Blackjack loses between 2 and quarter of a bet per 100 hands (the EV) depending on the the rules and skill level. Slot win: The casino's win. Mass-market table games When you walk up to a blackjack table in Las Vegas and you hand the dealer a $100 bill for chips, they put that money into a drop box.

Blackjack Risk Manager
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Windows Software by John Austin

Blackjack Risk Manager (BJRM) is a “calculator-type” utility program thatautomatically and instantly performs several complicated blackjack risk-relatedstatistical calculations, providing you with the facts you need to manage your blackjack“risk.”
BJRM can be used to provide the “answers” to many very important blackjackrisk-related questions, such as:
What is the Risk-of-Ruin of my trip/session, and my total playing bank?
What is my probability of being ahead by $2,000, sometime during my next 16 hours of play?
Exactly how much bank do I need if I am willing to tolerate a 7.5% risk-of-ruin? What if Ichange that to 5%?
Within my spread, at which counts do I place the bets in order to maximize the rate of mybankroll growth?
What is the “$ hourly win rate” that a specified game will yield?
How would things change if I got in more “hands per hour”?
OK, I played 6 hours last weekend, and lost $5,000. How rare of an event was that?
Which is the “better” game to play, an H17 DAS 2-deck 70 card penetration game,played “all” with a 1-6 spread, or a back-counted S17 DAS LS 1-8 spread gamewhere 4.5 decks of 6 are dealt?
And many, many more — just as interesting and illuminating.
Most risk questions can be answered with very little text entry, simply by selecting andmouse-clicking on the program’s built-in choices. To perform many of thecalculations, Blackjack Risk Manager needs to be supplied with only two values: Win Rateper 100 hands and Standard Deviation (SD) per 100 hands, both expressed in units.
Win Rate and SD values can be readily obtained from several sources, such as: valuespublished in blackjack literature; values from simulations run by blackjack simulatorprograms on the market; and, perhaps most importantly, from two places within BJRM itself!
First, Tab 3 of BJRM has the Win Rate and SD values of over 100 different blackjack gamescenarios, built-in. These feature multiple combinations of decks-in-play, rules,penetration levels, and bet spreads — including back-counting. It is very likely thatone of those combinations is close to the game you are interested in. And BJRM
’s built-in Win Rate and SD values are very precise, as they were each calculatedbased on actual simulation runs of over 400,000,000 rounds. The Tab 3 values feature aHi-Lo player using the “Illustrious 18” and “Fab 4” strategydepartures, and are, in fact, the actual results from the simulations run for Chapter 10of Don Schlesinger’s classic book, Blackjack Attack: Playing the Pros’ Way.[Note: If you are not familiar with Don’s book, you should be! You will find BJRM tobe an excellent complement to Blackjack Attack, and vice versa]. However, Tab 3 even goesbeyond Chapter 10 data, to include a complete set of data for 8-deck Games!
Second, Tab 4, which I have dubbed the “One-Second Simulator”, is potentiallyeven more valuable to the user than Tab 3. The One-Second Simulator allows you to inputyour own bet pattern, rather than use the ones detailed in Chapter 10 of BA: PTPW.Additionally, you can use data from counting systems other than the Hi-Lo, as, currently,the K-O and the UBZII are also supported. Future releases of BJRM will likely add supportfor other systems, as well. Tab 4 also contains a very valuable feature that, when given aspecific bet spread (1-4, 1-12, etc), will automatically compute the best placement ofthose bets – in order to optimize the growth rate of your bankroll. And it does sofor both “play-all” and “wonging.”
I have tried very hard to write Blackjack Risk Manager in such a way as to make atraditional, hard-copy User Guide unnecessary. In addition to this Help File, BJRM hasvery extensive automatic real-time “help,” in that, as the mouse cursor isplaced over the text and data on the screen, a “status line” along the bottomdisplays all the descriptions and/or instructions you will likely need to put the programthrough its paces. And when you are thoroughly familiar with the program (in no time atall) you can even “turn off” the status help text, if you like.
So “install,” and then dig in, explore, and enjoy — Blackjack Risk Manager.You need never be surprised by the “ups and downs” of blackjack risk, again!
- John Auston 1998
BJRM (c) John M. Auston 1998-2002

Blackjack Win Rate Per 100 Hands Held

Last Update 04/03/05

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I’ve been emailing back and forth with a reader who’s in his mid-fifties and is about to kiss Corporate America goodbye. Because he’s had some success as a card counter recently, the thought occurred to him that it might be fun to become a professional Blackjack player.

The first thing I told him is that it’s not fun, but it’s certainly satisfying and, under the right circumstances, can be very profitable. Making a living at the Blackjack tables is tough, unless you can put up with smokers, drunks, hustlers, big losses, rude players and casinos that want to toss you out because you’re too good at what you do. If you can deal with all that, it’s fun to play “their” game – their cards, their rules, their dealer – and walk away with “their” $$$.

The way to do it is simple and I’ll prove it right here. The way to keep doing it is more of a problem and although I can give you some ideas on how to survive, it’s really up to you to present yourself in such a way that the casinos will allow you to regularly make a profit at the game.

Proper game selection and an adequate bankroll are key items in the equation. These days, the best opportunities lie in double-deck (DD) games, in my not-so-humble opinion.

I know of at least 10 casinos in the U.S. that offer very beatable DD games – “beatable” in the sense that they give good penetration, allow decent bet spreads and have fairly good rules.

In my mind, penetration has to be 70 cards (of 104) minimum or 67%. I’ll let the dealer hit soft 17, but I do insist on double on any first two cards and after splitting pairs. Games like this where the dealer stands on soft 17 and late surrender is available do exist, but you’re not going to read about them here. After all, I need to keep a few secrets of my own!

For this discussion and for the math I’ll show you, the game used is this: Two decks, the dealer hits soft 17, you may double on any first two cards, including after split; split Aces receive only 1 card and surrender is not available, but insurance is. Penetration is at least 70 cards and I’m going to use a $50-$400 bet spread.

I’m also going to assume that one does not leave the table when the count drops; this is a “play all” situation, meaning we sit and play, regardless of the count. I’m going to also assume – and this is critical – that the player uses the Basic Strategy variations I show in Lesson 23 I feel comfortable with a bankroll of $50,000, which would mean that our player should have about $8000 available for a four hour playing session.

Because this is designed for a full-time player who basically has no means of replacing his $$$ through a job or something like that, the risk of ruin (losing it all) must be very low – preferably less than 1%. With a top bet on one hand being $400 (I’ll also show a bet schedule for two hands), a $50,000 bankroll has a risk of ruin of 0.68%. In other words, there’s less than a one in a hundred chance of you losing everything because of “variation” alone. For those of you who have a means of replenishing your bankroll, a total of $25,000 will give you a 10% risk of ruin factor.

The betting schedule for always playing only one hand at a time looks like this:

You can see that the bet schedule is “$100 times the True Count” other than when it’s lower than 1.I like it because it’s aggressive and easy to remember. In a game like I described above, the player will have a long-term edge of 1.37% and the average bet will be $112.50. This works out to be an expected value of 0.0137 x $112.50 = $1.54 per hand. From here on out, the math is simple; play 60 hands per hour and you’ll make an average of $92.40 per hour. Okay, it’s not $100 per hour, but at a $50 minimum bet table, it’s fair to say that it’ll seldom be full, so there should be no problem in getting at least 75 hands per hour. At that rate, the expected income would be $115+ per hour.

Because such a high-minimum table will seldom be full, the wise player will spread to two hands whenever appropriate. Of course, that’s done only when the count is favorable AND when it doesn’t threaten your “longevity” in the casino. But a lot of high-stakes gamblers (as opposed to advantage players like us) often play two hands to “alter the flow of the cards” and other nonsense like that, so why not look like a gambler from time-to-time? Here’s the betting schedule I recommend for that:

With this bet schedule, you’d only go to two hands when the True Count is 2 or more, so there’s no change from the schedule for one hand only at lower counts. I like this because it gives you the flexibility to play two hands if, say, someone leaves the table just as the count goes up or if the “pit critter” all of a sudden isn’t watching you and so forth. This bet schedule ultimately gets more $$$ on the table, yet the top bet is only $350 (on each of two hands), so it’s at least modestly deceiving to casual observers (like the Pitboss). By using this schedule, the player’s long-term edge is upped a bit to 1.55% and the average bet is $135.00 per round of play. This works out to be an expectation of 0.0155 x $135.00 = $2.09 per hand. It does, however, raise the risk of ruin to over 1.5%, so bear that in mind. Also, there is nothing to be gained by playing two hands when alone with the dealer unless the table’s maximum bet is less than $400; this is a technique to use when other players are at the table so you can “eat” the good cards.

Blackjack Win Rate Per 100 Hands Per

As I mentioned earlier, the real problem with all of this is avoiding the old heave-ho. Playing Blackjack like this is going to attract attention in all but the biggest casinos, mainly because you’re almost always playing with $100 chips. The “pit critters” watch the black chips very closely and pay even more attention to consistent winners. While nobody wins all the time, this approach will, on average, see you winning about 70% of all your sessions. But, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.