maybe didn't know what i was getting myself into when jack-jackson proposed the what i call the 'battle of the millenium'. hopped right into it with little fore-thought and not to much preparation or pre-planning. it was first and fore-most gonna be a practice session to hone counting skills. jj and i'd knock off three hundred shoes against Rules:6D,S17,NSA,75%pen,DAS,Lsr .36,HA
Conditions:3plyrs,1-10spread,Play-all,5,000K,BR.
so i got together the closest canned sim out of CVCX i could find for these rules and that would provide my betting guidelines and expectations.
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=76684&postcount=17
sagefr0g said:
jj had a schedule for reporting our progress set up and we were good to go. jj, God bless his soul was hand shuffling and dealing (maybe his girl friend helped)
She came over and set in a couple shoes and lost about 2500$ in about 25 shoes. Tried to help shuffle once.(ever played 312 pickup)? I shuffle every other shoe upside down to help keep them straight. Very fast shuffler and dealer.
while i was using CVBJ to play my allotment. of course jj doin it all by hand finished well before i did using the miracle of the modern computer lol.
well it was great practice counting. i've had to greatly improved my orthodox hi/lo count capability as a result of all this. not really sure what count jj was using and i believe he changed up as he went along playing i suppose one hand, two hands or more as he thought best. managed his betting that way also i believe, perhaps not going to max bet or going to max bet according to some of his either own judgement or according to what he knew best from what ever source i suppose.
for my own part of course i immeadiately wandered off the original game plan (cvcx sim) and for the first sixty shoes played how 'fr0ggy knows best' sort of thing. spreading to two hands say betting 150% on those two hands of what the bet for one hand would have been. who knows how much further from the game plan i'd have strayed had it not been for Kasi stepping in and exclaiming his joy over the fact that there was going to be a lot of unrefutable hard data generated and saved by the cvbj logs and statistical charts and tables. i was soundly chastized for my 'voodoo' actions over the first sixty shoes to where i decided ok i'm gonna play the rest of this contest by the game plan, repent and 'toe the line' so to speak.
the results are a reliable albeit anectdotal compilation of hard data that shows what a card counter might experience after circa 53 hours of play. something any advantage player who is counting cards would give their eye teeth for where they only able to collect that data in the real world casino conditions. that brings about the question of what say minimal data would one want to collect? far be it for me to be the one to answer that question but having the plethora of data that i have i can venture a guess. hopefully others can suggest other data types that can be collected to help give the casino playing AP the data needed to hold up a yard stick against his results so as he can come to an understanding of how he's been doing and maybe are things so far out of line that perhaps something is amiss sort of thing. but i'd say well go with a game plan. stick with it. have a sim that describes that game plan. now you've got your expected average win/loss, winrate, dollars/hour expected, standar deviation per hand and hour and risk of ruin. you know the frequency for which you should experience a range of true counts. you know what your average bet per hand or series of hands should be.you'll even know most of this for each particular true count that presents.
as a consideration of all that stuff you know before stepping foot into a casino and what i know about the spreadsheet WISEFR0G that Kasi extended to me is that two things you can know if you have the right data. (maybe more things but thats the limit of my understanding for now). if you know how many hands you played or how many hours (at some rate of hands/hour) and how much money you won or lost then you can determine where your at on the standard deviation scale. you can also ascribe goals for your time spent or hands played and know what your expectation is and compare how your doing relative to that expectation. that's all from just having a game plan, knowing how many hands or hours you played and how much you've won or lost. for example i lost $2,238.00 over 5342 hands in the contest of the millenium. see WISEFR0G in link below:
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=80643&postcount=173
so as emotionaly devastating and financially a hole in my pocket as it might be to have lost the money i can still see that mathematically i'm really not so very far off base from the expectations as they are from the perspective of standard deviation. i'm not really far off of one standard deviation which is where you expect to be within circa 63% of the time. according to the understanding of standard deviation: defined as...[standard deviation. (SD). Also called fluctuation or luck. This statistical index is often used in technical blackjack texts as a measure of how much individual wins and losses can differ from the average. In statistics, the SD is the square root of its variance and is used as a measure of dispersion in a distribution.
For all practical purposes (99.7% of the time), you will be within 3 SDs of your expectation. 95.4% of the time you will be within 2 SDs and 68.3% of the time you will be within 1 SD.] end definition......
then ok again from link above you also have a knowledge of your N0 in this case 34,894 hands. so in this case you know you have a long way of going having only played 5,342 hands before you can expect your results to begin to smooth out and conform to your expectation of $20.41/hr. then you can see you've got a pretty wicked ROR of 24.52% and 49.51% risk of halving your bank. which is just about what happended to me lol.
so a long way of saying, if you just can keep track of the number of hours you've played (with an idea of the rate of hands/hour) and you keep track of how much you lose or win and you play according to a well defined game plan then you can come away with a plethora of knowledge about what has been happening with repsect to your play and results. any other thoughts of what data to try and keep for real casino play are welcome!
so but again back to the link:
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=80643&postcount=173
just want to mention that my actual betting was pretty much right on with what one should expect to be betting as can be seen in the image. as the dollars bet match pretty darn close to the expected dollars bet as do the expected hands of a given true count and the actual hands of a given true count. the actual dollars bet and actual true counts presented were taken straight from my cvbj logs while the expected dollars bet and expected true counts come from the cvcx sim. additionally my average bet fell right in line with the expected average bet. so i can at least say for me that my counting and betting was spot on! admittedly though i did frequently use the cvbj peek function to verify my counts and deck estimation.
my excuse for that is that the whole contest was first and foremost an exercise designed to practice counting lol.
Ya what great exercise it was. While I was at I figured why not make into a competitive thing. Which I believe made it somewhat more interesting.
so probably i'm missing saying a whole lot of stuff and maybe it'll come to me later but for now that's pretty much where i'll leave the technical aspects of the experience.
so then comes the question of what was this all like experientially? it was really already asked and pretty much answered as i said in the link below:
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showpost.php?p=80118&postcount=141
i'd just add to all that now that the contest is over and any hopes of finishing out at least even or ahead are dashed. the experience for me was in a word, brutal. fun and intriquing but in the final analysis, brutal. lol. well at least seventy some percent of the time it was brutal.
Great show of heart to keep playing even when being in the red the whole time.
thats about how much of the time was spent playing virtually hopeless zero or negative true count hands. to play 3,810 hopeless as far as advantage is concerned to 1,532 hands that promised some advantage is again in a word a brutal experience. especially when the maybe thirty percent advantage hands were so often not panning out with big bets riding on them. yeah thats frustrating. ye ole bankroll drops pretty darn quick when that happens making it even more frustrating and scary. at least i can say for this contest is that with that 24.52% ROR and playing i guess full kelly that one might expect one heck of a roller coaster ride. lesson about having a proper sized bankroll for such a roller coaster ride well learned. lol.
a comment i'd like to make about the contest is how very strong the temptation often was to divert to voodoo play and betting. not so much say a known progression as to just the strong desire to not play like a robot and be free to make some 'creative' decisions or maybe some 'risk averse' plays and the like. would it have helped in terms of this short term play that the contest was? a question i suppose that really can't be answered.
any conclusions i might come to with all this is hard to say. it's massive to me to try and quickly come up with conclusions with the information explosion i've got from all this. i'd just say on a personal note that for the kind of money i'm willing to risk and the kind of games i'm able to play (pretty much just like this game) that i've got to stick with the nickle tables. additionally it's only gonna ever be a recreational thing for me with the hope of maybe getting to EV after some No or more worth of play and along the way it would be an experience of enjoying about an equal amount of good and not so good luck or otherwise known as standard deviation. it's no doubt in my mind that i don't have the constitution to achieve a level of play that i once dreamed of, that being where orthodox counting would be a supplemental income to my retirement. just not willing to risk the amount of bankroll needed and just don't really have the constitution mentally and emotionally that it would take to endure the ups and downs and also the amount of time and effort that it would take.
well even though i've babbled on endlessly i know there's much left unsaid. so maybe i'll throw out some more comments about all this later on. for now time for some zzzz's lol. :sleep:
oh yeah, any questions comments be glad to hear them.[/QUOTE]
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Multiple decks are brutal. Basically I hung around about even, until the last session. I was close to going under many times.
Wait until you try DD, its a whole new world. Youll actually get a 19 or 20 in positive counts. I had some of the highest counts imaginable only to be dealt 12 and 13s
craaazzzzy. Great summary, btw. Cant wait to do it again.
