mental game

I apologize to those of you who read multiple boards. I wanted to post this thought here as well, because I am very interested in hearing the feedback.

Every time a newbie posts asking questions about learning to count, somewhere in the responses, someone says that learning to count and wager correctly is the easy part. That dealing with the mental aspects is the hard part, like learning to deal with the sometimes long losing periods without panicking. I have never heard mention of learning to deal with the winning. (we should all have this problem too often right?)

5 years ago, early on in my BJ career, I started the year very fast. About this time of year (feb) I was 5 times ahead of expectation. I decided to cut my betting unit in half so that when the upcoming 'adjustment' or losing streak hit, I would only lose 50%.

Of course, no such adjustment occured. For the remainder of the year I continued to win, but at a rate below expectation. By years end my units won were extremely close to expectation, but I had managed to win 50% less for a good portion of the year. I was playing much loser stakes at that point, but it still costs me 4 or 5 grand. Lesson learned.

Fast forward. The early part of the year has once again been very good to me. I am up 2/3's of my winnings from all of last year, which is many times over expectation. While I am not about to repeat the mistakes of 5 years ago, I find myself certain that a 'correction' is due. I find it shocking and disappointing that my mind still even entertains these voodoo thoughts.

Kewl

kewljason said:

I apologize to those of you who read multiple boards. I wanted to post this thought here as well, because I am very interested in hearing the feedback.

Every time a newbie posts asking questions about learning to count, somewhere in the responses, someone says that learning to count and wager correctly is the easy part. That dealing with the mental aspects is the hard part, like learning to deal with the sometimes long losing periods without panicking. I have never heard mention of learning to deal with the winning. (we should all have this problem too often right?)

5 years ago, early on in my BJ career, I started the year very fast. About this time of year (feb) I was 5 times ahead of expectation. I decided to cut my betting unit in half so that when the upcoming 'adjustment' or losing streak hit, I would only lose 50%.

Of course, no such adjustment occured. For the remainder of the year I continued to win, but at a rate below expectation. By years end my units won were extremely close to expectation, but I had managed to win 50% less for a good portion of the year. I was playing much loser stakes at that point, but it still costs me 4 or 5 grand. Lesson learned.

Fast forward. The early part of the year has once again been very good to me. I am up 2/3's of my winnings from all of last year, which is many times over expectation. While I am not about to repeat the mistakes of 5 years ago, I find myself certain that a 'correction' is due. I find it shocking and disappointing that my mind still even entertains these voodoo thoughts.

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These fears and insecurities can be brought under control by a trip to Deadwood, there you are in the land where the Great Spirit dwells, partake of the Sun Dance then the Sweat Lodge under the auspicies of a full blood Medicine Man, your insecurities and fears shall be gone forever.


My Best,
CP

I think we all get those from time to time. Mine seems to always occur when I think about starting a new shoe with a 2 unit bet so my spread appears smaller. I generally leave it until I lose a hand. On those shoes where I don't and the count spirals down but I continue to win hand after hand I just keep thinking to myself why didn't I put that out there? Of course I just have to realize that even though this shoe is good, it's a negative EV situation to even employ that cover.

creeping panther said:

These fears and insecurities can be brought under control by a trip to Deadwood, there you are in the land where the Great Spirit dwells, partake of the Sun Dance then the Sweat Lodge under the auspicies of a full blood Medicine Man, your insecurities and fears shall be gone forever.


My Best,
CP

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Is it odd that I think I'm finally starting to understand these CP?

kewljason said:

...I decided to cut my betting unit in half so that when the upcoming 'adjustment' or losing streak hit, I would only lose 50%.

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It sounds to me as though you lack confidence in your edge, and/or are betting above your risk tolerance.

Sharky said:

It sounds to me as though you lack confidence in your edge, and/or are betting above your risk tolerance.

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I think he was just fell to the common mistake of thinking that the cards have to "correct" themselves. Like "this winning streak can't last forever, I better cut back before the losses come."

Does anyone else find it funny( in the peculiar sense) that everyone seems to agree in this case that no correction is due, but bring up a progression such as Oscars Grind and everyone insists a correction is coming, no matter how successful you have been.

shadroch said:

Does anyone else find it funny( in the peculiar sense) that everyone seems to agree in this case that no correction is due, but bring up a progression such as Oscars Grind and everyone insists a correction is coming, no matter how successful you have been.

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That's because everyone here understands the mathematics of the game, and they ALSO understand the lunacy of Oscars' Grind.

If we were in a forum that was frequented mainly by superstitious people with little or no understanding of math, yes; but I don't seem to find it the slightest bit strange.

Sucker said:

That's because everyone here understands the mathematics of the game, and they ALSO understand the lunacy of Oscars' Grind.

If we were in a forum that was frequented mainly by superstitious people with little or no understanding of math, yes; but I don't seem to find it the slightest bit strange.

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So what is the math that explains someone exceeding expectations by 5x?
What is the lunacy in Oscars Grind?

shadroch said:

Does anyone else find it funny( in the peculiar sense) that everyone seems to agree in this case that no correction is due, but bring up a progression such as Oscars Grind and everyone insists a correction is coming, no matter how successful you have been.

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Obviously at some point the correction will happen. Whether it happens all at once or slowly over time, that we don't know. That's why we can't resize down after large wins, the losses may not be coming for a long time! Oscar's grind is different because the majority of the money will be played at negative EV. That also will even out over time, and once again we don't know when. The difference is that one evens out in positive EV while the other is a loser.

shadroch said:

So what is the math that explains someone exceeding expectations by 5x?

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While I'm not sure how many standard deviations 5x is for this particular example, but perhaps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation#Rules_for_normally_distributed_data could be useful. So if it was 5std, then on average 1 out of 1.7 million people would experience "great luck".

And Chebyshev's inequality (link above) says that at least 96% of the values are within 5std's

kewljason said:

.... I find myself certain that a 'correction' is due. I find it shocking and disappointing that my mind still even entertains these voodoo thoughts.

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well, correct me if i'm wrong, but if you are five times above expectation, then yeah a correction is due. no?
thing is you just don't know when and how such a correction will come about, or really even if a correction will come about. well, i guess you know the range of probabilities and range of possibilities of how it will likely all come down.
but it shouldn't be considered voodoo or wrong headed to believe that at some point on up the road you will no longer be five times above expectation, sort of thing.
what ever, i'm probably off base again, lol.
i just know that it's when i'm having some sort of high flying winning session that i feel nervous and scared as hell, and when i'm losing my a$$ i'm cool as a cucumber, lol.
regardless, my philosophy is once i win some money, it's my money and there is no reason to believe that just because i won it that i'm bound to lose it, even though it may turn out that money was just sort of a loan the casino gave me and i'll end up paying it back, lol.
the interesting thing about this stuff is to try and realize the limitations of our knowledge. we only just know what to expect within some range of possibilities but we rarely if ever know what is gonna happen from one minute to the next.
so would maybe the moral of the story be, that say today you might be five times ahead of expectation and that some day in the future you might be right dead on expectation but have a lot more money than you had back when you had five times more than expectation.

sagefr0g said:

well, correct me if i'm wrong, but if you are five times above expectation, then yeah a correction is due. no?

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No. There is no such thing as a correction. As the proverb says - "The cards have no memory". They aren't going to persecute you to reclaim previous winnings, or help you out to give back previous losses.

What's done is done. The future is unknown, but you can expect it to be no different than it would be if your next hand were in fact your first ever.

yeah, that is how i (try to) look at it: the cards have no memory

The below article explains the law of the large numbers very clearly on page 9. Hope it helps you as much as it has helped me:


http://www.problemgambling.ca/EN/Documents/HPG%20Probabilty%20Final.pdf

London Colin said:

No. There is no such thing as a correction. ...

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no? then does that mean there is no such thing as expectation?
really seems to be a matter of semantics, not a matter of misconception.
shop talk or words you guys who are really good at math use.
practically speaking words as i understand them, lol, yeah there is such a thing as a correction. a simple, common sense mental concept is all that the term correction stands for in my mind.
for instance being five times above expected value is certainly not expected value. no?
is it really such a stretch to consider realizing ones expectation after being five times above expectation a correction?
to me, the realization of what we expect in our ignorance of what will really happen is the essence of the value of probability, especially when one sets out to take a gamble.
what does the term correction have some mathematical formula or equation with respect to it that i'm unaware of?

The theory of the long run is that you play long enough that your results are dicated by your expectation rather than your variance. This is not because after a long period of time your results will even out to be right on your EV but rather you have built up so much EV that the variance is so insignificantly small that you won't notice it in your hourly winrate. Or thats how I understand it anyways.

shadroch said:

So what is the math that explains someone exceeding expectations by 5x?

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Well, I'd say it's more like if one plays 1000 hands in, say by example, a 6D play-all game, 5 times $expectation could still be within 1 stan Dev from expected and completely unremarkable.

Play 100,000 hands and being 5 times above $expectation might be 6 or 7 or more Stan Dev from expected and therefore, at some point, simply not believable.

It's not how many times one is above or below $EV but how likely it is to be at that point after a defined period of time.

All cutting one's unit in half as KewlJ may have done is lower risk. Nothing wrong with that I guess. I don't think it changes the liklihood of finishing 5x above EV after the same number of rounds.? Would that be right?

Maybe it does imply he may have been playing with a risk he was somewhat uncomfortable taking originally, chose to risk that at the beginning and chose to lower risk after favorable variance lol.

My example is a play-all game which may not be what KewlJ actually plays anyway but, I think, the principle would be the same. However one plays, the game has a unit SD and unit EV per round physically played? No?

In a nutshell, ask always how likely are my results to this point in time for the game one has been playing. Since I always played -EV games, I always tried to figure stuff out in (assumed flat-bet) units. I could be -$ev at some point in time but the -$ev was still 3 SD's to the good lol.

Don't combine, maybe, results for many different games playing many different ways.

As always this nonsense assumes all hands played are in the same game played the same way lol. Counting winning a couple crazy $1000 bets or some Royal Flush win on a slot kind of distorts things lol.

You guys know me - I'd be just as upset with results exceeding 4SD (my personal threshold before I really begin to worry or wonder) to the good as I would be to the bad. Either way, at that point very serious re-examination of how I'm playing vs expectation would begin lol.

Yet, strangely, when down 3.7 SD's, after 7-10000 hds or so I really wanted to figure out how crooked the software was becasue it "had" to be. When ahead 3.7 SD's dev after 10000 hands on a different software platform absolutely no problem in my mind the software was fair because "stuff" happens lmao. Never could reach a + or - 4 SD variance.

The neg -3.7 SD's turned around to completely unremarkable 30000 hands later. The +3.7 Sds or so never did after a couple hundred thousand rounds before I was forced to stop playing. So I figure I just happened to be pretty lucky.

But, you know, my stuff was easy to figure becasue I always played the same game and played exactly the same way for that game and knew exactly my w/l/t results and exactly how many rounds I had played.

I like to think I have at least some appreciation for the difficulties "real-life" presents lol.

But, I'd guess, in real life, I'd have trouble abandoning as exact a mathematical approach as sims would give me lol.

Although, speaking of Oscar's Grind, I go down to the Rivers casino the other night, put $60 in the video $1 double-zero roulette machine. Bet on "Red" every spin. Never up even one dam* unit lol. Get down to $25, abandon Oscar and bet $25 and lose my $60 lmao. So, maybe, can't blame Oscar.

Go to the $5 virtual BJ machine, put in another $60 and cash-out $175 an hour or so later. Except I varied my bet and have no way of computing my SD or EV exactly lol. I have no idea how many rounds I played and my w/l/t results, no basis to put a number on my "luck" lol. If I cared I suppose I actually could record every round on a piece of paper. Obviously much easier to do on a virtual machine than with a real dealer lol.

As an aside, the actual play of BJ was absolutely horrific and beyond my limited imagination. Splitting all faces, doubling 14's 15's and 16's. Not doubling 10's vs 6's etc. Truly gut-wrenching. The only discipline I actually exercised was keeping my mouth shut lol.

sagefr0g said:

no? then does that mean there is no such thing as expectation?

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Expectation exists from 'now' onwards. If unexpected results have already happened, they do not exert some magical force on future results in order to restore any kind of balance.

Suppose you sit down at a table with $100 and, due to some outrageous good luck, quickly build it up to $1000. Someone then sits down next to you, bringing $1000. The blackjack gods are not going to make you lose more than he does. You both have the same expectation, going forwards, with the $1000 that you each have.

sagefr0g said:

really seems to be a matter of semantics, not a matter of misconception.
shop talk or words you guys who are really good at math use.
practically speaking words as i understand them, lol, yeah there is such a thing as a correction. a simple, common sense mental concept is all that the term correction stands for in my mind.
for instance being five times above expected value is certainly not expected value. no?
is it really such a stretch to consider realizing ones expectation after being five times above expectation a correction?

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You do seem to have a misconception. There is no restorative force at work. Nothing is ever 'due'.

'Dilution' might be a good word to use. If you start out with a streak of good or bad luck, that will initially have a huge impact on your overall profits. But over time it becomes less and less significant, until it is totally lost in the noise, and your overall results are in line with your expectation.

sagefr0g said:

to me, the realization of what we expect in our ignorance of what will really happen is the essence of the value of probability, especially when one sets out to take a gamble.
what does the term correction have some mathematical formula or equation with respect to it that i'm unaware of?

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I'm no mathematician. But the words 'correction' and 'due' imply that the past is influencing the future, even in just plain, everyday english. That does seem to be what you are suggesting. But it simply isn't the case.

Well, I am a little surprised at the direction this thread took. I didn't think we would get into a discussion about corrections. I just assumed that we would all be in agreement that results from previous sessions have no bearing or effect on future results. I certainly didn't think we would be discussing oscars grind, but that's ok. lol

The real purpose of my thread was to show how difficult the mental part of the game is. Here I find myself thinking about concepts that I know to be false, like a correction is due. Last summer while marred in a losing streak, I found myself question things I know to be true, like my style of play which had served me well for 5 and a half years up til that point and even the mathematics of card counting. It's almost like your mind plays tricks on you. Luckily, when these situations arise, I am able to go back and review and re-read some of the books in my library and information on the various site and reconvince myself of things I know to be true, or in this case false. I really was just wondering if anyone else experienced these situations.