Is It Worth Your Money? Is There a Way to Make Blackjack Insurance Worth It?

Overview

Objectives/Goals The objective of this project was to find out if making an insurance bet in blackjack was worth your money and if different deck sizes effected insurance bets. Methods/Materials When writing the porgram I made it so that a game of blackjack would be repeated 1 million times. When an option to get insurance came up four different stratagies would be used: Betting when you had no tens/face cards in your hand, betting with one ten/face card in your hand, betting with 2 tens/face cards in your hand and counting cards. Counting cards is when you count the total amount of cards and the amount of tens/face cards played. If the amount of facecards remaining is over 33% of the total cards left, you buy insurance. I did this in four different deck sizes: Normal(52 cards) Doubled(104 cards) Tripled(156 cards) and Quadrupled(208 cards) Results In the 52 card deck the no tens strategy lost you about 3 cents per bet. One ten lost you 9 cents, two tens lost you 14 cents and counting cards earned you about 13 cents. In a 104 card deck the no tens strategy lost you about 6 cents per bet. One ten lost you 9 cents, two tens lost you 11 cents and counting cards earned you about 11 cents. In a 156 card deck the no tens strategy lost you about 6 cents per bet. One ten lost you 9 cents, two tens lost you 7 cents and counting cards earned you about 11 cents. In a 208 card deck the no tens strategy lost you about 7 cents per bet. One ten lost you 8 cents, two tens lost you 10 cents and counting cards earned you about 10 cents. Conclusions/Discussion Using simple strategies(no tens, one ten, two tens strategies) were no good and lost you money. However, counting cards earned you about 10-13 cents a bet. Different deck sizes do make a difference. When counting cards or betting with no tens, its best to do with a 52 card deck. The one ten and two ten strategy works best with larger decks.

Competition history

• CSEF 2004 Mathematics & Software · Entry J1206

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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