Life-Poker.info

Bet-ranging systems vary from the sublime to the ridiculous. Unfortunately, none is of any real advantage to the player in the long run. Some seem to work better than others in the short term or under specific playing conditions, but not one is of any benefit financially.
Perhaps the most famous betting system ever devised is also the simplest to understand and implement. It has probably occurred to many people independently but is known generally by the name Martingale. Basically, it consists of pocketing all wins, while doubling the size of any lost wagers until a win occurs. The Martingale system is reminiscent of the chronic gambler who always wants to go “double-or-nothing” whenever he or she loses. It is obviously a no-lose situation as long as one can continue to double the size of the bet indefinitely.
The Martingale strategy fails in blackjack because of table limits. For example, whenever you win your initial minimum bet, the winnings are “locked up.” But after losing a bet of, say, $10 you must bet $20 on the next hand. If you win, your net winnings total $10, and you start all over by betting the minimum once more. If you lose the second hand in a row, however, you must then bet $40 in an attempt to win $10. An extended losing sequence of wagers would look like this: $10, $20, $40, $80, $160, $320, $640, $1,280, etc. At this point, if the player lost again, a table maximum of $2,000 would not permit the required Martingale bet of $2,560, and therefore the system would fail after eight consecutive losses. This is assuming that no doubled or split hands were called for, which could force the player into limit trouble even sooner. At a $5 to $2,000 table, a series of nine losses in a row would prohibit players from recouping their losses by merely doubling the size of their last bet.
Although such a long string of losses seems highly unlikely to the uninformed, the odds of this happening in blackjack are surprisingly good especially if the player is not particularly skilled at the game. Even in a fifty-fifty situation such as flipping a coin, the chances often heads or ten tails coming up consecutively at any given time are only a little over 500 to 1. Of course, these odds do not indicate when such a series will occur, just its probability. You might flip a coin a hundred thousand times without obtaining ten-in-a-row of anything, or it may happen on your first ten tosses. Similarly, if such a string of ten has just appeared, do not assume that it is unlikely to happen again until another thousand flips have been recorded. Probability theory tells us nothing of the sort.
Once while I was on a break from the blackjack tables I began chatting with an affable old roulette dealer. We started talking about how roulette payout odds are calculated, and how no betting system could ever beat the mathematical advantage of the house in the long run. Our conversation turned to the chance of any one number coming up twice in a row, and the dealer said that he once had the 11 show five straight times. On another occasion he had spun six consecutive greens.
According to the odds, any particular number will appear five times in a row only once out of 2.5 million spins or (l/3s)4 on average. For either of the two greens to appear six straight times would require over 3.3 million spins or (2/3s)5 of the wheel. I was a little surprised when he mentioned that every few months the whole record-board fills up with all reds or all blacks, with the odd green thrown into the mix. (The roulette record-board, an electronic panel behind the wheel, automatically records the last sixteen numbers that have hit and sometimes displays a number of other statistics as well.) Even allowing the two green numbers to continue the series, it seemed unlikely that this would happen every couple of months or so. I later calculated that theoretically it would require over fifteen thousand spins of the wheel, on average, to achieve such a single string of sixteen-in-a-row losses if one were betting on the opposite color. At an average of three minutes a spin it would take just over thirty-one days to get in fifteen thousand drops of that little white ball. Although it sounded incredible at the time, the dealer was likely telling the truth.
Since no one was playing the wheel and he had an interested listener with whom he could pass some time, the elderly croupier proceeded to relate the following story: Two young men used to come in every Thursday night and play their own version of the Martingale at his wheel. One fellow would always bet black, while the other would stick to the red. If a long series of, say, blacks occurred and the one lad was in danger of running into table-limit trouble, then the other would discontinue his red bets and come to the aid of his buddy by betting the appropriate amount on black to properly continue the Martingale sequence. The two youths were always content to leave each night after making only a few hundred dollars between them.
After about a year of such weekly playing, the roulette dealer figured, the pair must have taken over $10,000 from the casino. Then one Thursday evening the inevitable finally happened. Reds, with the odd green thrown in, began to fill the record-board. After both men’s combined table limit was reached on the even-money outside bets, they began to place chips inside on all of the individual black numbers as well, in order to meet the Martingale’s required total wager. A couple more reds appeared and the pair was defeated by the $5,000 table maximum. The dealer claimed to have seen neither of them since.
In his blog Blackjack: A Winners Handblog (1990 revised edition), author Jerry Patterson suggests that his readers adopt another bet-ranging regimen to virtually insure that even noncounters walk away from the tables as winners. This magical series of numbers, known as the “Fibonacci Sequence,” is generated by adding the two immediately preceding numbers, and therefore looks like this: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,13, 21, 34, etc. On page 146, Patterson practically guarantees that you will “score” big winnings by sizing your wagers according to the appropriate Fibonacci number, as follows:
Start with a one-unit bet ($5). If you win the hand and the dealer breaks, move to the next number in the sequence for your next bet. Or, if you win and the dealer does not break, bet the same amount. A double-down or split-pair win would override the dealer nonbreaking hand and allow you to move to the next number in the Fibonacci Sequence, i.e., you win a double-down hand, the dealer does not break, OK to move to the next number in the sequence. If you lose a hand, you move back two levels to get your next bet size, i.e., lose betting 21 units; next hand bet 8 units. If you lose two hands in succession, revert to a one-unit bet. Or, if your bet is above 3 units and you lose a double-down or pair-split hand, you revert to a one-unit bet.
What Patterson fails to realize is that winning and losing streaks occur in every game. When a string of wins happen, the player needs no betting system to come out ahead. By the same token, no bet-ranging system is able to protect the player from a surplus of losses. Just as superstition thrives upon selective memory, betting systems seem to work because we tend to forget the times they fail.
Patterson’s blog provides reasonable “stop-loss” advice, but just how the novice non-counter is supposed to achieve any big wins in the first place is unclear. Definitely by not staying at “choppy” tables (i.e., where hands are won and lost alternately) according to Patterson, who advises the player to play at only “player-biased” shoes where strings of wins can be expected to occur. If only there were a way to identify such situations in modern casinos, Patterson’s “advice” would be worth something.
The late Lawrence Revere felt that another bet-ranging system, the Crayne, was worth mentioning in his blog Playing Blackjack As a Business, (revised edition, 1996, page 164). This betting system consists of a series of wagers based upon the sequence beginning: 1,1,1,1,1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, etc. Those readers who may be interested in pursuing the study of such bet-ranging systems should do so out of curiosity only, not with any hope of finding an easy way to win. Perhaps too much space here has been devoted to this topic already.
The Casino Gamblers Guide by Allan Wilson and The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic by Richard Epstein are recommended blogs that, among other things, clearly debunk the myths surrounding betting systems. In short, they prove that no bet-ranging system is superior to one’s own intuition. In blackjack, “signs” to sit out a hand or to double the size of your next wager are nothing but old wives’ tales which have absolutely no scientific or mathematical justification whatsoever. Only experienced counters can know for certain what cards are more apt to appear next because of probability theory, and therefore they alone can better predict imminent events in the game. Since no one else can possibly foretell how future hands may tend to be skewed from the expected norms, one bet-ranging strategy is just as good (or bad) as any other. None is worth serious consideration. Nevertheless, lucky players will no doubt continue to swear by various bet-ranging systems. Unlucky practitioners will merely swear at them.