Macgyver said:
Pardon my ignorance, but is the 5.9 SDs in reference to everything played? OK, I see it's in reference to the very first post.
But how can you figure out standard deviations when it's two different games played?
That quote you post, caruso, is very confusing and misleading as that's not exactly what he posted. The player played Vegas Strip as well, not just Atlantic City.
I keep editing this, but he even adds the hands played at Platinum Play into that grand total of 505 hands. Two different casinos, at least two different games, and you can calculate SD?
It's pretty easy to work out. If you wanted to find the standard deviation of a sample of two different games you can easily calculate the standard deviation of the whole sample. However, it is not really necessary, as the two games are pretty similar:
AC bj - 8 decks, late surrender vs Vegas Strip - 4 decks, no surrender.
shows us the standard deviation of blackjack for various combinations of decks and split rules. Vegas Strip appears to have std deviation of 1.1666, and AC 1.1680. The difference is too small to bother with. Let's take 1.168 to err on the side of safety - this is most favourable to the casino.
Then the chance of the loss described is given in Excel by:
=NORMDIST(-157,0-(505*0.00365),SQRT(505)*1.168,TRUE)
Taking the reciprocal gives us that this is a 590 million to one event. In other words it would be damning if it were true.
However I do not believe it for a minute. Not a second.
Too many claims like this come and go without ever being backed up.
If they were to cheat, they would not do so obviously - they only need about 1.5 sd for people to bust out any of their signup offers, so why would any sane and reputable casino group such as Fortune Lounge want to cheat in such a conspicuous and unbelievable way.
OP has refused to post playlogs, claiming that transaction IDs could somehow be used against him (how?); even so, you could copy them into a spreadsheet and delete the ID column safely. Looks like hot air to me.