Blackjack Card Counting Tutorial (Beat The Casino)
Blackjack Systems — From Basic Strategy to Expert What began in a technical journal more than twenty years ago has come a long way since.
A new generation of more blackjack classes tx blackjack systems has come on the scene, and with the wider range of choices now available, you might be wondering what kind of system is best for you.
To help you make that choice, this article explains how we got where we are and divides useful blackjack systems into five distinct classes.
Blackjack In The Early Sixties The first good blackjack system was published in the September 1956 issue of the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
Developed by Baldwin, Cantey, Maisel, and McDermott, the system was a basic strategy which gave any blackjack player using it an edge in the long run that anyone playing craps, roulette, keno, or slots did not have.
The paper received little attention at the time because it was in a technical journal.
However, after reading it and trying the system, Dr.
The first edition had a discussion thorp blackjack system the use of a side count of aces for betting purposes.
It also introduced what was then thought to be the ultimate system, the use of a point count as a guide to betting while using the ten count for playing.
The second edition had an improved basic strategy and a high-low count, which was introduced, by Harvey Dubner at the 1963 Fall Joint Computer Conference.
At that 1963 Fall Joint Computer Conference, which was held in Las Vegas, Professor Thorp was master of ceremonies for an evening panel discussion on the use of computers in studies of games of chance.
The next Fall Joint Computer Conference held in Las Vegas was in 1965.
Popularity Increases Before Beat the Dealer, the large casinos had few blackjack tables and those tables were rarely crowded.
Now there are many blackjack tables at every large casino.
In Professional Blackjack Stanford Wong reports that the number of blackjack tables in the large hotel casinos on the Strip in Las Vegas ranges from a high of sixty-one at the MGM Grand to a low of sixteen at the Flamingo.
The casino revenue from blackjack has caught up with https://chicago-lawyer.info/blackjack/blackjack-bets-per-hour.html since the tables now are often filled with players.
Many of these have switched to the more respectable counting 21 to the glee of the casinos.
Yet the compulsive can now justify his losses with honor.
At first, this change was in response to wild bet variations made by professionals who could keep track of the specific cards left in the deck.
Then, the casino managers demonstrated they had more is blackjack 21 poker than common sense.
They changed the playing rules to make the game less favorable for the card counters.
Of course, these changes also made the game less favorable for all players, and blackjack quickly lost much of its new-found popularity.
The casinos soon learned that they had to be more subtle, and they abandoned almost all of the unfavorable rule changes.
This unfavorable change was partially offset by permitting splits of pairs after the first two cards except for a pair of aces.
A more subtle change was the switch from a single deck to two or four decks under the mistaken impression that nobody could count four decks.
Some casinos have since gone to five or six decks.
Furthermore, team play was hurting them much more than were individual card counters.
One side effect of going to multiple decks is that the game becomes less favorable for players who do not count.
As a result, many non-counters have abandoned casinos with only multiple decks in favor of those which still offer single-deck play.
This exodus has slowed down and probably reversed the trend toward multiple-deck games, which shows that the laws of economics apply to casinos too.
Players do tend to go where they get the most for their money.
Consequently, some casinos have experimented with rule changes which make the game more favorable for the knowledgeable player.
One example is the introduction and slow spread of the surrender option.
However, another example of the greed of some casino managers is the barring of players suspected of being card counters in order, presumably, to increase profits.
I suspect that those casinos flagrantly barring counters will actually decrease their profits.
For when other players see fewer winners, they will tend to get discouraged and go to other casinos with more favorable playing conditions.
Of course, the legality of barring counters is being challenged in the courts.
The only casino countermeasure which has not met serious resistance is the closing of blackjack tables when they become empty.
With fewer empty tables available, the good counter finds it harder to be the only player at the table.
In single-deck play, the good card counter loses a part of his advantage when forced to share the table with others if he cannot see all the cards.
And, of course, he receives fewer hands per hour, having to wait while the others play.
We can put these systems into two classes, which we will Call intermediate and advanced.
We use these terms- to emphasize that these systems are more difficult than a good basic strategy.
The intermediate systems use a simpler count than the advanced systems.
All that count involved was keeping track of the number of fives seen.
When the deck has fewer fives left than normal, it is more favorable for the player, and so you bet more.
When the deck is not favorable for the player, you bet less.
Revere has such a five-count system in Playing Blackjack as a Business.
In that system, you also have a different playing strategy than basic when the deck is favorable.
Advanced Systems The advanced systems use a somewhat more complicated count and achieve much better performance than the intermediate systems.
Table I lists the better advanced systems.
In addition, a count of all cards seen is easier than a thorp blackjack system in which you must decide whether or not the card is a ten before you count it.
Thorp next divided the number of non-tens left by the number of tens left.
This tens ratio was the index used to find out how favorable the deck was.
If the number of cards seen is at least as large as the point of favorability, the deck is rich and you take playing actions which you would not take if the deck were not rich.
You also bet more when the deck is rich.
The other advanced systems use what is called a running count.
If a card seen is one of the high cards being counted, you subtract the number shown in Table I from the running count.
If the card is one final, 21 blackjack ramon ayala have the low cards used by that system, you add one to the running count.
For any other card seen, the count does not change.
The running count is somewhat harder than the simple count used by the intermediate systems.
In contrast, the systems in the Advanced Class do not use a true count.
They require decision making based directly on the running count.
Since an ace can be valued at either one or eleven, its behavior in blackjack play is much different from that of a ten.
Consequently, because the Revere system has two cards with widely differing characteristics in the same group, it is less powerful for playing decisions than the better systems which have only tens in the high group.
When the deck remaining has more than the normal one ace per thirteen cards, the deck is ace rich and is favorable for betting purposes.
Better Systems For Professionals A number of systems for professional blackjack players have been developed since the early sixties.
All of these systems use at least one true count, and that is the criterion we are using to distinguish these professional systems from advanced systems.
Some of the newer systems have two or more true counts, and we will put these in the class of systems for experts.
One important advantage of grouping the systems into classes is that there is very little difference in the performance between the better systems within each class except for the expert class.
However, there are other differences among these systems which would tend to make some systems harder to use than others in the same class.
To me there is very little difference in difficulty between using a running count and using a true count because I have a facility for mental arithmetic.
However, most people have problems with the division operation particularly, and the HI-OPT systems, for example, recommend that you divide by three-fourths when one-fourth of the deck has been played.
Table I I lists and summarizes the characteristics of the more important professional blackjack systems.
If you have problems with dividing by fractions, then you should not consider any of the systems in this table which call for that operation.
The early systems were quite crude when introduced because their developers were not using any of the more powerful optimization techniques now available.
The Einstein system of 1968 can be regarded as a prototype for HI-OPT I.
Among the point count systems still of interest, the most complicated is the 1973 Revere Advanced Point Count.
A point value of 1 is assigned to sevens, 2 to twos, threes, and sixes, 3 to fours, and 4 to fives.
Tens have a point value of -3 and nines have a point value of -2.
Aces are counted separately.
This is the system which Ken Uston used, and the problems he had in mastering it are well covered in The Big Player.
The simplest of the point count systems is HI-OPT II which assigns a value of +1 to twos, threes sixes, and sevens, +2 to fours and fives, and -2 to tens.
The systems which use only a +1 for the low group and a -1 for the high group are obviously simpler to learn and use than the point-count systems.
Comparing Systems It is handy to have appropriate measures of system performance.
The most widely quoted measures of performance are the results of computer simulations of one million hands run by Julian Braun.
Furthermore, all of the systems compared are exposed to the same shuffled decks.
That is, the cards in the deck are in the same order.
This does not mean, however, that every system will have the same sequence of player hands and dealer up cards.
Of course, the effects of these differences cannot persist beyond the next shuffle.
The overall effect is much larger with multiple-deck play because thorp blackjack system hands can be affected by each difference.
Observing a player in action is not an adequate way to measure system performance.
Even if you 247 blackjack unblocked achieve one hundred hours of flawless record-keeping and play, it is not enough to fix the performance of a system with an accuracy useful for comparing systems in the same class.
Conversely, small differences in performance less than 0.
On the other hand, differences in error rates can be very important.
A difference of one error per hour is normally enough to overwhelm any performance differences between systems in the same class or even differences between systems in adjacent classes.
The advertising for HI-OPT II claims a gain of 0.
Such a table is much harder to learn and use than the HI-OPT I table with only one critical true count for the hard eleven total.
The Most Powerful Blackjack Systems Ever Devised As noted in Table II, all of the newer professional blackjack systems offer a side count for aces, which some use for playing purposes in addition to betting.
That is why that group was limited to systems with at most one true count and a side count of aces.
It used a point count for betting in addition to the tens ratio for playing decisions.
Characteristics of other systems which involve more than the professional systems already mentioned are summarized in Table III.
The first three systems in Table III all use the same groups of cards.
Collver did not have the benefit of any of the modern system-optimization tools; so his system was developed using tedious hand calculations.
Thus, he was not able to carry a good concept very far.
Because the circumstances which led to the DHM Expert System are rather unusual, I will briefly review what happened.
Although I had something blackjack basic chart join to Las Vegas a number of times before I started my congratulate, blackjack payout explained the in this area, I had never played the game of blackjack in a casino and believed the house could not be beaten.
I was then inspired to come up with something better.
The high-low count system offered several opportunities for improvement.
First, tens and aces behave very differently and thorp blackjack system not be in the same group.
Second, all cards should be accounted for so that there are no assumptions for uncounted cards.
Third, except for aces, the groups should be of equal size and as homogeneous as they can click at this page />Fourth, since four-deck play was becoming more common, a count system developed for one deck play might be inaccurate for four-deck play.
My work was first published in January, 1973 in the Claremont Economic Papers as an illustration of a practical application of mathematical probability.
When the Western Economics Association decided to have a session on the economics of gambling in their 1974 conference to be held in Las Vegas, mine was one of the first papers submitted.
Most of the papers were on economic and sociological aspects of gambling and subsequently appeared in Gambling and Society, published by Charles C.
Because of my lack of playing experience, I did not know I had invented a system which I would not be able to use for several years.
Then my associates contributed ideas which made the DHM Expert System manageable.
Table of Expert Blackjack Systems I became aware of the work of Fristedt and Heath shortly before the Second Conference on Gambling.
Professor Heath had been informed about my paper by Julian Braun.
Because our overall approach appeared similar, he was thinking of withdrawing the paper he and Fristedt had prepared.
I encouraged him to proceed with the presentation because their paper emphasized aspects which I had covered only lightly; secondly, they presented the system while I only presented its performance.
Their system has since been published in the May, 1977 issue of Winning magazine formerly Gambling Quarterly which is now defunct.
Although I regard the manner in which they presented their system as very effective for portraying their results, it is not the least bit useful to anyone who wants to use the system in casino play.
Furthermore, their presentation suggests that their optimization was less complete and less accurate than the techniques I used.
In estimating the differences in performance between the two systems, the DHM Expert System should be given credit for integrating the ace count into the playing decisions, while Fristedt and Heath used it only for betting.
In addition, the better accuracy of the techniques I used could account for several tenths of a percent difference in performance, which gives the DHM Expert System a clear performance edge over the Fristedt-Heath System.
The Multiple Parameters for the HI-OPT systems represents an entirely different approach to blackjack.
The mathematical foundation for the approach was laid in a paper which Professor Peter Griffin presented at the First Conference on Gambling.
The paper which he presented at the Second Conference on Gambling, held in 1975, puts forth the idea itself.
The advertised gain over the system with only the side count of aces is only 0.
Thus, the player is asked to add four more side counts for a gain of only 0.
The multiple-parameters approach has not been compared in a simulation with either the DHM Expert or the Fristedt-Heath systems.
However, in view of the rather small performance gain claimed, I believe that it is significantly inferior in performance to these other two systems.
The Sklansky Key Card concept was described in the August, 1977 issue of Gambling Times.
In that article, it was recommended as an addition to a basic strategy and only a few rules for using the ten side counts were given.
Thus, the system probably is feasible for experts.
However, use of a basic strategy as the base and the limited rules presented leads me to believe that it click is not much better in performance than the intermediate systems.
I doubt that it is as good in performance as the better advanced systems in Table 1.
It is certainly much harder to use.
The DHM Ultimate System was inspired by the Sklansky Key Card concept.
If you are going to the trouble of counting each card separately, you should be able to do something useful with that information.
At present, the best approach is to program a computer to use the thorp blackjack system counts and tell you what to do in each and every player hand-dealer up card situation in combination with the number andvalue of the cards remaining in the deck.
Unfortunately, the use of a computer in casino play for this purpose is probably illegal-or at least would not be permitted.
Thus, the DHM Ultimate System is an academic device which is being developed only to find out how close to this ultimate performance https://chicago-lawyer.info/blackjack/what-cards-do-you-double-down-in-blackjack.html DHM Expert System comes.
Conclusions and Recommendations There noware five distinct classes of useful blackjack systems: Basic — no counting; Intermediate — a simple side count; Advanced — a running count; Professional — blackjack pair true count plus an optional side count of aces; Expert — everything more complicated than professional systems including the most powerful blackjack systems ever devised.
People who play blackjack should be able to learn and use a good basic strategy such as the one contained on page 13 of this issue of Gambling Times.
Lessons are available for those who find it hard to learn from a book or article but who can easily learn from a teacher.
If you are not able or willing to learn a good basic strategy, then you will just have to put up with long-run losses, which will generally be higher than they would be in games like baccarat or craps.
For in those games, the luck factor is dominant, but the casino has only a small edge against here />With a good basic strategy properly used, read article would in the long run break even in single-deck play at a typical large casino on the Strip in Las Vegas.
A few of these casinos offer slightly more favorable rules than others.
With four-deck play, the basic systems drop off about 0.
Two deck play comes in between as does play at the typical downtown Las Vegas casinos in which the dealer hits a soft 17.
If you are going to play casino blackjack at least sixteen hours per year, it will probably be worth your while to move up to a higher performing level once you have mastered a good basic strategy.
There is no way to have a long-run edge in your favor without accurate card counting.
The intermediate systems have the simplest counting systems, but the price of this simplicity is lesser performance potential than the higher level systems.
However, an edge in your favor no matter how small is much better than playing against a house edge as you would do in any other casino game.
The better advanced systems listed in Table I give you a bigger edge if you can use them correctly in casino play.
They are good enough to provide an edge in your favor even for four-deck play.
Furthermore, they do not use any mental arithmetic beyond counting.
The developers of these systems have tried to make them as easy as possible to use with reasonable performance and to keep the rules as simple as possible, If tables are used at all, they are much less complicated than those used in the professional-level systems.
At present, few players are successfully using the professional and expert systems.
While reliable estimates are not available, I doubt that there are more than one hundred players in the world today who regularly use a professional system in casino play with an error rate much less than one per hour.
I doubtthat there are ten players successfully using an expert system.
It took me a fair amount of effort to learn to use the DHM Professional System, which I regard as the simplest of the better professional systems.
In addition, I had to brush up and practice before each trip to Las Vegas.
The ace count is easier and more accurate in the DHM Expert System; so I am now using that one.
However, it does take more effort to learn the expert system and more practice to get up to the necessary speed before using click here in a casino.
Except for the various; expert systems, there is little difference in performance between the better systems within any one class.
On the other hand, there are differences in what you have to learn and what you have to do to use the various systems in the same class.
Once you choose the level which is best for you, you should consider the characteristics of the better systems in that class and choose the one with which you are most comfortable.
Since no system can guarantee that you will win in the short run, your error rate and how you feel using the system are more important in deciding whether the level is right for you than is how much you won.
Because the differences please click for source a basic strategy and the intermediate systems are small compared to the differences between the intermediate systems and the higher levels, you may be able to skip one of those two levels.
If you have sufficient motivation and the appropriate skills, you may be able to make it all the way up to the expert level.
If you succeed, it will take a smaller bankroll to reach the same income level and you can get by with a smaller average bet.
In addition, the probability of an unfavorable session is sharply reduced.
Among the expert systems listed in Table III, there are only four which I am sure outperform the better professional systems.
On that basis these four can be called the most powerful blackjack systems ever devised.
One of them was given that title in the article describing it.
Another of these systems, the DHM Ultimate, requires use of a computer during play; so it is not usable in a casino.
The other two-HI-OPT with Multiple Parameters and the DHM Expert System-are usable in casino play.
Howard Mitchell is president of 5 card charlie blackjack Associates, a computer systems consulting firm.
Besides developing better blackjack systems, Dr.
Mitchell has used computers to solve a variety of problems, ranging from how to get more natural gas through existing pipelines to designing a system to process efficiently a flood of data from a Defense Department satellite.
Gambling Times Magazine is one of the oldest and most recognized online gambling publications in the world.
Our reporters give you the latest news from one of the most interesting industries on the planet.
All content on GamblingTimes.
If you stumble upon something incorrect, please get in touch.
Blackjack Card Counting Tutorial (Beat The Casino)
Testing and perfecting his card counting system in casinos (funded by an underground organization), Dr. Thorp wrote his book and his system was brought to ...
It does not approach me.
I congratulate, what necessary words..., an excellent idea
What good question
I suggest you to visit a site on which there are many articles on this question.
I can not take part now in discussion - it is very occupied. I will be free - I will necessarily write that I think.
What words... super, a remarkable idea
It is the valuable information
It agree with you
In my opinion you are not right. I am assured. I can defend the position. Write to me in PM, we will talk.
It is remarkable, it is very valuable information
I consider, that you are not right. Write to me in PM, we will talk.
This simply matchless message ;)
You are not right. I suggest it to discuss. Write to me in PM, we will talk.
Prompt, whom I can ask?
In it something is. Many thanks for the information, now I will know.
What remarkable question
I apologise, but it does not approach me. Who else, what can prompt?
You were visited with a remarkable idea
Certainly. It was and with me. We can communicate on this theme.
I recommend to you to look in google.com