Re: Why can't I win at anything?

Posted by Brh on August 12, 1997 at 01:17:54: In Reply to: Why can' I win at anything? posted by Byron Smith on August 11, 1997 at 18:28:47:

Byron,

I think you are just in the depths of the long haul in a shoe game. There has been a lot of talk about what defines the long run, but there is reasonable agreement that it does depend on the ratio of expected win to standard deviation. I choose to define a quantity called N0 = (SD^2)/(EV^2), which has units of hands played.

For a fixed better, NO is the number of hands which need to be played such that if you are 1SD below the mean, you are at exactly zero. To be exactly zero at M standard deviations below the mean, you need to play M^2 *N0 hands.

For a typical 6 deck game, 75% pen, with your spread as described, I get EV=$7.91/100hands, SD=$154/100hands, and so NO=37860 hands. With 30 playing hours, at full tables, I doubt if you have come close to this many hands.

Your spread is also a little sub-optimal, which increases the size of N0. Try this one instead :

 leave table TC <= -1
  $5 at  -1 < TC < 0
  $5 at   0 <= TC < 1
 $10 at   1 <= TC < 2
 $20 at   2 <= TC < 3
 $30 at   3 <= TC < 4
 $40 at   4 <= TC  and above

I think this is close to your spread, except that you dont bet $10 until TC=+1. This will reduce your N0 to around 32000, which is quite an improvement.

Cheers,
Brett.

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