It's a dreaded phobia that festers in the hearts of most blackjack players; the fear that the stranger at third base will misplay his hand, causing you to lose in the process. This belief that bad players hurt a good player's chances is so widespread that many die-hard "21 " buffs refuse to play in the company of novices! What does it all amount to in the big picture? Jack Squat -- that's what! Furthermore, I believe I can prove it to you if you'll just follow along with me.

Suppose you were playing blackjack with only one other person at the table. You're at first base and he's at third. The dealer has a deuce up. You're both dealt a 15. Acting first, you make the correct play and stand. Now it's the third baseman's turn. You realize the dealer has to bust -- or you lose. So how do you want third base to play his hand?

Now we have to examine what our chances are of win¬ning or losing multiple hands consecutively. To do that, we'll work with a chart I created that clearly depicts the probabilities. The figures on the chart were gen¬erated by taking the number two to the sixteenth power (2") to simulate wins versus losses over thousands of hands of play, not taking into consideration ties, or as they are some¬times called, pushes. The results were rounded and evened up for our basic analysis. If you look at Figure 6-1, you'll see two ways of interpreting the results regardless of the deck configurations