Quote from: 21pilot on June 25, 2014, 12:52:22 PM

with game theoretical optimal approach there are several casinos where black jack has a house advantage of only 0.17 %

Of course not many real casinos (if any) offer single deck black jack anymore. I guess the standard is six decks at least where I live.

Well nobody would dare play single deck blackjack anymore. Original card counting could be done so efficiently that if you had a good couple of hands you could make a mint if the last part of the deck had a high count. Also with a full blackjack table you might run out of cards on the second deal, which means you would have to use a new deck after every deal.

But there are electronic games of blackjack which shuffle the decks after every deal so card counting is impossible. But with good basic strategy the HE is under 1%. Casinos usually make up the difference because most people don't play basic strategy, but prefer to play with their gut. But no casino today is going to let you play blackjack for the dollar equivalent of 250BTC.

I said that the best HE for a game of chance in a Brick and Mortar casino is 1.4141%. One casino in Vegas was famous because for decades if you bet $5 at 1.4141% they would let you bet up to $500 at zero house edge. But these are tricks. There are only 8 to 10 positions at the casino where you can do this, the thousands of other people in the casino all have to play games with terrible house edge. You can't offer a teaser game online, as there is no place to go. Your whales will bust you.

By October 5th of 2013 3.94 million BTC had been wagered. Applying the daily USD/BTC exchange to each days wagered I get $461.7 million. The estimates is that 2.5 million BTC were wagered by Nakowa. The peak wagering day was almost $200 million (over 1.5 million BTC) . The total profit had just returned to zero.

The entire rest of the year from October 5th only 1.4 million BTC were gambled. Of course that was more money in USD. But without the really big whale profit was well over the expected value of 1%.

Nakowa spent one long period controlling his bets so that they were 40 BTC or less, and was still winning. The surest defense is to raise HE a little. Although the number 1.98% and 2.0% has been suggested, dooglus seems to want to offer the best game on the web. A HE of 1.4% seems to be a good compromise.

The Old traditional casinos in downtown Las Vegas had about $6.7 billion in wagers in the last 12 months, but excluding slot machines it was $1.1 billion (consistent with JD). These casinos made $132 million on those games or (11.8%). So they made about 33X times the return as the 0.358918% of JD.