The risk of overbetting and the tupsy-turvy logic thereof

Saturday, November 05, 2016

The risk of overbetting and the tupsy-turvy logic thereof

I was watching a player the other day who was betting at levels he wasn’t comfortable with, between £75 and £150 per hand. How did I know he was uncomfortable? During the time I watched him he did not make a single double or split, and there were several occasions were even a typical non-optimal player would have put out the extra bet.

The confused rationale is easy enough to see: "I'm already betting outside my comfort zone; any more and I'll have way too much riding on this hand; I can't take the risk - I'm not doubling / splitting".

A little bit of analysis reveals the topsy-turvy confusion of this thinking: when you make a bet at that start of a round of blackjack the casino has an advantage to the tune of around 0.5%, assuming optimal strategy. At one hand in every 200 that's not a huge advantage, but it's still a losing proposition for the player. The double down, when correctly played, is a unique bet - it carries a player advantage. This is the one and only bet in the casino that you can make in the knowledge that it is you, not the casino, that profits. By simply hitting when doubling is optimal you still average a profit, but it is less than the double.

What almost invariably happens after the player has refused the double and concluded that round of play? He goes on to make another bet, usually exactly the same size as his last bet and, as such, no smaller than the double down wager he refused. The player plays on and on making initial bets that favour the casino, and every opportunity he gets to put out a bet no bigger than his initial one and where he has the advantage, he refuses it. He bets exclusively when the casino has the best of it, and never bets when he has. This is the precise, one hundred percent polar opposite of what is in his best interests. It's like walking along a street picking up stones, twigs and other worthless items, and every time you see a coin someone has dropped, you ignore it.

The same concept is at play with splits, although splitting often entails decreasing your disadvantage rather than betting into an advantage. But in any event, correct splitting always carries greater value for the player than not splitting.

Of course, almost no recreational player is able to articulate the exact reason for doubling, that of extracting greater profit value from the hand than is available from hitting alone. Most players just think of doubles as "a good bet", and can be forgiven to a degree for not appreciating the extremely counter-productive nature of the play described above. But it remains extraordinary when a player, over the course of making negative value initial wager after negative value initial wager, refuses any and all opportunities to make positive value bets.

The solution to the dilemma is to never bet so much that will cause you to baulk at the prospect of at least doubling your bet. In fact, you should confidently be able to have at least four bets on the felt at any one time, on those occasions where you split and are confronted with a double on each new hand.

More simply: train yourself to never deviate from basic strategy.

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1 Previous Comments

Know the game. Know the math. Discipline discipline discipline. Not my thing haha.

By Sandracer, at 12:47 am

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