Back between 1998 and 2002 then I played blackjack quite seriously in the UK until it became apparent that the automatic shufflers were just making it too difficult to find beatable games. I have encountered a lot of card counters in my time and one of the biggest mistakes that I see novice counters make is to only use a running count. For those of you who are not familiar with what a running count actually is then it is the sum total of all of the high cards that have been dealt from the shoe as opposed to low and neutral cards.
The hi-lo level one counting system for examples used a figure of +1 for all cards dealt that are a deuce through to a six while the tens and aces are counted as -1 with every seven, eight or nine given a score of zero and the sum total is the running count. However to only use this running count to form your betting decisions is a big mistake because it doesn’t do a very good job of estimating the ratio of remaining high cards to low cards and that is what a card counter needs in order to base their betting decisions.
To better explain what I mean then I will quote an example of why we need a second count called the “True Count”. Imagine if we took a deck of 52 cards and the first six cards out of that deck were low cards which would give us a running count of +6. With a total of 20 cards valued at +1, another 20 cards valued at -1 and the remaining cards valued zero then what we have is a situation where there are 20 high value cards and only 14 low value cards remaining which gives us a ratio of 1.428 high cards to low cards thus giving us a running count of +6.
Now suppose there were only eight cards remaining and seven of these were high value cards and aces and one card was a low value card. We would have the same +6 count as in the previous instance but here the ratio of high cards to low cards is massively different and is 7.0 high cards to low cards indicating a deck that is far richer in high cards and aces. So you can see why the running count by itself is simply not enough to estimate our edge and is why we need a second count working alongside it.
Come and play poker with Carl at www.pokerstars.co.uk
{ 0 comments }
