I was at a party for Halloween, and due to the nature of my friend group due to having experience as a professional poker dealer, I know a lot of people who gamble. While I’m vehemently against gambling myself, I hear stories all the time from specific individuals about how they’ve won so much money playing blackjack, and how they beat the house by counting the shoe, more popularly, the story about the team of individuals from MIT who “beat the house” by doing some incredible, complex math, seem to echo about everywhere when you talk to anybody about blackjack, or even just searching it.
I had to know, so I dove into the deep end, creating a blackjack simulator that allowed you to enter the amount of decks in a shoe, with tons of customization with different betting strategies, burn amounts, shuffle strategies, ranges, playing based off of true values, and more. I had to conduct serious research in how the game operated, deviations from normalcy, common betting strategies, advanced betting strategies, frequencies, and more. The betting and counting strategy I landed on using is called Wong Halves. Blackjack counting strategies are divided into different levels based on the complexity of the technique, and how granular the approach to counting is, and Wong Halves is a level 3 in complexity, meaning maximum. I also implemented several betting strategies using spreads, although I settled on a linear one in my upload on github.
Upon running several billion shoes worth of cards, in multiple configurations,with all possible modifications that the game could have, running betting strategies like the Kelly Criterion, Martingale, Parlay, Paroli, and Labouchere, and using game logic like Wong Halves, Silver Fox, and Revere RAPC, I can say with confidence, that I will never start gambling. Every simulation I had run was a complete bust. With any amount of realistic burn cards (20% of the deck typically on a 6 deck shoe), from my studies, it’s impossible to ever come out positive no matter what betting system is deployed.