Hacker News Reader

Comment by alpad | Hacker News Reader

The article is a bit confusing. If I take it correctly, a few casinos offered him nearly 50:50 odds, and a discount on his losses if he lost more than ~500k. In other words, a great deal, worth ~$50k. And then he proceeded to have amazing games, winning millions by sheer luck. The article doesn't talk much about the luck this requires, and one wonders if he does have something else going on.

View on HN

As far as the "luck" goes nothing is recounted of the nights when he didn't win big. This all took place over 4 months and while he didn't gamble every night he didn't just gamble once at each place.

Probably his nights while he had the discount followed a normal distribution with most of them break evenish but as explained losses were cut off around 400K and winning streaks were allowed to spiral.

I don't really see luck being a major factor. In the long run he's going to have a blockbuster night and then get kicked out of each place just like he did.

Good point, to summarise, nothing was said of his actual profits in applying his strategy over the duration of the events.

The article makes it clear that he's very good at the odds of Blackjack. It was a bit confusing when it described the difference between the odds-sheets given by the casino and his method. But, basically, he follows optimal betting technique for every card played.

The negotiation on the rules of the game is key. For example the difference between a 'soft 17' and a 'hard 17' is worth a few percentage points, and those points are valuable.

No it's not. Soft 17 is worth approx. 0.25% on the house edge. Even in Vegas, it's not hard to find 0.50% edge blackjack, even at low stakes.

I've literally never been in a casino where a dealer can hit anything soft, or where a player can't. Admitedly I've never been in a US casino.

The difference between dealer play on soft 17s is worth a few 10ths of a percentage point, not a few percentage points.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com