A.P Heat

Red Flex Bet (RF) is a side bet for the blackjack variant “Pure 21.5 Blackjack” that is played in California card rooms. This side bet can also work as a side bet for ordinary blackjack, though I am not aware of any blackjack placements. I am also not aware of any placement outside of California card rooms.

Some blackjack side bets are so obviously countable that extraordinary measures must be taken to protect games where they are offered. Ordinary blackjack Insurance is such a wager (see this post). Insurance is simply a side bet paying 2-to-1 that the dealer’s down card is ten-valued.

Back in 2003, when I was still a player, I advocated playing against the Lucky Ladies (LL) bet. Back then, there were a few great opportunities, particularly in Washington State. In early October, 2003, I stumbled on a variation of the LL concept on the tables at the Plaza casino in downtown Las Vegas.

One of the first games I posted about on this blog was the blackjack side bet Twenty One Plus Three (21+3). In this post, I showed that there was very little possible profit against 21+3, even using perfect play.

The Upcard Luck (UL) blackjack side bet is a bit wacky to describe. Payouts are based on the dealer's up-card together with the two cards the player is dealt. In this sense, it is similar to both Lucky Lucky and 21 + 3. There would certainly be intellectual property issues if this bet made it big. Right now, though, it has very few placements.

“Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” – Unknown (not Groucho Marx)

A long long time ago, in a casino far far away, there was a blackjack side bet called “Over/Under 13” (OU13). The player had the opportunity to wager that his two cards would total more than 13 (Over) or would total less than 13 (Under). A total of 13 lost for both wagers. These were even-money wagers, nothing fancy.

In this blog post I explained edge sorting. For many years I have looked at the back of the playing cards Harrah's uses and wondered if it was feasible to edge sort those. Harrah's uses several different designs for their backs.

The table game Caribbean Stud (CS) used to be among the most popular of all proprietary table games in this country. In 1994, there were 167 tables of CS in Nevada.  By the year 2000, that number dropped to 97 tables. In 2009 there were only 15 tables left.

In this post, I gave details about edge sorting Mississippi Stud (MS) by considering the sort where Jacks are oriented in one direction, while non-Jacks are oriented in the opposite direction. The question arises if there is an improvement over the Jack/non-Jack sort? Can the AP do better than 39.489%?

When loss rebates are offered as a strict rebate on total losses, without a time or play requirement, practically any game can be beaten. Roulette takes this theorem to the extreme, giving absurdly short average play times. This implies pure hit-and-run style play for the AP.

I thought I had completed my work on loss rebates when I published the First Loss Rebate Theorem (LRT1) in this post. Then my dog gave me a good idea on how to get a closed form for the quit-win and quit-loss points and it worked.

I recently went to Gambler's General Store in Las Vegas and looked through their cards for sale. I segregated the cards by the pattern on the back-side and purchased one deck for each unique distinct design I observed. Altogether, I purchased 14 decks.

Casinos use loss rebates as an incentive to draw high-limit play. The player who wins gets to keep 100% of his winnings. The losing player is given back a certain percentage of his losses as a direct cash rebate. Typical rebates range from 5% up to 20%, depending on the player’s bankroll and average bet.

This post concerns significant errors in the article “Examining a Gambler’s Claims: Probabilistic Fact-Checking and Don Johnson’s Extraordinary Blackjack Winning Streak,” written by W.J. Hurley, Jack Brimberg and Richard Kohar [HBK]. This article appeared in the February, 2014 issue of CHANCE magazine, Vol. 27, No. 1, pages 31-37.