Posts Tagged ‘professional blackjack’
One art you will have to perfect, regardless of your method of true count adjustment, is estimating the number of remaining decks. You cannot do this without practice.
Buy yourself a few dozen decks of standard playing cards. Use casino-quality cards, preferably used ones from a casino, so that the thickness of the decks is the same as you will encounter when it counts. Many casinos sell their used decks in their gift shops. Make up stacks of cards containing 8 decks, 7 1/2 decks, 7, 6 1/2, 5 1/2, 5, 4 1/2, 4, 3 1/2, 3, 2 1/2, 2, 1 1/2, 1 and 1/2. (You will need to purchase 62 decks of cards to make up all of these stacks. Believe me, pros do it.) Familiarize yourself with exactly what each sized stack looks like.
In casinos, you won't see such precise stacks of discards very often, but your eyes will estimate to the nearest sized stack you can recognize so that you may make your adjustments effortlessly.
Never waste a moment in this estimation process. If it appears 2 1/4 decks are remaining, call it 2 1/2. Always round up—this way you'll play more conservatively. Call it 2 only when it's definitely below 2 1/4.
Also, when you eyeball one of your practice stacks, remember that you are looking at the discards. Therefore, if you assume that you're in a 6-deck game, and you look at a stack of 4 decks, you will make your true count adjustment based on 2 decks—the remaining decks. Be sure you practice this way.
True count adjustment is one of the most difficult aspects of card counting to master. Most counters are poorly trained in this area and should stick with the running count systems. If you ever try to join a professional blackjack team, don't be surprised if you are tested rigorously on true-count adjustments. The team captain will likely show you various-sized stacks of discards and give you hypothetical strategy decisions. He will expect you to respond with the proper plays immediately, based on your system. After each response, you'll have to explain in detail the method you used to make your decision.
I'm always surprised to hear sloppy, slow, and badly trained players profess that they would win a fortune if they just had the big bankroll behind them. They often complain about cheating dealers, poor conditions, negative fluctuations, and the like. But they use systems beyond their abilities and can't make accurate decisions to save their lives. These players —and the majority of card counters fall into this group—are the meat and potatoes of the casino industry.
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Players who are familiar with traditional Hi-Lo strategy tables, or for that matter, with true count strategy tables for any balanced card counting system, may be surprised by the simplicity of the Hi-Lo Lite. Many experts will doubt its strength and playing accuracy. Allow me to describe the history of its development.
Early in 1991,1 attempted to answer via computer simulation whether Stanford Wong's or Julian Braun's version of the Hi-Lo Count was more accurate. Both were respected programmers and blackjack authorities who had devised indices for the Hi-Lo Count that differed on dozens of decisions. Using John Imming's Universal Blackjack Engine software, I ran off 500-million hands of each strategy with a flat bet in single-deck games with Vegas Strip rules, using all indices between -15 and +15. At the end of the test, Wong's indices bettered Braun's result by .009% (less than one-hundredth of one percent), but the margin was within 2 standard errors, not a statistically significant result.
My simulation results led me to theorize that strategy index numbers may not be such precise indicators of when to alter basic strategy, or at least that the borderline for the coin-toss decisions may be fairly wide. I set up another test to see just how wide: I simulated a 6-deck Atlantic City game and ran off 200 million hands using Wong's Professional Blackjack indices. For the second simulation, I converted each of Wong's indices to -1, +1, or +4. I did this systematically—if Wong's index was -1 or -2, I made it -1. If he had an index of 0, +1, or +2,1 made it +1. His +3, +4, and +5 indices all became +4.1 then ran off another 200-million hands testing this simplified version of Wong's strategy. In both simulations, I used a 1 to 8 spread, and I also tested the effect of not betting on negative counts.
These were the results:
Strategy Play All No Neg.
Wong +0.50% +0.98%
Simplified +0.51% +0.99%
In a test of 200 million hands, the fact that the simplified version of the Hi-Lo outperformed the exact version by .01% is not mathematically significant. What is significant is that such an approximate version of the Hi-Lo strategy is equal to the standard, orthodox version.
I wondered how well this approach would work in single-deck games where playing strategy is so much more important, so I set up a Reno one-deck simulation, and used 60 indices from Wong's Professional Blackjack.
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