broken-knuckles is a small library to evaluate different blackjack rules and betting strategies.

Do not trust broken knuckles. Blackjack is a pile of special cases. Find the flaws in broken knuckles and report them. Do not gamble; gambling is bad. The best card counting strategies are risky in the short term and you can go down (way down) for hours and hours playing the best strategy. You will probably bankrupt yourself.

The class, game.Game is the basis. You instantiate a Game and simulate some hands. The default betting is just 1 unit per hand regardless of count. You can replace this betting strategy with the get_bet kwarg to game. Let's simulate a game which pays 3:2 on blackjack and a game which pays 6:5.

Mostly, I have just been using the ipython notebook with pylab to run simulations.

You can enter the notebook, ipython notebook --pylab inline.

import pandas
import game
import betting
reload(betting)
reload(game)
import pylab as pl

g32 = game.Game(get_bet=betting.basic_kelly, blackjack_pays=1.5)
g65 = game.Game(get_bet=betting.basic_kelly, blackjack_pays=6/5.)

g32.play_shoes(10000)
g65.play_shoes(10000)

games = [
    g32,
    g65,
]
num = min([len(i.money_trail) for i in games])
df = pandas.DataFrame({
    "3/2": g32.money_trail[:num],
    "6/5": g65.money_trail[:num],
})
df.plot(title="BlackJack Pays, 3/2 vs 6/5")

g32.print_summary()
g65.print_summary()

Calling plot above may give you an image like this:

And, the print_summary calls may print some stuff out like:

final units 14302.0
num hands 151635
winnings per hand 0.0943185939922
min units= -1223.0
max units= 14760.0
Hours with 1 hand per minute= 2527
$25 units= 357550.0
$5 units= 71510.0

Check out game.Game.__init__ for the options to game. As of the time of writing, the above code simulates:

• Infinte splits
• can double after split
• Only 1 card after split Aces
• 1 deck with 75% penetration
• perfect counting, perfect and undeviated basic strategy
• no other players at table
• dealer stands on soft 17

These can be changed with arguments to Game.