Posts Tagged ‘system developers’

In 1981,1 self-published 1,000 copies of a little book titled Blackjack For Profit, and when I say "a little book," I mean little. The size was approximately four inches by five inches, and its 96 pages could easily fit into any man's shirt pocket with less bulge than a pack of cigarettes. Blackjack for Profit was actually my second book—my first, The Blackjack Formula, was also 96 pages and self-published, but I charged $100 per copy for that one.

Those two books, now out of print, initially made my reputation as a blackjack expert. What I revealed in The Blackjack Formula in 1980, which serious players were paying so dearly for, was the fact that the counting system in use was of less importance than the table conditions— the number of decks in play, the penetration (shuffle point), rule variations, and so forth. This was a radical idea back in 1980: system developers had been devising more and more complex card counting systems for almost none of them paid much attention to the games themselves, which were pretty much assumed to be equal.
The real eye-opener back then was the importance I placed on penetration, a game factor that had been ignored by virtually all of the best-known authors. I discovered its importance while reading a technical paper that had been published by the late Peter Griffin in 1975 titled, The Use of Bivariate Normal Approximations to Evaluate Single Parameter Card Counting Systems at Blackjack, which later became the core of Griffin's masterwork: The Theory of Blackjack (1979).

After I published The Blackjack Formula, which provided an algebraic method for estimating the expectation from playing any game with any counting system, I learned that bootleg copies of my formula were circulating in Las Vegas and Reno. Some players just didn't want to pay $100 for a 96-page book! So, I wrote an easier version of the book, which I titled Blackjack For Profit, which excluded most of the mathematics, but contained an even simpler method that virtually anyone could use to evaluate a blackjack game—"The Snyder Profit Index"—and I priced this book at a more reasonable $9.95.

I reprinted Blackjack for Profit numerous times over the next decade as I worked on a revised and updated version. In 1991, the infamous Oakland Firestorm destroyed my computer and all my backups of the work I had been doing (along with my house). In 1993, when I sold the last copies of the last printing of the book, I never reprinted it. Since then, the book has been out of print and unavailable at any price.

I've learned, however, from various blackjack players that bootleg copies of "Chapter Seven: The Snyder Profit Index," taken from that book, were circulating in Las Vegas and elsewhere, just like the Blackjack Formula, because the book was simply impossible to find, and many card counters still found the Snyder Profit Index, or SPI, to be a quick and convenient game evaluator.

Many pros today have computer software for evaluating game expectations with pinpoint accuracy, but for average players who find themselves faced with myriad table conditions, the SPI will almost always point you in the right direction. The SPI, which works by adding and subtracting points for favorable and unfavorable conditions, should be viewed as an approximate gauge rather than a precise evaluation, as there is no simple way to analyze a blackjack game precisely. The SPI will do for practical purposes, however, as it classifies games as either winners, time wasters, or losers. (In the SPI Chart below, I have revised a few of the values for better accuracy.)

• Blackjack – The Snyder Profit Index Part5 (0)
• Blackjack – The Snyder Profit Index Part4 (0)
• Blackjack – The Snyder Profit Index Part3 (0)