Gross HA and net HA. Say what? It's what makes blackjack the best table game in the house.

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(Click on the image to enlarge it)

The above summary chart has an important story to tell, and I think you are going to like it.

Blackjack is unique among casino table games in that decisions the player makes after the hand has been dealt can make the difference between winning and losing.

Devotees of pai-gow poker (which has a 5.0% house edge and should be seriously considered only if you have money to burn) like to pretend that there is a smart way and a dumb way to play the game, but in fact, very little brain is required in the process.

What you see above confirms the wisdom of learning "The Book" of blackjack inside out and upside down to ensure optimal use of double/split opportunities.

I said in an earlier post that recovered or completed series in target betting split pretty much evenly between those that had more wins than losses, those that had an equal number of wins and losses, and those that had more losses than wins.

Statistically, that idea isn't rocket science, and when hands are treated as either wins or losses regardless of whether the final outcome is a multiple of the original bet because of doubles/splits or added revenue from a natural, you end up with marginally more loss-heavy series as in the column on the far right above.

Treating hands just as losses or wins makes a big difference: the GROSS AV from -1,-1,-1,-1,+2,+3 indicating a successful double-down, then a winning split+double is -2; the NET AV is +1.

I use the term "loss-heavy" because thanks to target betting, they are not losing series, in spite of the fact that more bets were lost than won.

As you can see, educated and experienced application of doubles and splits switches the bias from the house's favor to the players, and it does it consistently throughout more than 60,000 rounds of blackjack in the current trial.

Given a house edge at blackjack of about 1.0%, the odds of winning any given round are 49.5-50.5 AGAINST, but the number is complicated by the fact that roughly 20% more doubles/splits will win than will lose, hence the clear player advantage inherent in those opportunities.

My mythemaniac critics will counter that the quoted or known negative expectation (NE) for the game includes not just doubles/splits but extra money from naturals too. True or not, that's an irrelevance at the moment when you pull 6,6 against a 6, split them, catch a 5 on each, and double down twice in the hope of drawing two 10s.

At that point, you have 4x your original bet on the table. Are the odds still against you? You tell me! You will be too wound up sweating an extra fat bet to think about anything until the dealer busts.

(My best double/split experience was at Caesars Tahoe when I had 5x out against the dealer's 5 at a $100 table and he turned out to have another 5 under; I had four 20s and a 19; the dealer drew an 8. I don't remember my worst-case scenario, but isn't that always how it goes?).

There will always be people who will never believe anything I say and dismiss whatever supporting data I produce, but I suspect a good proportion of the critics who "flamed" me over the years did so from office desks inside casinos.

Here's another summary they won't believe (or will say they don't):-

(Click on the image to enlarge it)
My preferred spreadsheet program (vastly superior to Excel in almost every way) makes me split BST blackjack outcomes into chunks of around 8,000 per "session" and in the current trial, I'm now on #14.

As you can see, the GROSS AV is theoretically deadly at 5.4% and even the NET AV, at 0.7%, calls for an overall loss to date of $228,000 (action x -0.73%). Instead, target betting delivered a win of $1.58 million. There were some big bets along the way, including a 4x d/s on an original bet of $25,000, but target betting was never intended as a get-rich-quick guarantee for penny-pinched punters!

What matters is that the strategy ended up with a notional win worth more than 5.0% of its total action.

And a lot of it was thanks to well-timed and by the book application of splits and doubledowns.

An important reminder: The only person likely to make money out of this blog is you, Dear Reader. There's nothing to buy, ever, and your soul is safe (from me, at least). Test my ideas and use them or don't. It's up to you.
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