[AaronBrown]

It might help a little or hurt a little, depending on your assumptions. It won't matter much. However, counting is easy to learn and you can disguise your counting as progressive betting.

For example, consider the simplified model that your probability of winning in blackjack starts out at 49% and moves up or down 0.5% at each hand. 20 hands are dealt between reshuffles. With fixed betting, you expect to lose 2% of each bet. So if you bet $25 per hand, you expect to lose $0.50.

With progressive betting I started with a $20 bet so the average bet size was the same in both schemes. That had a loss of $0.47 per hand.

I know this isn't realistic about blackjack, I'm just trying to demonstrate that you can gain a slight advantage from progressive betting if the winning percentage is a random walk.