The sad reality of today's blackjack. Part I. Simulations versus short term A long time ago I do not write on the blog and the reasons are quite diverse but in general it's because I'm almost not playing: In central Europe most casinos and gambling houses use CSM with disgusting rules. In Eastern Europe and in the ex-Soviet countries, either the casinos have been bought by the big European chains or they are in the hands of the Russian mafias with conditions that are somewhat dangerous for advanced players. In Prague, which is my base of operations for my professional activities as a consultant engineer, the playing conditions have deteriorated enormously since the Czech Republic's total accession to the European Union. The few remaining sites with reasonable playing conditions were subject to fierce attacks by both US and Russian teams and the conditions obviously changed. Many of the good casinos have closed or have been sold to large European or Russian companies. In Venezuela, where legal regulation was somewhat opaque and the legality of casinos in Caracas and other important cities is always a problem of interpretation of the official on duty, most casinos and gambling houses have been closed. In summary both my professional activity and the general conditions practically do not play. In fact, some other night I'm going to play in Prague against the CSM where at least there are good rules S17 and ES10. Playing some smooth progression I spend a pleasant time, I disconnect and until sometime I leave with a juicy profit. I experienced this same situation three years ago in Brussels, at that time investigating the functioning of the CSM and working with a team to find a weakness I played many hours against them, flat or with simple progressions not very aggressive and it turned out that I won much more money than whoever won with a capital, a counting system and even advanced techniques like ST in normal shoe games. As above, there were very good rules compared to the rest of Europe. After reading some entries of excellent participants and moderators of the forum I have been motivated to write this article. The questions I want to answer are the following: Does it make sense to count cards, arm yourself and risk a capital for the eventual player? Is it possible for a lone (advanced) player to arm himself with a capital and go bust the bank? Maybe I disappoint many with my response and I may even win some enmities. After all these years I am definitely convinced of the following: The only way to beat the casinos is through team building. Counting is important but not vital for the solo player. Good rules and conditions of play are more important than counting for the eventual player. There are very few places in the world that have rules and conditions good enough for an AP (advanced player) to earn a lot of money alone. In general they are in remote places where the levels of bets are low and if there are no problems of insecurity, the possibility of changing the money, removing it from the country, etc., becomes complicated. The subject is long and will take several articles to expose everything. Simulations: The first thing I want to discuss is the subject of the simulations and the reality of the game. A simulation of billions of hands will result in an optimal betting ramp an appropriate point to enter and exit the game. We will also obtain an expectation of EV gain, the margin of the house for the game strategy. The simulation will give us other very important data such as the ROR or risk of ruin, the ROI or return of investment that for a specific ROR is the SCORE or estimated profit per 100 hands. Another important fact is the average bet and the most important one is the Standard Deviation. If we run the simulation several times we will obtain slightly different results with the same set of rules, players and number of hands. The greater the number of rounds in the simulations, the closer they will be to each other until they reach similarities to the fourth or fifth decimal. The short term versus the simulation: Suppose a player who goes to the casino 5 times a week and plays about 4 hours each time. (I know very few that are so constant) This represents 20 hours per week at the rate of 60 hands per hour would be 1200 hands per week. If you play for 50 weeks a year we are talking about 60,000 hands a year. Let's say that he is a player who will dedicate 30 years of his life to blackjack, that is, barely 1,800,000 hands for life. Any modern simulator does a billion rounds to get reasonable results. It would take about 500 lives of a fan like the one described above to play the same number of hands as the simulation. If we run 500 simulations of 1,800,000 hands with the same betting ramp
