Bonus Edge

The following is taken from my new blackjack site: http://londonblackjack.live/
http://londonblackjack.live/bonus-edge/

There are many ways to gain an edge over the house in this beautiful game and I’m going to share a little secret with you now, Bonus Edge is not one of them.

If you posses a solid understanding of Basic Strategy and a first deposit to get you started, most so called blackjack experts out there will tell you to jump straight in as there is a pot of gold to be had.

Basic Strategy allows you to sufficiently reduce the house edge to around 0.5% but that is no where near enough to overcome the casinos hold on your money by accepting bonuses. This is true in most cases including the casinos featured on this very site, but guess what? I never accept casino bonuses. They will not help you beat the house, they will only chew you up and spit you out before you get close to closing the EV gap.

Obviously, as with any rule there are certain exceptions to this and you can take your pick from any number of ”get rich quick” sites out there claiming they have identified all the weak casino bonus spots to exploit, and for all I know maybe they have, but for the vast majority of casino bonuses I would strongly urge you to reject them or at the very least learn the math behind the EV of each bonus and make an informed decision.

Anyway this site is not about exploiting bonuses and I would urge players to reject any casino bonus they are offered as a general rule of thumb. But enough waffle, let me show you why.

Let’s take one of the bonuses offered by Genting Casino on this very site. Now Genting are a fine upstanding casino which is why I recommend playing there, well that and their Live Blackjack tables are very beatable with the correct strategy (but that’s for another post on another day).

They offer a 100% up to £1,000 bonus!

Sounds good right?

£1,000 in your pocket for double the blackjack delights, eh?

Wrong, let me show you the math.

Genting want you to deposit up to £1,000 for an additional £1,000 bonus. Ok great let’s take the max in this example.

Deposit: £1,000 + Bonus: £1,000 = £2,000 blackjack monies 😉

The requirements are as follows.

1: You must wager the bonus amount 50x in accordance with their bonus contribution table.

2: The Max bet on any one hand is £10.

3: If you withdraw any of your real money you forfeit the bonus.

Does it still sound fair? Let’s continue.

Assuming you are playing perfectly and have reduced the house edge to 0.5% (this takes a lot of concentration, especially if you’re new to blackjack strategy, but it’s possible)

Ok so wagering: you need to wager 50x the bonus of £1000 = £50,000

But we’re playing blackjack remember and unfortunately blackjack doesn’t contribute 100% to the wagering. Well how much does it contribute to the wagering? I hear you ask.

10% (yes… just let that sink in)

So with blackjack contributing 10% to the wagering how much do we need to wager on blackjack to complete the wagering?

£50,000 x 10 = £500,000 (this is not a joke – they do this to people – they really do)

Ok… well we have £1,000 of basically free money so maybe it’s not so bad?

Oh but it is … betting the Max of £10 per hand and assuming our EV vs the casino (playing perfectly remember) we will lose an average of £0.05 per hand in EV.

Ok how many hands do we need?

500,000 / 10 (per hand) = 50,000 hands

So where are we now?

Well we just lost £0.05 per hand in EV for 50K hands, I’m guessing it’s not good.

£0.05 x 50,000 = £2,500

So there you have it. We’ve just given up £2,500 in Expected Value for £1,000 in Bonus Funds.

Not only are we not a favorite in this bonus, but the house has such a hold on us they are actually a favorite to take our initial deposit and the bonus, and it’s not even close.

We have no chance without getting very lucky. (which can happen as this is a game of chance after all) But the point is that we should never sacrifice our Expected Value to gain a bonus, regardless of how attractive the bonus may look. Remember Casinos are ”it it to win it” and they are not messing around. You need to know the value of a bonus before you even consider accepting it.

If you truly want to win at this game, it is going to take some work. You are going to need to be efficient in everything you do at the table. You will need to have a firm understanding of your edge (where it comes from & and how to capitalize on it) and finally you will need to pick your spots carefully and asses the EV of every situation. In some cases it might even be correct to give up some EV just to stay in the game. But at this point your focus should be on developing your strategy and finding good +EV spots to capitalize on your edge.

It’s almost never correct to tie yourself to a -EV position for 50K hands or a death by 50 thousand cuts as I prefer to call it. It’s not easy to win at this game but if you have a desire to learn and a lot of grit, then stick around and I will show you the way.

Peace, Jack