Maximizing Blackjack Wins: The Science of Bet Sizing

perfect Blackjack skills without knowing exactly how to bet is just a waste of your time or even worse a waste of your bankroll but how do you know how much to bet at each true count in this video I'm going to show you how an optimized bet spread can help you both with game selection and in maximizing your profits at the blackjack [Music] table I'm calling from Blackjack apprenticeship and before I was running Blackjack apprentiship I was playing on and running Blackjack teams that have beaten casinos for roughly $4 million and one of the roles I had on these teams was putting together optimized bet spreads in our early days we just mimicked what we found in the Blackjack book that we read on card counting but as we got betting software we got more sophisticated and what we realized is that not all games and not all bet spreads are created equal there were certain places we were playing that even with a big bet spread it was an absolute waste of time we were gambling it best whereas other casinos if we really tweaked and refined our bet spread we could have a bigger impact on our win rate or expected value than we ever realized and like me countless aspiring card counters put together all the technical skills the basic strategy the counting the true Count the deviations that they just head to the casino and use whatever bet spread they come up within their head 1 to 5 1 to 10 1 to 20 not knowing really what they're doing and the impact it's having on their EV and their risk so to demonstrate I'm going to tell you about a guy we're going to call him Bob I don't want to use his real name but Bob trained through Blackjack apprenticeship he trained at home he even came to one of our boot camps and not only did he come to a boot camp he passed the test out if we have 20 people at a boot camp 10% of them maybe two of them pass the test out and to pass it you have to have a perfect game and he had a perfect game I hear from him a year later and he says Colin I've been playing full-time I've played 900 hours with back offs and travel and all that and I don't have any profits to show for it now 900 hours that's crazy you should have profits after 900 hours you should have profits after 500 hours unless you're just having some horrific losing streak I knew something was up and so I started digging in asking questions about where was he playing how is he betting what kind of conditions was he playing in and I started to develop a picture of what was going on to kind of show you both what was wrong as well as how we fixed it I'm going to bring you over to some betting software to demonstrate you need to be able to analyze how every condition and how you bet is impacting your EV and your risks this is our bang software it's called the pro bang software and it comes with our Blackjack appren membership but you can use cvcx or CV data which comes from qit let's talk about Bob's situation he had a $25,000 bankroll and he said he was using a 1 to10 bet spread with a $25 betting unit and as I dug in he told me the specific casinos he was playing and so I was able to look at the EV and what was interesting is that a professional card CER friend of mine had also been playing in this part of the country that same month and he said oh no I didn't play that place I went in there they were cutting off a little bit more deck penetration the rules weren't that good so the penetration was a little worse than you know I would recommend for Bob and the rules were okay they had resplit aces hit 17 game he was playing through negative counts so you can see here is his expected value it's just dropping his risk is going up but also he was playing a little bit more crowded tables we'll say four players on average well that's going to drop his rounds per hour as I'm starting to get this story from Bob I see look his EV with a $225,000 bankroll is $10 an hour his risk is Sky High and you know what it's going to take to get to the long run is just in incredible it's just not advisable here's our Varian visualizer after 900 hours at such a poor quality game you know anything can happen it's not absurd to you know like like in this situation to just not even really have profits after after all these hours he needs to have better game selection and so I told him look the region you're playing in there's a lot of casinos you can play but you can't play some of these ones that you are and so I knew that that in that same part of the country there were games that had much better deck penetration and even had surrender okay so things are starting to look better but still he needs to avoid those bad negative counts and he also needs a more optimized bet spread there are things he could do like look we barely have an edge at a true one I would wait for True two and if there's other players at the table it's ideal Don slesinger has pointed this out it's better to play two spots when you have the advantage with other players at the table you know what his risk is below 1% so he could even bump up his bets here in those those higher counts he could he could bump up sooner Al bet he could go up to 200 let's find out yeah 1.2% risk of Ruin and also really try to play with fewer players if he's playing with two players on average what this is going to do it to his rounds per hour it's a big impact and now he went from what 10 bucks an hour to $87 an hour 1% risk of Ruin and a much shorter long run overall well here's the next thing for Bob I said look if you're playing better games and more optimized bet spread you actually have the bank roll to play even better games there are regions in the country that have better penetration better rules and look what this did it bumped up the EV to 19 but if the risk is below 1% he can even be more aggressive about his betting he could do something more like bet 100 at three he's still under he's at 1% there and $130 an hour um and things are looking even better for him so what happened with Bob I told him he thanked me he said you know what you're right I have not been very selective about where I'm playing I'm falling into some of the traps that I knew not to do like more crowded tables and playing through negative counts and playing poor deck penetration poor rules I hear back from him a few months later and he said Colin I played 200 hours and I'm winning over100 an hour since then game selection an optimized bet spread took someone like Bob from $10 an hour to $130 an hour simply by knowing what games to attack and how to attack them even with good game selection and an optimized bet spread there is still variance to the game of blackjack as a card counter and to us variance is a four-letter word so to learn how to minimize your variance check out this video

Channel: Blackjack Apprenticeship

Views: 83,348

Keywords: Blackjack, blackjack apprenticeship, blackjack apprentice, colin jones, how to count cards, blackjack strategy, beat blackjack

Id: jWvkK_H0HEg

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 20 2023