1. If player has total of 16-21 go to step 2, other wise play normally.
2. If dealer's 3-card total will be over 21 then go to step 3, otherwise play normally.
3. Remove dealer's third card, go to step 4.
4. Take following card from deck, go to step 5.
5. Take further cards as necessary to attain total of 17 or more, then score hand.

This is what would be known in a real casino as dealing seconds. I do not know what the game does if the player splits and my experiment ignores split hands.

It should be emphasized that I do not know if this code is legitimate.

Assuming an infinite deck for the sake of simplicity it is easy to calculate the probability the dealer will bust with any given total of 12-16. With a total of 12 there are 4 cards that will break the dealer and 9 that won't so the probability the next card will break the dealer is 4/13. Likewise the probability of busting on the next card with a total of 13 is 5/13, and so on. The next table shows the expected number of times the dealer should have busted in this experiment based on these probabilities and the number in the sample for each total from 12 to 16.

The variance of the binomial distribution, which this experiment follows, is n*p*q, where p is the probability of success and q is the probability of failure. The total variance is then 84*(4/13)*(9/13) + 61*(5/13)*(8/13) + 67*(6/13)*(7/13) + 61*(7/13)*(6/13) + 59*(5/13)*(8/13) = 78.11. The standard deviation is the square root of this number, or 8.84.

The difference between actual and expected dealer busts is 149.38-89 = 60.38. This is 60.38/8.84=6.83 standard deviations below expectations. The probability of falling this far or more to the left of the bell curve is 1 in 238 billion. To put this in comparison the probability of hitting the Power Ball is 1 in 80,089,128. It would be 2976 times easier to win the power ball with one ticket than to have results this bad in a fair game.

The webmaster of Custom Strategy Cards also conducted various tests on Casino Bar's blackjack game. The most convincing of which is the distribution of the dealer's third card when the dealer had a 2-card total of 12-16 and the player had 17-21. Following are the results.

Note how heavily weighted the low cards (A-5) are compared to the high cards (9-K). Putting this distribution through a chi-squared test the chi-squared statistic is 97.83 with 12 degrees of freedom. The probability of results this skewed are 1 in 676 trillion. Further information about this experiment can be found at www.customstrategycards.com/vnd_coa-we.htm.

Dear Michael,

Thank you for contacting our support team.

Your Black Jack queries regarding randomness, I will attempt to provide you with layout and the techs of the game, then providing you with facts why we are sure our RNG is perfectly legitimate.

We use 4 decks of cards in the game. These are re-shuffled after every hand, as is the case with most on-line establishments.

The difference between land and on-line in respect of shuffling after every hand and the deck only being shuffled when the shoe comes to and end, is obvious, which I am sure as the experienced gamer that you are, you will understand.

Our BJ game is our main attraction and through an infinite number of players and hands wagered, we have received very few complaints.

Michael, your total gaming odds at CasinoBar are 95%. Research will tell you that this figure is comparative and many instances on a par if not better than most casinos out there.

This above leads me to believe that we offer a reasonable, fair and enjoyable gaming experience.

Please let us know if we can be of further assistance.

Regards,

Kira
Customer Service
www.CasinoBar.com

My response to their response is that their random number generator is not the issue. I'm sure their random number generator is fine. What I suspect is that their programmer deliberately put in code to take a "second chance" card in the situation already mentioned. Regarding the second point I do not dispute that my total actual return is 95%. The way they cheat is subtle and will only lower the theoretical return by a few percentage points in my rough estimation. Casino Bar does claim their overall actual return in blackjack to be 97.68% for the month of April 2002. This figure was evidently calculated in house, no outside verification is mentioned.

    See important note about Bodog payouts & deposits.