Streaks as a Predictor of the Next Hand

You must avoid getting distracted by the small picture at blackjack. What happened on the last draw or last few draws, whether you won or lost the few hands, or the disheartening times when a dealer draws out to a 21 on a hand you thought was locked up, have no bearing on your chances of winning.

Streaks and recent events have no bearing on what the correct strategy should be for any given situation. It does not matter that you may have won the last five hands. It says nothing about what will happen the next five hands or even the very next one.

If you have won five hands in a row, are you on streak? Of course. Will it continue? If you answer yes to that question and knew that yes to be a true statement, then you would have to be a complete fool not to drag your home mortgage, all you jewelry and life savings, your car, and any spare money you could dig up from every friend and relative you had, and get it onto felt circle at the table.

And if the answer is not yes, but a "maybe I don't know," then get off the notion of a streak as a predictor of future behavior. The cold hard truth is that none of us are psychics--we cannot predict what will happen to a deck of cards with any more accuracy than anyone else.

If you feel lucky, or that you are on a streak that will continue, it is okay to increase your bet moderately. You can not get hurt by a gradual increase of bets. you can however, get hurt badly by a large increase over your normal bet size. If your hunch is wrong, one overly large bet that loses can turn a big winning session into a losing one of nightmarish proportions in a big hurry.

One large losing bet can quickly turn into a series of larger losing bets as you desperately chase. Boom, boom, boom, boom, what happened? One minute you are winning solidly and feeling good. The next minute, after a fateful large bad turned sour, and then another and another, you are suddenly in big trouble, and before you know it, you just want to hide your head in a hole. Be careful ostrich! Bets out of proportion to your betting can easily turn one or two hours of a winning effort into a night to forget.

Get the picture? Avoid playing streaks with anything but gradual increases. Nobody knows how the next few hands will fall.