Hi,
According to your Online reviews you rate Global Player very high. Based on that recommendation I created an account with them. I recently had an experience while playing their 1-deck Vegas downtown BJ game. Within a 75-100 hand session I had two 11 or 12 hand losing streaks while playing the basic strategy perfectly for a single deck, S17,DA2, no DAS, late surrender, etc rules. I understand statistics and SD, variance, outliers etc. I have written a program that will simulate tens of thousand of hands based on various table rules. The program records each card drawn, how the win, loss, push occurred, etc. In a 16,000 hand simulation , based on the above rules, only two 12 in a row losing hands occurred. I had two occur within 100 hands.... along with 3-4 pushes on a hand of 21 in the same session in Global Players casino. I was $150 ahead on a bankroll of $600. I lost $200 as I doubled up after the 6th in a row loss. I had another 12 hand losing streak occur in a session a couple of days earlier but I wrote it off as an extreme outlier. I use a loss-win streak approach - which has worked well for me at other casinos and has been consistently backed up with my simulations.

Doesn't this experience at Global seem awfully odd? Have you heard of anything similar occurring? Thanks,

By the way, I e-mailed Global 4 days ago about my experience (and complimented them on the general site and the variety of the games they offer) but I received only an acknowledgement that my e-mail was received.

Hello, Keith.
Your experience does, indeed, seem to be odd but I have seen a lot of odd things in all sorts of Blackjack games.

On another message board, I recently saw postings by some players who count and they said that they had lost a high percentage of hands when the count was high in the multi-deck games at Global Player Casino. You are a progression player and you experienced long streaks of losses. Do you see my point here? You are essentially taking data and making it fit your hypothesis (that being: Global Player cheats). I know you're not saying that they cheat and neither am I saying that I'm 100% sure they are honest, but the way to test something like this is to first form your hypothesis and then collect the data which will prove or disprove it.

For example, in your case you noticed the streaks, but what was the overall percentage of hands won, hands lost and hands pushed? One of the ways we check a game's integrity is keeping track of each individual card that is played. Obviously, in an "honest" game, the quantity of 4s that appear should be the same (within statistical probabilities) as the number of Aces that appear. Did you keep track of that? Win/loss streaks are important, but they aren't the only way to check a game's "fairness" and, while the streaks you observed are admittedly unusual, they can still occur in a fair game.

In the "GameMaster's Secrets" column on my site, you'll find an article, "Is This Game Rigged? (Part 1)" and it shows how we examine a Blackjack game for fairness. I must stress that our method isn't foolproof, but it does give us a high degree of confidence and we are highly confident that the Blackjack games at Global Player Casino are honest, because we checked them. Sure, we could be wrong about that, so you have to keep your guard up, as you're doing, but I am still of the opinion that it is much more difficult to cheat than it is to run an honest game where the casino has a built-in edge over the player, as is the case with Global Player Casino's single-deck games.

Yours for winning,
The GameMaster
4/12/2001