Blackjack & Card Counting Pro

After tracking statistics over 10,000 hands dealt and calculating likelihoods for losing streaks, dealer card supremacy, and lack of winning streak for the player, I can say that the variance is four or five standard deviations from the mean on all of these fronts. If it was just me and it was a few hundred or a couple thousand hands I would just write it off as a fluke, but it’s over 10,000 hands now and the reviews are full of people experiencing this behavior. Card shuffling is hard. Developers talk about random number generators but that’s one of the least relevant factors in how bias shows up in computer blackjack. The most basic algorithm has a built in bias due to the pigeonhole principle. The correct algorithm produces completely random sequences from one of the 52! permutations of possible card orderings but is nothing like how cards are shuffled in real life and is unnatural. This leads to all kinds of sequences you are almost never likely to see in real life play at a casino. Then there’s how shoe shuffling works and what happens at the end of the shoe. Does a brand new set of cards get initialized and then shuffled or does it used the shoe that was just dealt and shuffle it? Think about what happens in real life when cards slowly develop a patterned ordering based on play and then have sequences that still remain in a loosely ordered fashion after a shuffle. The defaco shuffling algorithm destroys all of that and pulls another random sequence from the giant 52! state space. The developer may write off my review like others where what I’ve experienced is blamed on variance. But I hope others that see this feel validated about their own experiences and complaints. If the dev is serious about the product they will publish more details about their shuffling and dealing algorithms and rng. And they will also look more deeply into these complaints and maybe consult someone with a deeper math background to help.

^^

This is a fantastic app and very well done. I’ve been working to perfect Basic Strategy and am looking forward to learning deviations. I hope to one day get walked out of a casino. 😁 One minor improvement would be to allow easier entry on betting, instead of tapping the “chips.” A simple free-form entry would suffice. Thanks to the developer for the reply and excellent work on the app. Kudos.

The interface and user experience is good but it needs a setting to practice specific subsets of basic strategy. There is wayyyy to much variation for a beginner. You need a setting where the “deck” constantly forces the same hand with a different dealer up-card to practice what to do with a hard 12 and dealer is showing *whatever* and that’s how to memorize what to do. And then when I start getting those right most of the time I can select something different like hard 13 or whatever and practice what to do with different dealer up cards, etc. Then I can turn more and more of these on until it eventually gets to where the app currently is, practice real black jack with a normal deck and now that I have the basic strategy memorized I can actually try to apply it.

This app is great I just don’t understand why they don’t have the option to do single deck

It’s great how simple this app is to build a memory of hands. the dealer has insane luck. i played everyday with real cards and it’s balanced. this app is not. the dealer constantly gets exact what they need. and when you follow the guide it almost always turns out bad. i feel like something is a bit off. maybe not and i’m too focused on it but i never have these experiences when playing with real cards. your balance will consistently tank if you follow the guide.

Easy to use yet very deep. I don’t have any complaints, only wishes. I wish there was a basic strategy/deviations chart overlay or some kind of active indicator that shows the optimal move based on the current cards. It would be a kind of training wheels and defeat the purpose of the drills but it would help to reinforce the memorization so when a hand and dealer card comes up, your mind sees the chart. Just a thought.

Allows for soft total, hard total, and pair splitting specialization to perfect each aspect individually. Keeps the running and true count for you to check yourself. Allows customization for different rule sets and toggling playing deviations. It would be great if you could customize deviations individually, so you could start off with a few at a time and be able to include some more niche deviations for fun.

I've been using this app for around a week now and I love it and it's definitely the best 6 dollars I've ever spent (I got the speed counting drill). That said there are two main quality of life features that would be nice. The first is a high score for your streak. The second is to add a "hands played" and a streak counter for the speed counting drill

Just letting you know that I can now beat the app anytime I want by using a completely bogus strategy and flat betting, because of it’s predictive behavior. You can try to explain it away with variance, but when I don’t use the bogus strategy it performs over 2 standard deviation to the negative in a couple shoes minimum after a few rounds of play. I can assure you this is the case and very provable. I am bringing it to your attention because I truly enjoyed and was training from the app for the first few months. Something has changed. I have well over 250 hours on this app. PLease take my and tomato’s review seriously and look into so I can keep training properly