Newb Guide Questions

[DavidC]

(put the bottom on top)

Alright... after reading this, and writing this, I still have no idea what my bankroll requirements are if I want to start casino whoring blackjack. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

I figure that you have a certain bankroll required for $1 bets, a certain roll for $5 bets, etc.

Any idea how to figure this out?

--Dave.

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WR: Wager Requirement
HA: House Advantage

** I know that HA isn't nearly 1%, but the math is easier this way and it's better to give them more edge than less edge. **

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Reading the faq (link):

[ QUOTE ]
Q: I don't want to be a whiner. Is there a simple way for me to see how bad my blackjack session has gone before I start posting about it?

A: Sure. Translate everything into bets, so if you lose $500 in 1000 hands betting $10/hand, then that's 50 bets lost. Subtract off (number-of-hands)/200, or 5 in this example, giving 45 bets lost. Take the square-root of the number of hands (31.6 in this example) and multiply it by 1.14. Here that's 36. This is the standard deviation. Divide the number of bets lost by the standard deviation. 45/36 = 1.25.


[/ QUOTE ]

If when clearing a $2000 WR bonus, in $1 bets, you should bet 2000 times, see a STD DEV of:

2000^0.5 = 44-ish
* 1.14 = 51-ish units
= $51 * $1 bets...

Let's call $51 "B".

Assuming a HA of 1%, we lose $20, which is our starting point:

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Coming from this site about probability / stats (link):

[ QUOTE ]
One standard deviation away from the mean in either direction on the horizontal axis (the red area on the above graph) accounts for somewhere around 68 percent of the people in this group. Two standard deviations away from the mean (the red and green areas) account for roughly 95 percent of the people. And three standard deviations (the red, green and blue areas) account for about 99 percent of the people.

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To me, this means that I expect to be at Bonus-$20 (Let's call this "A") when I'm finished the bonus, but that:

34% of the time I'll be between "A" and "A"-"B".

13.5% of the time I'll be between "A"-"B" and "A"-2"B".

2% of the time I'll be between "A"-2"B" and "A"-3"B".

This is rough, as the numbers aren't exact on the distribution on a standard curve.

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[DavidC]

one bump

One experienced bonus hunter over at bonuswhores.com said something like if you have at least 5K to bonus whore with then $5 bets and up is ok, otherwise stick with $4 or less.
I don't know if that helped

[DavidC]

[ QUOTE ]
One experienced bonus hunter over at bonuswhores.com said something like if you have at least 5K to bonus whore with then $5 bets and up is ok, otherwise stick with $4 or less.
I don't know if that helped

[/ QUOTE ]

I found this: link

over there:

[ QUOTE ]
You ask very reasonable questions. Everyone should approach gambling in this fashion.

I approach this problem from an hourly wage point of view. I like to win $50/hr when I am playing. This doesn't count the time to start a new account and deal with customer service which drives the wage down.

To win $3.2K I want to spend 3200/50 = 64 hours playing.

I need to wager $96,000/64 = $1500 per hour to achieve this rate.

Number of wagers you can make per hour differs a lot by software, and how well you know the strategy. A very safe estimate would be 300 wagers/hour. So you need to wager $5/hand when you play. The smaller your bet size -- the smaller the hourly wage.

You will make bets on blackjack, but sometimes you will play video poker and other games with higher variance. Let's say an average SD is 1.5 bet per hand (SD=1.15 bet per wager in blackjack).

After you wager 96000, your SD will be sqrt(96000*5)*1.5 ~ $1000.

EV=$3200, SD=$1000 and the desired risk of ruin percentage allows you to calculate starting bankroll.

If RoR=0.1%, starting bankroll should be at least $1200.


[/ QUOTE ]

I haven't read it over completely yet, but I'll get there...

I just did a search for "bankroll" AND "blackjack" and ignored all the sticky stuff. When I'm ready for stickies I'll go back and search and read all the sticky stuff.

I use a similar approach actually. I estimate how many wagers I can make per hour.
If my EV for the bonus is $150 for example and I want to make $30/hr I know I have to meet the WR in 5hrs using $x bets to meet the WR.
It sill depends on the bankroll though. I'd like to make more than $50/hr but my flatbets would be way too high for my bankroll.

[DavidC]

Using the SD stuff from the OP, your SD/100 hands will be 11.4 bets from the mean.

This is about 2/3 the deviation that we see at poker, right?

So if Miller suggested a 500bb roll for poker, then we could maybe make due with a little less for blackjack... not sure though.

What I don't like is the idea of using the SD over the course of 2k hands to make our decisions... I mean, that doesn't really give us any sort of indication as to what would happen between starting the run and playing 2k hands, right, it only describes the "End Event" distribution.