Help with Beat the House

You have not played many decisions yet, so the rating can still swing a long way on a single hand. It steadies as you play. Nothing about the scoring changes when the label goes away — it is a warning about how much to trust the number, not a different number.

Experience says how much recent play stands behind your current rating: Limited, Developing, Established or Extensive. It is a word rather than a count because a count would sit at the top of the scale forever once you got there, which tells you nothing useful.

Individual sessions still report their exact decision count, which is genuinely informative.

How hard the decisions you met were to remember, averaged across the session and scored from one to five. Not how much money was on them. A hard twenty against a six is the easiest call at the table and the most profitable, and it scores one. Nine-nine against a seven costs almost nothing either way and scores five, because almost everybody gets it wrong the first time.

Your current rating reflects your recent play, so a session that was good but not as good as your recent average will nudge it down. The figure beside it on the summary is the movement — your rating after the session minus your rating before it.

They are different exercises. Learning corrects you as you go; Game Play does not. Pooling them would flatter one and punish the other, so the app keeps two ratings and never mixes them.

No. Bankroll and card luck have no effect at all. A session where you played every hand correctly and lost the lot rates exactly as well as one where you played every hand correctly and won.

It was. Splitting is by card value, so King-Queen is a pair of tens and the table will let you split it — but twenty is already a winning hand and breaking it up is a losing play. The app offers the split because a real table does. Withholding the option would train you for a table that does not exist.

You do, often. You lose more often by standing. Both plays are bad; hitting is less bad, and basic strategy is about picking the least costly option rather than a comfortable one.

Because it is a side bet, and basic strategy declines it every single time. Presenting it as a normal option would teach a habit worth unlearning, so the app leaves it out entirely.

Basic strategy depends on the exact rules in play. This app deals a four-, six- or eight-deck shoe with the dealer standing on soft seventeen, and the chart is indexed to precisely those rules. A chart for a single-deck game, or one where the dealer hits soft seventeen, differs in about a dozen cells and would be wrong here.

Open the Watch app on your iPhone, scroll to Available Apps, and tap Install next to Beat the House. Even with automatic installation switched on, watchOS installs when the watch is charging and in range rather than straight away.

The watch is given its rating by the phone rather than working one out for itself. Open the app on your iPhone with the watch nearby and it will come across.

If the summary said "decisions saved — your rating updates when your phone is back in range", the drill is safe on the watch and waiting. Bring the two together and it will sync itself. Nothing is lost, and a drill that syncs twice is only ever counted once.

It should open straight onto the first decision. If it lands on the rating screen instead, make sure the watch app is up to date — open the Watch app on your iPhone and check for a pending update.

Betting, bankroll and chips belong to Game Play and stay on the phone. A drill measures decisions and nothing else, which is what makes it worth doing in ninety seconds.