I'm new to this old thread, and found it fascinating. I read the VIP articles on Snyder's site, and read through this thread at least 2 times. This quote above was the 2nd post in this long thread, but nobody has really answered it. How the heck does it work? Unseen aces have nothing to do with whether the hole card is a 10 for the insurance bet. So I've been thinking about it.
It seems like the Ace side count is just functioning as a proxy for estimating the number of remaining decks, without looking at the remaining decks. In a six deck shoe, if you are at 20 Aces remaining, you should have about 5 decks left. Is that what the VIP boils down to?
I could understand how for insurance betting, the two methods would corrolate, meaning that if you figure out your insurance bet using the remaining decks or use remaining Aces, they should both corrolate, but it doesn't make sense that the remaining Aces would be more accurate. To me, it would seem like the remaining decks is the bottom line, or what you are trying to directly get at, and it would seem to me that remaining Aces would only be a fuzzy approximation of remaining decks.
Another thought on the VIP that no one has brought up: Would the VIP work with any other side count that is not overlapping the main count? For example, Hi Opt 1, you count 3, 4, 5, 6 vs 10's. I've read that some people like to side count 7's. Since unseen 7's have as much to do with insurance as unseen Aces (meaning that they both have nothing to do with it), if you were (just suppose) side counting 7's instead of Aces, wouldn't the VIP work just the same? Substitute remaining 7's instead of remaining Aces to compute the VIP?