Abstract:
This paper will discuss the important elements of blackjack and give insight as to the best strategy for bets and game decisions that one can play. There are many strategies that people can find in literature, online, and on television. The goal of this paper is to show that the optimal strategy combines the use of basic Strategy, first developed by Edward Thorpe, and card counting. Many other strategies might seem to be foolproof but, in the long run, most of these strategies will only make a player lose more money.A computer simulation was written to simulate a real life game for a Basic Strategy player, a hi-low card counter, and a player who uses the Martingale betting strategy. The Martingale strategy is just one of the many betting strategies that seem to be better than the Basic Strategy, but only make a layer worse off in the long run. The program was set up to run large numbers of trials to get a good estimate of the long-term advantage (or disadvantage) of a player in a game. The results of this program along with statistics found through research are shown and analyzed in this paper.
