I was thinking of writing a piece of software to help me hone my blackjack ability, sort of a card counting trainer program. Luckily, I searched on freshmeat first and found that someone had already done so. This led me to the OpenBlackjack website. Aside from including a piece of software that is very similar to what I had in mind to write, it also has some insightful articles that demonstrate that the people responsible for OpenBlackjack are both very funny and extremely good with statistics. The top entry in the News & Articles section includes the following scathing overview of a "crockery bullshit" blackjack article found at gamblingmagazine.com:

Have you ever been on a losing run at blackjack? Do you find that the dealer sometimes draws out to 21 on you? If so, you might have previously blamed your bad luck on mathematical phenomena such as "chance" and "variance". I was once like you, that is until I read this article.

I now know that my losing streaks have been caused by HOT dealers. Apparently, any table where the player wins less than 50% of the hands has a HOT dealer behind the felt. You should leave the table immediately and find a COLD dealer. "or at least neutral"...

How do you find those COLD dealers? According to the article, look at past performance; A dealer that is HOT will stay hot. You see, much like a coin flip and other random games of chance, blackjack outcomes can be predicted based on the past. For instance, suppose you flip a coin and it comes up heads. That coin is what we statisticians like to refer to as "heads-hot". It will be more likely to land on heads. Until you change tables.