Players who are familiar with traditional Hi-Lo strategy tables, or for that matter, with true count strategy tables for any balanced card counting system, may be surprised by the simplicity of the Hi-Lo Lite. Many experts will doubt its strength and playing accuracy. Allow me to describe the history of its development.
Early in 1991,1 attempted to answer via computer simulation whether Stanford Wong's or Julian Braun's version of the Hi-Lo Count was more accurate. Both were respected programmers and blackjack authorities who had devised indices for the Hi-Lo Count that differed on dozens of decisions. Using John Imming's Universal Blackjack Engine software, I ran off 500-million hands of each strategy with a flat bet in single-deck games with Vegas Strip rules, using all indices between -15 and +15. At the end of the test, Wong's indices bettered Braun's result by .009% (less than one-hundredth of one percent), but the margin was within 2 standard errors, not a statistically significant result.
My simulation results led me to theorize that strategy index numbers may not be such precise indicators of when to alter basic strategy, or at least that the borderline for the coin-toss decisions may be fairly wide. I set up another test to see just how wide: I simulated a 6-deck Atlantic City game and ran off 200 million hands using Wong's Professional Blackjack indices. For the second simulation, I converted each of Wong's indices to -1, +1, or +4. I did this systematically—if Wong's index was -1 or -2, I made it -1. If he had an index of 0, +1, or +2,1 made it +1. His +3, +4, and +5 indices all became +4.1 then ran off another 200-million hands testing this simplified version of Wong's strategy. In both simulations, I used a 1 to 8 spread, and I also tested the effect of not betting on negative counts.
These were the results:
Strategy Play All No Neg.
Wong +0.50% +0.98%
Simplified +0.51% +0.99%
In a test of 200 million hands, the fact that the simplified version of the Hi-Lo outperformed the exact version by .01% is not mathematically significant. What is significant is that such an approximate version of the Hi-Lo strategy is equal to the standard, orthodox version.
I wondered how well this approach would work in single-deck games where playing strategy is so much more important, so I set up a Reno one-deck simulation, and used 60 indices from Wong's Professional Blackjack.
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