Abstract
We assess a player’s long-term expected winnings or losses at the game of blackjack without knowing the strategy employed. We do this by comparing the player’s moves to those of a baseline strategy with known expected winnings. This allows an accurate estimate of the player’s expectation to be found hundreds of times faster than the naive approach of using the average winnings observed as an estimate.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Thomason, W.: The Ultimate Blackjack Book: Basic Strategies, Money Management, and More. Carol Publishing Group (1996)
Thorp, E.: Beat the Dealer. Random House (1962)
Baldwin, R., Cantey, W., Maisel, H., McDermott, J.: The optimum strategy in blackjack. Journal of the American Statistical Association 51, 429–439 (1956)
Heath, D.: Algorithms for computations of blackjack strategies. Presented at the Second Conference on Gambling, sponsored by the University of Nevada (1975), Available at http://www.bjmath.com
Benjamin, A., Huggins, E.: Optimal strategy with “lucky bucks”. The Journal of Undergraduate Mathematics and its Applications 14, 309–318 (1993)
Gordon, E.: Optimal strategy in blackjack. Claremont Economic Papers (1973)
Manson, A., Barr, A., Goodnight, J.: Optimum zero-memory strategy and exact probabilities for 4-deck blackjack. The American Statistician 29, 84–88 (1975)
Griffin, P.: The Theory of Blackjack, 6th edn. Huntington Press (1999)
Wong, S.: Professional Blackjack. Pi Yee Press (1994)
Kelly Jr., J.: A new interpretation of information rate. IRE Transactions on Information Theory 2, 185–189 (1956)
Thorp, E.: The Kelly criterion in blackjack, sports betting, and the stock market. Paper presented at The 10th International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking (June 1997) (Revised May 1998), in http://www.bjmath.com/bjmath/thorp/paper.html (1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wolfe, D. (2003). Distinguishing Gamblers from Investors at the Blackjack Table. In: Schaeffer, J., Müller, M., Björnsson, Y. (eds) Computers and Games. CG 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2883. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40031-8_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40031-8_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-20545-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-40031-8
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive