 vs 7 is a Basic Play.