The house ends up winning because if the player busts, the house wins regardless of whether the dealer later busts.

Quote:Original post by michael879The only reason I can think of is that it has something to do with the dealer going last. With multiple players, there tend to be more high cards than low cards when its the dealers turn since players tend to hit when they get a low card and stay or bust when they get a high card.

Yep thats it exactly, the dealers chance to win is greatly increased simply because he goes last and doesn't have to risk busting if the player busts before him. To balance this out the dealer is forced to draw until he reaches at least a certain value and has to stick the first time he reaches or exceeds that value. I've seen mathematical derivations of the odds before and playing with the base rules, one on one with the dealer, and with shuffles each hand, you'll get back 95.5% of your bets on average over a long session. All the extra rules they throw in that vary between casinos, such as splitting and doubling, only change these percentages by a very small amount and dont really impact the game too much.

With reagrds to multiple players you'll actualy find your chances get better the more players there are. Like you said, low value cards tend to get sucked out of the deck faster than high value cards. This means that with more players the deck will be stacked with a higher ratio of high value cards when it comes to the dealer. Since he must draw till he reaches or exceeds a threshold value (17 usualy) this increases his chance to bust. To try and counter act this the game will be played with multiple decks.

So if you want to beat the casino's here's how you do it. First off all you want to get the best base chance possible so pick the table with the most players, the least decks, and the dealer who shuffles the least. Whilst the deck is fresh bet the least amount you can and count up whenever a low card is drawn and down when a high card is drawn. The higher the count in your head the more heavily stacked the deck is with high cards increasing the dealers bust chance and hence your win chance. At a high enough count the money back percentage will increase above 100% and this is the point you increase your bets by a signifacant amount, enough to make back the losses during the infavourable period and net a profit too.

Quote:Original post by michael879
ah cool, ty. Forgot about busting. Anyone ever play blackjack online? they shuffle every hand but they only use 2 decks and you can play like 5 seats at once. I was thinking that since you know such a high number of the cards if you could write a program to calculate the most profitable play given the cards showing you might actually have an advantage over the house. I mean, the dealer shows 1 card so you start off with 11 cards showing. thats like 1/10 of the deck. Then on average you end up with about 3 cards so by ur 5th seat there should be 15 cards showing.

Yup I play a bit of blackjack now and then and I had the same thought. The problem with playing online though is that in order to win you need to know the count before the bet so you know whether to bet high or low. Since the count is reset each hand though due to the shuffle you can never do this (remember that all seats must bet before any cards are dealt). After all, if you could find an online casino where its possible to get the better of them with the odds I garauntee you they wont be around for long ;).

You could but it wouldn't do you any good since you only want to bet high when the count is in your favour. For all you know when the bids are placed the count might go down with each hand you play meaning you have less chance to win with your big bet on the last hand than you did with your small bet on the first hand. See? Even if the count did go up its extremely unlikely you'd get a high enough count by your last hand to tip the odds in your favour.

Trust me there's no way to beat the system. If there were there wouldn't be any online casinos left.

[Edited by - Motorherp on June 28, 2006 4:42:24 AM]