KO question

If KO's key count is reached after 6 decks have been dealt (from 8), does the player have the advantage? The RC inceases by 4 after each deck, after 6 decks, the RC should be 24 (IRC=0). The key count is 22, so wouldn't the house have the advantage at this point?

As I've said before, don't think just do. Trust in the billions of computer simulations and blackjack experts.

This is true

With KO, when you reach your key count at the six deck mark of an eight deck game, the True Count is actually -1.0 -- and the house will have about a 1% advantage. Also, if you reached your key count two decks into the eight deck shoe, your True Count would actually be +2.3 and you'd have an advantage of about +0.7%. At mid-shoe, your key count would equal a True Count of +1.5, giving you an advantage of about +0.35%.

As popular and formidible as KO is, it's major shortcoming is that an unbalanced count whose pivot is "+4 true" has a rather loose correlation between the running count and the true count at various shoe depths. These "error ranges" however, tend to boil down to meaning little after all is said and done.

Still, an unbalanced count whose pivot is "+2 true", such as Red 7, KISS and UBZII produce a tighter bond between the running count and the true count at various shoe depths. With KISS for example, reaching your key count of "20" six decks into an eight deck shoe would produce a +1.5 true count. Reaching that same key count of "20" just two decks in equals a +1.8 true count. Your key count at all other depths falls somewhere in between +1.5 and +1.8 true. The intitially tacky feature of Red 7 and KISS is that you must include a half rank of cards in your count structure, such as the red 7s or the black deuces. UBZII is a level 2 count, so that gets taken care of by counting some cards as 1 point and others as 2 points.

In defense of KO, when your count gets very high, it then is more accurately tied to the true count than the "+2 pivot" systems. At that point though, you usually have your max bet out anyway (or near it) and will already be making most of your index hand plays.

All in all, I believe unbalanced systems with a pivot point of "+2 true" makes more efficient use of why you unbalance a count in the first place. Just my two cents worth.

Fred, that's the first argument I've personally seen for using Red 7 or KISS instead of KO. Usually they're all lumped together. It's not going to make me unlearn KO, but it's good to know.

That is some very interesting insight into KO...perhaps a bit too simple for its own good? All that being said, do you feel that the simplification of about 12 or so basic strategy indices are detrimental to the "average" card counter? Or is it a good thing to be able to utilize those, especially expanding the double downs, at 2 or 3 index points?

Obviously, I have my view of the system, but I'm always interested to hear others' perspectives.

Chef -- I Don't know, but I did run several long sims with KISS III; first using no indices at all, then using just Insurance and 16 vs. 10; then using all 21 individual index numbers supplied in the book; and finally using 9 additional indices for 9 extra hands not supplied in the book. All were run for the six deck game, S17, DAS dealt at 4.25/6.0 and a 1-to-10 spread. They performed like so:

No indices: +0.50%
2 indices; +0.63%
21 indices; +0.70%
30 indices; +0.71%

From all that, it doesn't appear that grouping/approximating the index numbers for major double downs can cost more than maybe 0.03%??? Sims could be run to pin this down.

Good deal...I wondered how much you lose with the simplification.

Thanks