Card Counting Spanish21

[Strizkiz]

Hi I have been somewhat of an avid card counter through the years. I also work in a surveillance room for a casino. Last night a couple young fellas came in and started hammering black on SP21 table. So i ran them down and thought they couldnt be counting or if they were they were doing something wrong. The guy went from $5 to $200 on a running -14, so im thinking have at it, because from from what I know thats not correct. He ended up doing a bit of damage, so i went on the computer today to see if there was something I was missing and because weve entered some parallel reality you dont have to start at a TC-4 you can count normal and just add a -1 to an ace, oiow you start at zero but instead of treating an ace as -1 you treat it as -2. I ran the guy down using this method and thats exactly what he was doing. I just dont get how -2 for an ace equates to a true-4, on a 5 deck game. When he first raised his bet one count equated to a running -14 and roughly a -3 TC (so nowhere near playable) and the second count was just over a +1 and playable for a raise in bet size. What am I missing here? Thanks

 

[johndoe]

Katarina Walker wrote the seminal book on beating Spanish 21, and advocated for hilo tags and starting off with a negative running count. More recently just using A=-2 and a balanced count is more popular. Obviously the strategy is totally different.

But yeah if you were counting with hilo and saw a -14RC, there's no way that was a positive count even with that adjustment.