Card-Counting, A Simple Strategy For Blackjack
Blackjack
Apr 27, 2000, 16:57
By M. Wilson Staff
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A strategy for card-counting in blackjack, the Hi-Lo method.
"You're going to have to practice ... A lot." My father was talking about the violin at the time, and I was eight, but keep the idea in mind now if you want to play blackjack and learn card-counting. You don't need to be the Rain Man, or any kind of savant. You do need to pay attention and have practiced plenty at home.
If you're already using Basic Strategy but want to increase your edge, this basic method of card-counting should help you do it, provided you are ready to carry it out when you sit down at a casino table. It is usually called the Hi-Lo system, in which you assign a value of +1, 0, or -1 to each card that turns up in play. The count isn't going to get very high, usually not more than plus or minus 6, so you don't have a complicated number to keep track of.
The cards 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 all get the value +1. The cards 7, 8, and 9 are value zero, which is neutral. Aces, 10s, and all face cards, which are equal to 10, get the value -1. There are twenty cards in the deck which are +1, and twenty in the deck which are valued -1. You're simply going to add the value of each card, plus one, minus one, or zero, as the cards appear in the game. At the end of a deck, the count would be zero. Your continuing tally of the cards in each hand played is called the running count.
The idea is this: If there are a lot of low cards remaining in the deck, the player is at a disadvantage. When there are a lot of 10s (and face cards, which we will call, from now on, 10) and Aces remaining, the player has a slight advantage. He can avoid busting by choosing to stand on a hand of 13, 14, and so on, but the dealer, who has to hit 16, can't. The higher the positive running count is, the more likely it is that the dealer will bust. So you'd want to press your bet in that instance.
Start dealing out cards to yourself and practice recognizing their point value, and do it until it's second nature. Many players practice by counting a deck over and over, which should get to zero by the end and indicate to you whether your count is accurate or not. Next you should simply deal hands as if there were several players with you, because you'll soon be counting the cards in groups of two anyway. Look at two cards at a time, and add them; a lot of the time they will cancel each other out and be zero. And when they're zero, you simply skip over them and continue your count.
A Basic Strategy player is at a blackjack table for an extended time, relying on his method of play to work to his advantage over time. One of the marks of an inexperienced player is that he will react to a loss on a couple of hands by lowering his bet. Basic Strategy players and card-counters will play more consistently by keeping to a minimum bet much of the time, then multiplying that unit bet at certain times. You multiply your unit bet according to the running count, with some variations depending on how many decks of cards are used in the game. An uncomplicated way to do it is to bet: 1X your unit bet when the running count is negative.
2X your unit bet when the count is zero.
4X your unit bet when the count is positive.
If the game you join is in the middle of a deck, bet only the minimum and keep it that until the cards are shuffled, when you can start counting. And you must start a count over each time they're shuffled. Card-counting depends on being able, naturally, to see the cards, so a game dealt face-up is best. If the cards are face-down, you may only see them when a player busts or after the dealer resolves each player's hand, in which case you'll have to count fast, and you should be sitting in the farthest left seat so you are dealt to last. And so far we've only been considering the single-deck game. The running count is based on one deck only. To use it to play in a game using multiple decks, you apply your count to a formula to get the true count.
The true count equals the running count divided by the number of decks remaining. You look at the discard tray and make your best estimate of how thick the pile of cards is. To estimate this requires developing an eye for the size of a deck of cards. (I've measured it against all sorts of things, and my best way of remembering its thickness was that it was a little thinner than a pack of my brand of cigarettes.) A deck is a little over half an inch thick -- about 5/16 inch. So if you're playing in a game with a 6-deck shoe, and the discard pile looks like about 2 &1/2 decks, there are 3 & 1/2 decks left in the shoe. Say your running count is +7. Divide 7 by 3.5, and the true count is 2. You bet according to that +2, which in our simplified method would mean you'd bet 4 units. But you must remember your 7 when you continue the running count! It's easy to get mixed up.
The next thing you ought to consider is the penetration the dealer is allowing, that is, how far into the deck or shoe he continues to deal before he shuffles and makes you restart your count. The farther the penetration, the more reliable your count, since, clearly, you've counted more cards and it's a better representation of what cards are where. In single-deck games you may see the dealer shuffling after every couple or three hands. What's the point of playing in this game? However, you would be lucky to find a game where the penetration is more than 50%. If you want to get really accurate, you must realize that the true count in a single-deck game equals the running count divided by the number of cards remaining. This is something you can only approximate. For better play in a single-deck game, and if you're up to it, consider your running count to equal the true count only during the play of the first fourth of the deck. After one-fourth of the deck has been played, start pressing, because your count is becoming a more reliable bet. Play the second quarter-deck as if your running count were 1.5 times what it is. For instance if you have a running count of +4, act as if it were +6, and bet accordingly. For players who can card-count pretty well, it's worth betting with a wider spread, or more range of units than the 4 we've mentioned here.
Last but definitely not least, remember that every single player attempting to count must also develop his ability to hide the fact that he is counting. Anyone sitting with fixed, rigid attention to the game is immediately suspect. Some skilled players manage to talk and count at the same time; one man I knew, who counted at blackjack for a number of years, said he'd taught himself to talk aimlessly at any little task he was doing, and it didn't distract him a bit. When I tried to do it myself, I found that I talked about card-counting. So be careful!
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