This is the bot I used to win the Blackjack AI Bot coding competition at Build 2014. More information can be found at http://blackjackbot.codeplex.com/.
The basic thought process I used:
- I implemented basic card counting.
- I decided to purchase the dealers card every time and implemented the logic for what to do based off mine and the dealer’s cards. These first 2 steps got me to around $3300.
- I set a cut off for when to go to a minimum bet so as to avoid losing money after setting a new high score. This got me to around $8000.
- With a few hours left in the competition there was a general shift among the top 10 competitors to throw out any attempts at card counting and start doing a max bet every hand. You either bust and try again or run until you hit a cut off and switched to the minimum bet. This took me to the high score for the competition of about $36000.