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On the flight back from Vegas on my first ” Counting” trip ( family trip part of it too). Taught myself counting by reading everything and practicing. Did two hours a day at treasure Island from 6-8am and I have never felt so good about the game and my hard work and success. Five and ten dollar tables and I moved tables after I won or was down. Got out each time I made a certain amount. I can do this. I want to do this regularly as a supplement to my real job. I like the fruits of the hard work and the possibilities that counting brings rather than the money (though I want that too). Seeing the table and potential in a whole new way is exhilarating. What is the best way for me to take this more seriously and start doing this for $5,000 results in a three day trip to Mecca? Any and all advice is welcome. I thought about taking a counting class in vegas for $795. Thank you.
Your reaction is the main reason that I still encourage smart players to learn to count, even though the game is not as vulnerable as it once was. The change in perspective that comes from beating any casino game will forever change the way you look at casinos. You will begin to see opportunity where you overlooked it before.
As for buying an expensive class, it really depends. Everyone learns best in their own way. For some people, an $800 class could be a good choice, while for others it would be much cheaper to simply buy two or three reputable books and learn at your own pace.
Hi Ken, First let me say I have learnt so much from your website and I am using it to play online live with favorable results.
My question is, the site I play on go to about 65% penetration before using a new shoe, with an 8 deck game. Should I only play at the table when it is a new shoe? Or is it OK to join and play even if I estimate 2-4 decks in the discard pile?
Just like in a land-based casino, you can join the game at any time. Just consider the discards as if they were behind the cut card. An unseen card is an unseen card whether it was dealt before you arrived, or hasn’t left the shoe yet. Of course, joining a shoe in progress means you will get poor penetration on that first shoe, with a similarly lower chance of good counts arising. But there is nothing wrong with the prospect of joining mid-shoe.
Ken SMith first of all your knowledge is a treasure to us. i don get it with the 16vs 10 .if tc is bigger than 0 we stand.why we do that?
cause the high cards that are left will bust us or because we hope for the dealer to take first the low card and after a big one?
Also lets say that i play two bets .a 18 stiff and a 16 stiff against 10 dealers .my opinion is that if i stand propably i will loose all my two bets.if i stand like logical in 18 and take card at 16 and get bust with a a ten my other bet will still at the moment be “alive” and maybe the dealer takes a 7 or 8???? Please inlight me !!!
16vT is a close call because of two things: The high risk of busting when you hit, and the very real chance that you can hit successfully and still lose to a strong dealer hand. All of these aspects are baked into the numbers that determine basic strategy. (And also into the index numbers that counters use to deviate from basic strategy.) It has nothing to do with whether a low or high card is likely to “come out first”. We can know nothing about the possible order of cards, and any order of the remaining cards is equally likely.
Actually, the lower the number of decks, not necessarily the better. Though if you’re lazy, it’s more appealing. It depends on 3 things – how many decks are in the shoe, where the cutcard is, and what the minimum bet is. In most places I have been, in the pacific northwest and in Indian casinos in the midwest of the US, there are 2 games you’ll see standard. The 2 deck game and the 6 deck game. Typically, the cut card will be one deck before the end in EITHER ONE. Which means that in the 6 deck game, you’ll be suffering through 5 decks before you get to the cutcard, but in the 2 deck game, you’ll only go through 1 before you get to a new shoe. But the thing is, the standard deviation OF the truecount, right before the cutcard, is actually higher in the 6 deck game than the 2 deck game. Meaning a larger fraction of the time, the truecount will be more than 5, or more than 7, or more than 9, when there is 1 deck left. AND the minimum bet of the 6 deck game is typically 3 or 5 dollars (3 is very good, 10 is very bad), and the minimum bet of the 2 deck game is typically 15 or 25 (15 is very good, 50 is very bad) dollars. If you can maintain a standard of accuracy in keeping track, then the 6 deck game is often better than the 2 deck game. Especially since they will be more off their guard in the 6 deck game. They usually don’t allow mid shoe entry in the 2 deck games, but they don’t care in the 6 deck game, and they often require the 2-deck game be dealt face-down, whereas the 6 deck game is generally always face-up. Why? because they are unaware that they have a vulnerability in the 6 deck game, they are only concerned about the 2 deck game.
How does the standard deviation OF the truecount vary through the deck and with number of decks in the shoe? Well, the regular count on the first card dealt is the same no matter how many decks, and then the variance as a function of position through the shoe is a parabola intersecting the line y=0 at x=0 and x=(52*number of decks), and of course standard deviation is square root of variance. In other words, the count is 0 before the first card has been dealt, and after the whole shoe has been dealt. Naturally the peak of the parabola is halfway through, but that’s the regular count, not the truecount. The truecount is that parabola divided by number of decks remaining, and that increases all the way to the end. The way I count is 2-7 get one point, 9 10 and A get -1. The regular count, on the first card dealt, is (12/13)^0.5, the square root of 12/13. So now you have 3 points that define the parabola entirely, you have y=sqrt(12/13) at x=1, and y=0 at both x=0 and (52*number of decks). What is the result you get? Well, one result is that halfway through a n-deck shoe, the truecount is sqrt(40/n). So in a 2-deck game with the cutcard 1 deck before the end, the standard deviation of the count right at the end there will be sqrt(20) or about 4.47. So 16% of the time, the truecount will be more than that. Allowing for some error resulting from discretization of a normal distribution, that is. But what is the standard deviation of a 6-deck game, 1 deck before the end? It’s sqrt(40), or about 6.32. Better than 4.47 by a factor of the square root of 2. So 16% of the time, the truecount will be more than 6.32 right before the cutcard in the 6-deck game, but one standard deviation is only 4.47 right before the cutcard in the 2 deck game. The detriment is that you have to suffer through 5 decks to get there instead of just 1, but the upside is that all the while, you’ll be betting the minimum bet, which is probably 5 times smaller in the 6-deck game. Plus you’ll see less heat. Almost always, the 6-deck game is going to be better. It just needs more patience and more precision, because if you can’t accurately keep count, then you might as well give up and go home. If you’re lazy and not good enough to count through 6 decks though, then the 2 deck game is for you. It’s higher risk, but you’ll see the reward more quickly. Possibly.
Under these conditions, what you should do to minimize risk of ruin (and the math I used to calculate this was unpleasant) is in the 2 deck game, bet the minimum bet PLUS 2*(the minimum bet) for every 1 the truecount is past 1.8, and in the 6 deck game, bet the minimum bet PLUS 3*(the minimum bet) for every 1 the truecount is past 1.8. And I’ll generally just use 2 instead of 1.8 because I don’t have all the time in the universe to be that precise. This is supposing they allow double after split, no hitting on split aces, double on any but only after first 2 cards, blackjack pays 3 to 2. So if you’re playing a 2-deck game and the min bet is 25 and the truecount is 3, you should bet 75 dollars, since 25+(3-2)*2*25=75. If you’re playing a 6-deck game, the count is 11, there are 3 decks left, and the min bet is 3, you should bet 18 dollars, because 3+(11/3-2)*3*3=18. This also shows you why it’s much lower risk playing the 6 deck game.
Oops. Correction – the VARIANCE is the function that has the parabola, not the standard deviation. So the 3 points that define the parabola are x=0 and y=0, x=52*(number of decks in show) and y=0, and x=1 and y=12/13. The STANDARD DEVIATION of the count after the first card has been dealt is sqrt(12/13), the variance of the count after the first card is dealt is 12/13.
Eh. What do you expect. The real opportunity ended in 1961 with the publication of Beat the Dealer. It’s a wonder blackjack was continued AT ALL after that. It’s just not the opportunity that exists any more. Every generation, there is an opportunity to get rich easily. Blackjack was the big opportunity in the first half of the 20th century, and it stopped being so once everyone knew how it could be beaten. Just as you might be wishing you could go back in time to the 1950s (you could probably count cards out loud and they’d never figure out what you were doing!) for a completely vulnerable 1-deck game with no maximum bet and probably a 1$ min bet, or even less than that since it’s 1950s dollars, and probably surrender available and probably the blackjack bonus for getting a 5-card 21 too, just imagine, someone in the year 2100 wishing he could go back in time to today to exploit a weakness that is somewhere, right under your nose, that you don’t know about. And once you learn about it, it will be because everyone will have learned about it, and then that opportunity will be gone.
Obviously casinos would eventually rig blackjack in some way though. I’m just surprised it took 50 years. Honestly, you don’t want to invest in casinos. They’re desperate, and if you check stock market history, they’ve been losing money for a long time. And it’s not all because Trump is retarded and drives all his businesses into the red.
No peek means that the dealer does not check for blackjack before the players complete their hands. It also applies in games where the dealer does not take a second card until all players are done. The reason it affects the strategy is because in the typical US-style peek game, players know for sure that dealer does not have a blackjack before making a decision to split or double down. In a no-peek game those moves are riskier against a dealer ten or ace, because you may lose all of the bets to a dealer blackjack.
Excellent forum here to start. I live down in Florida and just graduated with a degree in physics. There are several casinos down here but are all owned by the Seminole Tribe. I have mastered the Hi-Low system and keep track of the Ace’s via strategically placed chips in my stack. I play $25-$1000 spread @ Hit Soft 17 6-8 decks. I prefer to play with at least two other players as the speed and pressure is a little over my head-for now. My first run I bought in for $1,000 and made $3200.00 profit in about 4 hours. My max bet was about $150.00. I did this 3 more times and just cleared $9,000 in profit. I feel like this is too much to fast. Am i just getting lucky on top of the count?
I then proceeded to just have a fun in a skin pit ($10 min, 6:5, CSM) I bought in for $300.00 and walked away $2,355.00 and was counting and keeping track of the Aces and hands in between rich Ace hands.
Is there ever a added subconscious ability to memorize and sequence cards relative to the count. Maybe I just need to lose to feel good again but I’ve been almost nervous heading to the tables, I guess not knowing how to lose and how to react.
One more quick thing, what are your thoughts on automatic shufflers (where they put multiple decks in, not the One2Six machines on the table). I have come to love these machines. The cards always seem to have the right balance. Does anybody else hate hand shuffles?
Given that you were only spreading 1:6 in a six or eight deck game, you weren’t playing with an edge at all. And you were playing at a really big disadvantage when you switched to the 6:5 game. If you had instead been spreading maybe 1:12 in this game (and never played the 6:5 game), I would break down your $9K in profit as roughly $500 skill, $8500 luck.
You mention that you have mastered Hi-Lo, but it sounds like you still need to learn a lot. No worries, we all started where you are.
Just for reference, card counting will usually yield about 1 to 1.5 units an hour in expected profit. If you are spreading $25 to $300, that means making $25 to $40 per hour. Of course your actual results will be all over the place, easily up or down $3000 in a session.
Machine shuffles or hand shuffles don’t materially affect the game, except for more advanced techniques. Any trends you have noticed as a result are just noise.
When I started out about 20 years ago, for the first two or three years I used the Hi-Lo. Then I switched to Wong’s Halves count, which has an awesome betting efficiency. That is the count I have used ever since. However, it is a complicated 3 level count (and I use it in true halves form, not doubled). It’s hard to justify a complicated system these days unless you are really playing a lot. These days, when people ask what to learn, I recommend KO and Hi-Lo.
when is it proper to increase betting in a positive count?
It sounds like you aren’t talking about tournament play, but regular counting instead. Lessons 7, 8, and 9 of the Blackjack School address this topic.
On the flight back from Vegas on my first ” Counting” trip ( family trip part of it too). Taught myself counting by reading everything and practicing. Did two hours a day at treasure Island from 6-8am and I have never felt so good about the game and my hard work and success. Five and ten dollar tables and I moved tables after I won or was down. Got out each time I made a certain amount. I can do this. I want to do this regularly as a supplement to my real job. I like the fruits of the hard work and the possibilities that counting brings rather than the money (though I want that too). Seeing the table and potential in a whole new way is exhilarating. What is the best way for me to take this more seriously and start doing this for $5,000 results in a three day trip to Mecca? Any and all advice is welcome. I thought about taking a counting class in vegas for $795. Thank you.
Your reaction is the main reason that I still encourage smart players to learn to count, even though the game is not as vulnerable as it once was. The change in perspective that comes from beating any casino game will forever change the way you look at casinos. You will begin to see opportunity where you overlooked it before.
As for buying an expensive class, it really depends. Everyone learns best in their own way. For some people, an $800 class could be a good choice, while for others it would be much cheaper to simply buy two or three reputable books and learn at your own pace.
Hi Ken,
First let me say I have learnt so much from your website and I am using it to play online live with favorable results.
My question is, the site I play on go to about 65% penetration before using a new shoe, with an 8 deck game. Should I only play at the table when it is a new shoe? Or is it OK to join and play even if I estimate 2-4 decks in the discard pile?
Just like in a land-based casino, you can join the game at any time. Just consider the discards as if they were behind the cut card. An unseen card is an unseen card whether it was dealt before you arrived, or hasn’t left the shoe yet. Of course, joining a shoe in progress means you will get poor penetration on that first shoe, with a similarly lower chance of good counts arising. But there is nothing wrong with the prospect of joining mid-shoe.
Ken SMith first of all your knowledge is a treasure to us.
i don get it with the 16vs 10
.if tc is bigger than 0 we stand.why we do that?
cause the high cards that are left will bust us or because we hope for the dealer to take first the low card and after a big one?
Also lets say that i play two bets .a 18 stiff and a 16 stiff against 10 dealers .my opinion is that if i stand propably i will loose all my two bets.if i stand like logical in 18 and take card at 16 and get bust with a a ten my other bet will still at the moment be “alive” and maybe the dealer takes a 7 or 8???? Please inlight me !!!
16vT is a close call because of two things: The high risk of busting when you hit, and the very real chance that you can hit successfully and still lose to a strong dealer hand. All of these aspects are baked into the numbers that determine basic strategy. (And also into the index numbers that counters use to deviate from basic strategy.) It has nothing to do with whether a low or high card is likely to “come out first”. We can know nothing about the possible order of cards, and any order of the remaining cards is equally likely.
I speak about european bj.s17 no peek hole card
Actually, the lower the number of decks, not necessarily the better. Though if you’re lazy, it’s more appealing. It depends on 3 things – how many decks are in the shoe, where the cutcard is, and what the minimum bet is. In most places I have been, in the pacific northwest and in Indian casinos in the midwest of the US, there are 2 games you’ll see standard. The 2 deck game and the 6 deck game. Typically, the cut card will be one deck before the end in EITHER ONE. Which means that in the 6 deck game, you’ll be suffering through 5 decks before you get to the cutcard, but in the 2 deck game, you’ll only go through 1 before you get to a new shoe. But the thing is, the standard deviation OF the truecount, right before the cutcard, is actually higher in the 6 deck game than the 2 deck game. Meaning a larger fraction of the time, the truecount will be more than 5, or more than 7, or more than 9, when there is 1 deck left. AND the minimum bet of the 6 deck game is typically 3 or 5 dollars (3 is very good, 10 is very bad), and the minimum bet of the 2 deck game is typically 15 or 25 (15 is very good, 50 is very bad) dollars. If you can maintain a standard of accuracy in keeping track, then the 6 deck game is often better than the 2 deck game. Especially since they will be more off their guard in the 6 deck game. They usually don’t allow mid shoe entry in the 2 deck games, but they don’t care in the 6 deck game, and they often require the 2-deck game be dealt face-down, whereas the 6 deck game is generally always face-up. Why? because they are unaware that they have a vulnerability in the 6 deck game, they are only concerned about the 2 deck game.
How does the standard deviation OF the truecount vary through the deck and with number of decks in the shoe? Well, the regular count on the first card dealt is the same no matter how many decks, and then the variance as a function of position through the shoe is a parabola intersecting the line y=0 at x=0 and x=(52*number of decks), and of course standard deviation is square root of variance. In other words, the count is 0 before the first card has been dealt, and after the whole shoe has been dealt. Naturally the peak of the parabola is halfway through, but that’s the regular count, not the truecount. The truecount is that parabola divided by number of decks remaining, and that increases all the way to the end. The way I count is 2-7 get one point, 9 10 and A get -1. The regular count, on the first card dealt, is (12/13)^0.5, the square root of 12/13. So now you have 3 points that define the parabola entirely, you have y=sqrt(12/13) at x=1, and y=0 at both x=0 and (52*number of decks). What is the result you get? Well, one result is that halfway through a n-deck shoe, the truecount is sqrt(40/n). So in a 2-deck game with the cutcard 1 deck before the end, the standard deviation of the count right at the end there will be sqrt(20) or about 4.47. So 16% of the time, the truecount will be more than that. Allowing for some error resulting from discretization of a normal distribution, that is. But what is the standard deviation of a 6-deck game, 1 deck before the end? It’s sqrt(40), or about 6.32. Better than 4.47 by a factor of the square root of 2. So 16% of the time, the truecount will be more than 6.32 right before the cutcard in the 6-deck game, but one standard deviation is only 4.47 right before the cutcard in the 2 deck game. The detriment is that you have to suffer through 5 decks to get there instead of just 1, but the upside is that all the while, you’ll be betting the minimum bet, which is probably 5 times smaller in the 6-deck game. Plus you’ll see less heat. Almost always, the 6-deck game is going to be better. It just needs more patience and more precision, because if you can’t accurately keep count, then you might as well give up and go home. If you’re lazy and not good enough to count through 6 decks though, then the 2 deck game is for you. It’s higher risk, but you’ll see the reward more quickly. Possibly.
Under these conditions, what you should do to minimize risk of ruin (and the math I used to calculate this was unpleasant) is in the 2 deck game, bet the minimum bet PLUS 2*(the minimum bet) for every 1 the truecount is past 1.8, and in the 6 deck game, bet the minimum bet PLUS 3*(the minimum bet) for every 1 the truecount is past 1.8. And I’ll generally just use 2 instead of 1.8 because I don’t have all the time in the universe to be that precise. This is supposing they allow double after split, no hitting on split aces, double on any but only after first 2 cards, blackjack pays 3 to 2. So if you’re playing a 2-deck game and the min bet is 25 and the truecount is 3, you should bet 75 dollars, since 25+(3-2)*2*25=75. If you’re playing a 6-deck game, the count is 11, there are 3 decks left, and the min bet is 3, you should bet 18 dollars, because 3+(11/3-2)*3*3=18. This also shows you why it’s much lower risk playing the 6 deck game.
Oops. Correction – the VARIANCE is the function that has the parabola, not the standard deviation. So the 3 points that define the parabola are x=0 and y=0, x=52*(number of decks in show) and y=0, and x=1 and y=12/13. The STANDARD DEVIATION of the count after the first card has been dealt is sqrt(12/13), the variance of the count after the first card is dealt is 12/13.
Eh. What do you expect. The real opportunity ended in 1961 with the publication of Beat the Dealer. It’s a wonder blackjack was continued AT ALL after that. It’s just not the opportunity that exists any more. Every generation, there is an opportunity to get rich easily. Blackjack was the big opportunity in the first half of the 20th century, and it stopped being so once everyone knew how it could be beaten. Just as you might be wishing you could go back in time to the 1950s (you could probably count cards out loud and they’d never figure out what you were doing!) for a completely vulnerable 1-deck game with no maximum bet and probably a 1$ min bet, or even less than that since it’s 1950s dollars, and probably surrender available and probably the blackjack bonus for getting a 5-card 21 too, just imagine, someone in the year 2100 wishing he could go back in time to today to exploit a weakness that is somewhere, right under your nose, that you don’t know about. And once you learn about it, it will be because everyone will have learned about it, and then that opportunity will be gone.
Obviously casinos would eventually rig blackjack in some way though. I’m just surprised it took 50 years. Honestly, you don’t want to invest in casinos. They’re desperate, and if you check stock market history, they’ve been losing money for a long time. And it’s not all because Trump is retarded and drives all his businesses into the red.
what is the meaning of no peek?
No peek means that the dealer does not check for blackjack before the players complete their hands. It also applies in games where the dealer does not take a second card until all players are done. The reason it affects the strategy is because in the typical US-style peek game, players know for sure that dealer does not have a blackjack before making a decision to split or double down. In a no-peek game those moves are riskier against a dealer ten or ace, because you may lose all of the bets to a dealer blackjack.
Excellent forum here to start. I live down in Florida and just graduated with a degree in physics. There are several casinos down here but are all owned by the Seminole Tribe. I have mastered the Hi-Low system and keep track of the Ace’s via strategically placed chips in my stack. I play $25-$1000 spread @ Hit Soft 17 6-8 decks. I prefer to play with at least two other players as the speed and pressure is a little over my head-for now. My first run I bought in for $1,000 and made $3200.00 profit in about 4 hours. My max bet was about $150.00. I did this 3 more times and just cleared $9,000 in profit. I feel like this is too much to fast. Am i just getting lucky on top of the count?
I then proceeded to just have a fun in a skin pit ($10 min, 6:5, CSM) I bought in for $300.00 and walked away $2,355.00 and was counting and keeping track of the Aces and hands in between rich Ace hands.
Is there ever a added subconscious ability to memorize and sequence cards relative to the count. Maybe I just need to lose to feel good again but I’ve been almost nervous heading to the tables, I guess not knowing how to lose and how to react.
One more quick thing, what are your thoughts on automatic shufflers (where they put multiple decks in, not the One2Six machines on the table). I have come to love these machines. The cards always seem to have the right balance. Does anybody else hate hand shuffles?
Given that you were only spreading 1:6 in a six or eight deck game, you weren’t playing with an edge at all. And you were playing at a really big disadvantage when you switched to the 6:5 game. If you had instead been spreading maybe 1:12 in this game (and never played the 6:5 game), I would break down your $9K in profit as roughly $500 skill, $8500 luck.
You mention that you have mastered Hi-Lo, but it sounds like you still need to learn a lot. No worries, we all started where you are.
Just for reference, card counting will usually yield about 1 to 1.5 units an hour in expected profit. If you are spreading $25 to $300, that means making $25 to $40 per hour. Of course your actual results will be all over the place, easily up or down $3000 in a session.
Machine shuffles or hand shuffles don’t materially affect the game, except for more advanced techniques. Any trends you have noticed as a result are just noise.
when should we split 10.10?and when should we surrender while 17 against dealer’s hand 10?thanks a lot!!!
hi admin!!when should we buy insurance?thank you so much~~
When I started out about 20 years ago, for the first two or three years I used the Hi-Lo. Then I switched to Wong’s Halves count, which has an awesome betting efficiency. That is the count I have used ever since. However, it is a complicated 3 level count (and I use it in true halves form, not doubled). It’s hard to justify a complicated system these days unless you are really playing a lot. These days, when people ask what to learn, I recommend KO and Hi-Lo.
Consider taking a look at KO, in the book Knock-Out Blackjack. It doesn’t require a conversion to true count, and still compares favorably to Hi-Lo.