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blackjack session variance and whether this actually follows statistics

so i’m running my usual low stakes grind, playing six deck, s17, das, and tracking everything on this crusty notepad, because i trust paper more than apps. i get that blackjack’s supposed to be all math and odds and long run and blah blah blah, but my session results are a fever dream. i’ll have 5-6 sessions where i’m just eating losses and the free potato chips like they’re required, then out of nowhere a big upswing that wipes out all the losses plus a weird profit. then another cold run like the universe is keeping a ledger.

i’m starting to feel like the “law of large numbers” is some cruel inside joke at my expense. i know swings are normal and “variance” is the buzzword, but honestly sometimes it feels like each shoe has a personal vendetta. for you regular grinders, do your tracked results ever actually line up with what statistics says you’re supposed to get session by session, or is it just endless streaky chaos that only looks tidy on a graph after 10,000 shoes? how close do you guys really see your numbers getting to the expected edge over time?

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5 comments
C
7,115••2 replies

kinda no, but also ur giving way too much respect to the word session imo. session is just when u got hungry or tired or the pit got annoying. the cards dont know u stood up. thats the part that messes people up more than variance talk. i do qa for a living, if i chop a noisy process into dumb little buckets and then stare at each bucket like it owes me meaning, of course it looks broken. same thing here. six deck s17 das can still feel stupid for a long time bc ur sample per session is tiny unless ur glued there forever. poker guys at least get to pretend decisions create neat stories. blackjack mostly just hands u a receipt and says deal with it. if u want ur notes to say anything, track hours and hands played, not vibes and whether the chips felt cursed. otherwise its just potato chip accounting tbh 😑

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M
338•

exactly

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A
1,077•

Live Dealer makes this feel worse, honestly. Watching elite blackjack crawl hand by hand had me thinking patterns were real when it was just boring old variance.

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T
1,515•

Lol session by session? No, not in any way that feels human. The thing that cleaned this up for me was quitting multi-hand blackjack, because spreading to “speed up the math” just made the swings feel like slots with better branding, lmao, and insurance is still trash!!!

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M
1,058•

Yeah, session by session it’s basically haunted. My notepad only started looking “statistical” after an embarrassing amount of shoes. Before that even good double downs felt like jokes 🙂

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