So, why aren't blackjack experts singing the praises of the situational systems?
The problem with utilizing this type of strategy is that none of the advantage indicators are very strong. In most games, they would simply indicate that the house had less of an advantage over the player, not that the advantage is with the player. In deeply dealt one-deck games, with good (Las Vegas Strip) rules, all of these indicators combined might provide a player making small bets of $5 and high bets of $100 (1-20 spread) with an expectation of about $l-$2 per hour. In other words, no individual situational indicator is worth more than a few hundredths of a percent, and all of them combined are not worth much more than a few tenths of a percent, in a deeply dealt one-deck game with a big betting spread.
I have nothing against any player making $l-$2 per hour, especially if he would otherwise be breaking even (or worse) just using basic strategy, so why don't I advise players who are not up to the task of card counting to use this easy situational approach? Because this non-counting method looks more like card counting to the game protection personnel than real card counting! Using a system like this is the fastest way to get barred as a card counter! All you have to do is consider the situations that are used as positive/negative indicators. In every case, the positive indicators coincide with a probability that more low cards than high cards have just come out of the deck. The negative indicators come into play when the opposite is true.
For example, Indicator #3 is that a push indicates a drop in player advantage. Why would this be true? It's not that every push indicates this; but the most common push is a player 20 (two tens) against a dealer 20 (two tens), so that pushes taken as a group more often indicate that high cards have been removed from the deck.
Gwynn's and Serf's studies also showed that, more often than not, a player win was slightly more likely with high cards coming out of the deck, and vice versa. Technically, it's not the win, loss, or push that really indicates the more probable result of the next hand, but the removal of high or low cards from the deck.
In fact, this type of situational play—despite the fact that you are not technically assigning count values to the cards—really is just a very weak card counting system. It's not strong enough to win you any money, but it will be recognizable enough to casino personnel to get you kicked out of the game (assuming you can find a deeply dealt one-decker with Strip rules, so that you can even test your 1-20 betting spread).
So, situational play is just an interesting theory, not a practical moneymaking system.
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