I've developed a custom simulator that does a good job predicting freq, EV, and variance for blackjack and related games. I wrote my own software primarily to fully understand the game, as well as experiment with some more unusual games/strategies that aren't included in commercial sims. Plus, the programming was far easier than I expected. And fun. 
The next step is index generation. The software is simply a brute-force playing simulator. To brute-force index generation, it would be fairly simple to keep track of each hand composition, and the EV of each decision as a function of TC. Where the curves cross, there's the index.
The first obvious problem is that many hands are rare enough that unless I let the sim run for a long time, it's likely I won't have enough data to keep the error reasonably low. However, if these hands are rare, the index probably isn't that important anyhow. Plus, since I can run a billion hands in a few minutes, running a few trillion-hand simulations is really not that big of a deal.
My primary interest is shoe games, so using pure combinatorics is probably not that useful. Is this correct, or are there shortcuts that allow a reasonable estimation?
The other, simplest idea is to simply "guess" at a few indicies I care about (maybe those that come up the most), run a sim for each alternative, and compare the EV's directly. Is this reasonable? In shoe games, I suspect that the hands are independent enough to allow this to work without running a sim for every possible index combination. But the influence of each index might be so small as to be lost in the noise. (But if this is the case, why should I care about the index at all?)
I've read a few articles about index generation, but is there a "definitive" source that outlines the particulars of tried and true index generation methods that I should read before I dive in?
(Edit: Clean methods for EOR calculation would also be helpful!)
The next step is index generation. The software is simply a brute-force playing simulator. To brute-force index generation, it would be fairly simple to keep track of each hand composition, and the EV of each decision as a function of TC. Where the curves cross, there's the index.
The first obvious problem is that many hands are rare enough that unless I let the sim run for a long time, it's likely I won't have enough data to keep the error reasonably low. However, if these hands are rare, the index probably isn't that important anyhow. Plus, since I can run a billion hands in a few minutes, running a few trillion-hand simulations is really not that big of a deal.
My primary interest is shoe games, so using pure combinatorics is probably not that useful. Is this correct, or are there shortcuts that allow a reasonable estimation?
The other, simplest idea is to simply "guess" at a few indicies I care about (maybe those that come up the most), run a sim for each alternative, and compare the EV's directly. Is this reasonable? In shoe games, I suspect that the hands are independent enough to allow this to work without running a sim for every possible index combination. But the influence of each index might be so small as to be lost in the noise. (But if this is the case, why should I care about the index at all?)
I've read a few articles about index generation, but is there a "definitive" source that outlines the particulars of tried and true index generation methods that I should read before I dive in?
(Edit: Clean methods for EOR calculation would also be helpful!)
