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Old 01-08-2005, 03:44 AM
pzhon pzhon is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2004
Posts: 66
Default Re: BJ down swing- want to find out how rare of an event this is...

Without determining what criteria you used to separate this streak from the rest of your session, you can't say how unlikely it was. Why didn't you just talk about the one set of hands where you lost 18 bets? Did you not include other sets of 54 bets on either side because you won?

If you had played only these 195 hands, you would be down about 2.7 standard deviations (assuming a standard deviation of 1.17). Keep in mind that it is much more likely that you hit a bad streak at some point than that you get that streak in a prespecified set of hands.

If you want to collect useful data, determine what you are looking for before you start looking, or stick to very simple patterns.

I lost 21 hands of blackjack in a row (no ties, total loss 25 units) at one online casino. I had the casino verify the streak after 20 hands. However, I have played enough hands that it really wasn't much of a surprise to hit at least one losing streak of that length. By the way, I'm ahead by a lot at that casino despite the streak.
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