Casino Vérité Blackjack – The Ultimate Practice Tool
Casino Vérité Blackjack (CVBJ) is an award-winning software program developed by Norman Wattenberger, an advantage player and technology guru. Norman is a former Strategy and Architecture Vice President for Citibank and has been a card counter for over 40 years. He currently runs a blackjack forum, and he has been distributing Blackjack software for over 20 years.
How is CVBJ useful?
CVBJ is regarded as one of the top-tier blackjack training tools ever created. It is the software that myself and countless other card counters have used to perfect their counting skills, and it can save an aspiring card counter a substantial amount of EV (estimated value or potential profit) by flushing out mistakes behind a computer monitor rather than at the blackjack table. By allowing you to track your play, recognize your mistakes, and practice your technique, CVBJ is a must-have for any serious advantage player.
What can CVBJ do?
CVBJ allows you to recognize what your own play at the tables can’t. The program shows you where you’ve gone wrong, and allows you to correct it. Because the standard deviation in the game of blackjack may create a winning player out of a bad card counter or a loser out of a well-practiced, experienced card counter, knowing where you stand is critical. Even the results of 300 hours of play can be misleading, and if you hope to make it as a counter or even play a good basic strategy game, you need to know how you’re performing before the long-run catches up with you.
CVBJ Features
CVBJ is highly customizable to fit your game, goals, and skill level. At setup, you create a profile and select a 4 or 6 seat table (which you can change later on). You then select your level of experience. Your experience level doesn’t change the options available to you, but a novice level makes the simpler options more prevalent and noticeable. You then select your strategy, be it pure basic strategy with no counting involved, the high-low counting method, KO, Zen, or many more. Once setup is complete, you can automatically begin practicing and exploring the software.
Customization
Once you’ve begun to explore the settings from the menu at the bottom left of the screen, you’ll notice that you can customize the rules for number of decks, penetration level, number of burn cards, rules such as H17, true count calculations, dealer speeds, number of players and their play styles, your starting bankroll, bonuses such as 777 pays 2:1, and different 21 variations like suited ace and jack paying 2:1. This allows you to create hypothetical scenarios or practice in the same exact conditions as your local casino.
Vérité even allows you to simulate dealer errors. These include insurance and blackjack payoff errors, missed dealer busts, players losing a push, or dealers incorrectly standing. This feature allows you to test your ability to recognize dealer errors in a live casino environment that will negatively affect your EV.
While I believe that you can only truly become comfortable assessing a casino’s level of scrutiny toward your play through experience within a casino environment, CVBJ does have a heat index system which allows you to recognize which plays and strategies are likely to draw the ire of the pitboss or surveillance crew. This meter increases when you make strategy deviations, spread your bet drastically, correlate with the count, and bet large amounts. You can fully customize which options raise your heat level.
Error Recognition
This feature makes CVBJ worth the price alone. Once you’ve set your strategy, the software will make sure that you play to it correctly. For instance, if you are playing high-low and you want to use the Illustrious 18 index, you can select that playing strategy so that if you deviate from play incorrectly according to the count (hitting a 16 vs a dealer 10 at a +2 TC, for instance), an error sound and a pop-up window will notify you. You can set your indexes anywhere from just a few +1 or +2 deviations to the entire range of count deviations in existence.
In addition to the error notifications, an error log is available for you to review after your play sessions. You can consult your log to see which strategy errors you made and how much EV was lost with each cumulative mistake. Once you’ve learned which mistakes you consistently make, you can set up drills within CVBJ to practice those areas of difficulty, saving yourself the cost of practicing with real money until you are finally casino ready.
Practice and Drills
While CVBJ can be incredibly useful to sit down and simply play the game of blackjack and practice keeping the count, deck estimation, and conversion, all while comparing your numbers to CVBJ’s calculations to test your accuracy, the true benefit comes from the program’s unique flashcard, discard tray, counting drills, and more.
The flashcard drills allow you to test your count system indexes. You can select your most common play or drill errors, the illustrious 18, or any set range of index. The drills are timed and give you two cards, the dealer one card, and you a true count. From there, you need to decide which option (hit, stand, double, etc.) is the correct option.
The discard tray drills show images of a discard tray (you choose the number of decks) full of a variety of different numbers of cards. During the timed drill, you must select how many decks you believe are left in each image. This is a great way to practice your deck estimation.
The counting drills allow you to practice your running count, true count, and other side counts. A number of different cards will rotate on the screen, at a speed you select. Once the drill is over, you must give the true, side, or running count based on your practice specifications.
Casino Vérité Blackjack is absolutely the closest that an advantage player can get to practice in a live casino environment. The software prevents you from sacrificing EV and potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars in the process. Even if you have already played extensively in a live environment, CVBJ can point out flaws or errors in your game that are costing you every time you step foot in a casino. The program can teach you anything from basic strategy to advanced counts to risk of ruin, and no serious blackjack player should be without it. You can purchase CVBJ at qfit.com
