How To Speed Count In Blackjack
A new Blackjack counting system called Speed Count has appeared in the past few weeks. It was developed by Dan Pronovost and Henry Tamburin of DeepNet Technologies and is being licensed to Frank Scoblete, Henry Tamburin, and Dom LoRiggio, who will market the product under the name Golden Touch Blackjack (GTB). 'a new basic strategy the can only be played with speed count' from 'Beat Blackjack Now!, The Easiest Way To Get The Edge!' Lots of charts too I have the book in Google Play imo, a very dry read in other words not too much excitment Sally.
How To Speed Count In Blackjack Games
- How to Play Blackjack (Part 5) – How to Count Cards in Blackjack. There is only one practical, and legal, way you can place yourself in a position of having an edge when you are playing blackjack. This is by learning to become a card counter. But it must be emphasized that card counting isn’t for everyone.
- In the Book of British Blackjack, published in 1992, there is a system described as “All Sevens” which closely mimics the KO. In this particular system, the deck assumes a slight advantage for the player beginning at a running count of +2. Of course, the higher the running count becomes the more advantageous the deck becomes for the player.
It’s been well proven over the past few decades that the game of casino blackjack can be beaten. The way sharp players beat the game is by keeping track of the cards that have been played, aka “card counting.” When card counting was first publicized in the 1960s, the “plus/minus” method of mentally adding and subtracting points for each high or low card that came out became standard operating procedure. Even today, the old tried and true “Hi/Lo” Count from 40 years ago remains probably the most widely used card counting system around. With the Hi/Lo, you mentally add a point every time a 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 comes out and subtract a point with each 10, jack, queen, king or ace that’s dealt. Anytime your running total is a positive number, it means more little cards have come out than big ones, and if you have a negative total it means the opposite. With this information, the card counter can glean enough extra accuracy in sizing his next bet and playing his hands to gain an outright advantage in the game. HORSEPOWER vs. SIMPLICITY As time moved into the 1970s and ‘80s, even more sophisticated “plus/minus” counting systems were developed under the natural assumption that more is better. Some super-structured systems counted various cards as +2 or -4 as they came out in an effort to optimize card counting efficiency. It wasn’t realized until blackjack simulation software became widely used in the 1990s that these super-structured count systems gained very little in the way of additional performance. Ninety percent of the advantage produced by these super-systems could be netted with the use of the good old Hi/Lo Count. Even at that however, the basic Hi/Lo card counting system was still too much for 99% of the blackjack players to handle. That caused system designers to think in the opposite direction. The question now became: How simple can you make a card counting system, and still have an advantage over the house? In blackjack, high cards are more precious to the player than the dealer. For low cards, it’s vise versa. For those reasons, all card counting systems involve monitoring the dispersion of high vs. low cards via one method or another. With the help of blackjack simulation software, several simpler, shorter, more user friendly methods of tracking high vs. low cards were developed that might bring beating the house at blackjack within the reach of the recreational player. The systems described in this article all fall into that category. They are much easier to use than the standard Hi/Lo Count and underperform it substantially as well. Nevertheless, they still carry enough oomph to create a net advantage for the player, albeit a small one. If card counting always seemed too technical and over your head, maybe you can find a simpler system in here to fit you. CAUTION: It should be strongly advised however, that playing advantage blackjack is serious business. Even if learning one of these systems becomes child’s play for you, implementing it effectively and responsibly is not. You will need to adhere to the system almost perfectly so as not to lose your edge. You will have to invest a lot of money to win a little. All card counting systems require that you vary the size of your bets substantially, and sometimes you will lose several hands in a row with your biggest bets out there. If this reality doesn’t rest well on your stomach, then it might be better for you to remain a basic strategy player and plan on being slowly and gradually ground down by the house. That being said, we’ll start with the bare bones, simplest counting systems first, and move slowly up the ladder from there.
THE ACE/10 FRONT COUNT
Crossing over the line from being the underdog to being the favorite at blackjack doesn’t get any easier than this. The flip side is, your advantage using the “Ace/10 Front Count” perfectly will be a mere 1/4%. That means if you vary your bets between $10 and $60 (with the averaged wager being $17), you should net $4 per hour long term. Note that the two key words here are, ‘long term.’ You see, even after 100 hours at the tables using the Ace/10 Front Count, your chance of being ahead of the game will be only 55%. Sound like a waste of effort? Remember the alternative. If you played perfect basic strategy with no count system you’d be at an 1/2% disadvantage. After 100 hours at $17 per hand, your fighting chance of being ahead would be only 33%. Your most average result over that period would be a loss of $800, but with the Front Count it would be a gain of $400. It’s your call, but if you plan on playing blackjack in the coming years anyway, it ought to be worth taking your game up this critical notch. Here are the basics of the Ace/10 Front Count. Since most blackjack games today are played with a six-deck shoe, the Ace/10 Front Count was designed specifically for that particular setup. With that many decks being used, it usually takes a couple of decks to be dealt out before the shoe can become substantially biased to the high or low side. That’s the sole purpose of the Ace/10 Front Count. It merely gauges the high/low strength of the shoe at the point where the first two decks have been dealt out. Using it as a barometer, you’ll know when to bet more money the rest of the way, and when to leave the table. A particularly recreational feature of the Ace/10 Front Count is that you stop counting altogether once the first two decks of the shoe have been dealt. From there on out, you just play. That’s why it’s called a “front count.” Nevertheless, following your Ace/10 Front Count religiously can give you the overall edge in the game.
HOW TO BEGIN
You must start at the top of a fresh six-deck shoe. The only cards you pay any attention to are the 10s, jacks, queens, kings and aces. This is not a traditional “plus/minus” system; there is no adding and subtracting of low vs. high cards. You simply add together all the 10s through aces that were dealt out during the first two decks, no further. Do this by starting off at zero and counting forward with each 10 or ace as it appears. Once two decks are in the discard tray, stop counting altogether and play the rest of the shoe out according to how many ace/10s you’ve counted. Since there are 16 10s and four aces in every deck, on average, you will have seen 40 ace/10s after two decks have been played, but not always. That would merely be “normal,” and when things are normal, the house still has the edge. Sometimes however, you will have seen say, 44 ace/10s in the first two decks. At these times the house will have an even larger advantage than normal on the remaining shoe because so many high cards are already dead. Yet, sometimes you will have seen maybe only 36 ace/10s in those first two decks. That’s when you’ll have an outright advantage on the shoe and should increase your bets as well as play some of your hands more aggressively than usual. The most sensitive part of the whole Ace/10 Front Count system is determining when two decks have been dealt. This you do by looking at the discard tray. You’ll need to have a good picture in your mind of what 104 cards (two decks) looks like — not 98 or 110 cards, but within 3 or 4 cards of two decks. At that point you’ll take your read on the shoe and either finish it out with one unit bets, increase your wagers substantially — or leave the table.
REALITY CHECK
The Ace/10 Front Count is not a key to riches. No card counting system is. The Ace/10 Front Count is merely a super-simple, recreational way to gain a very small net edge over the house at blackjack. That’s reality number one. Reality number two is, as with any card counting system, it needs to be implemented with solid financial backing. To play it effectively, you should have 12 times your maximum bet in your pocket before you sit down to play. This rule goes for just about any count system, no matter how simple or sophisticated. Playing with any less is just asking to get busted out. Although investing a lot of money to probably win a little may seem like an unattractive way to play blackjack, it still beats the snot out of losing just like everybody else. For a complete 13-page instruction booklet on the Ace/10 Front Count, send $9 to Fred Renzey, P.O. Box 598, Elk Grove Village, IL 60009.
THE SPEED COUNT
The next step up on the performance and complexity ladder for recreational blackjack counting systems is the Speed Count. It’s a bit tougher to learn than the Ace/10 Front Count, but performs somewhat better as well. The Speed Count makes unique use of the handy statistic that says the average completed blackjack hand happens to contain 2.7 cards. Now, since the key low cards in the game (2s, 3s, 4s, 5s and 6s) comprise 38% of all the cards, then on average, almost exactly one of these low cards should appear for every completed blackjack hand. It’s true, sometimes you’ll be dealt a 10/10 and sometimes you’ll end up with A/3/9/5, but on average, each hand will contain one 2 through 6. Speed Count developer, Dan Pronovost saw that this could be a simple way to infer the number of low cards that have been dealt thus far. In fact, the more decks that are used, the more accurate this inference turns out to be. Dan then teamed up with Frank Scoblete and Frank wrote, Golden Touch Blackjack Revolution, a 182-page detailed book on exactly how to apply the Speed Count at the blackjack tables. Here’s basically how the Speed Count simplifies and avoids that tedious plusing and minusing of low and high cards as they come out, which is so traditional for full scale card counting systems.
THE METHOD
As the hands are completed, you simply tally up how many 2s through 6s were in all the hands, including the dealer’s hand. If there were four players and one dealer, there should’ve on average, been five low cards on the table. In reality, there could’ve been only two or three, or maybe even seven or eight. So what you do is subtract the number of hands from the total of low cards to see whether that round contained an average, an excess or deprived number of low cards. In this example, if there were seven low cards on the board, your Speed Count will have gone up two points, indicating that two extra low cards have been dealt out of play. If there were only three low cards, your Speed Count will fall two points, informing you that two extra low cards are in the unplayed supply. A rising Speed Count for the round is a good thing and a falling number is bad. Perhaps the toughest part of the Speed Count is that you must remember and carry over your net total to the next round, and keep updating all the way through to the shuffle. If your net Speed Count on the first round went down a bit and on the second round it went up a lot, you’ll now have a small positive net Speed Count total. The book offers a valuable streamlined format that makes this task much easier, and allows you to avoid using negative numbers. Once your Speed Count has risen far enough above your starting point to erase the house edge and create a player edge, it’s time to increase your bets. At a certain elevated point in the count, you should also take insurance due to the significant number of extra 10s that remain available. In its continued effort to streamline and simplify, the Speed Count shies away from playing various hands different ways at various counts. Instead, it uses a handcrafted, one-size-fits-all playing strategy unwaveringly at all Speed Count totals, called Optimum Basic Strategy. It differs from standard basic strategy in that a small cluster of hands are always played as if the count were just modestly positive. The Optimum Basic Strategy reputedly performs better than sticking to straight basic strategy, yet is simpler than playing some hands two different ways depending upon the count.
How To Speed Count In Blackjack
PERFORMANCE
In a typical six-deck game, my simulations and analyses suggest that the Speed Count, played appropriately would yield a net player advantage between 4/10% and 1/2%. As with any card counting system, you still need to have about 12 maximum bets available for action at the beginning of any playing session. For complete details on exactly how to implement the Speed Count, get a copy of Golden Touch Blackjack Revolution online: www.goldentouchblackjack.com. It retails for $24.95 and comes with an instructional CD.
THE K.I.S.S. COUNT
Once you go beyond the improvisational card tracking methods of the Ace/10 Front Count and the Speed Count, the next practical rung up the card counting ladder would be an entry-level, abbreviated plus/minus count. That’s basically what the KISS Count is. It stands for “Keep It Short & Simple.” Although the KISS Count is an honest-to-goodness plus/minus system, it counts only 50% of the cards, ignoring less significant ones. In doing so, the KISS Count still garners about two-thirds as much net edge over the house as the old full scale Hi/Lo plus/minus count. The KISS also avoids the traditional need to divide your running count by the number of remaining decks in order to determine your advantage, or true count. Perhaps the most desirable part of the KISS Count however, is that it’s directly upgradeable to a better, more expanded system once the user has become comfortable with it. The KISS I, II and III systems were all developed together with each succeeding version being a natural progression of the last. This allows the user to ease his way from entry-level card counting to full scale counting one soft step at a time.
THE SYSTEM With the KISS
I system, you count the picture cards (jacks, queens and kings) as -1 point when they come out, while the 4s, 5s and 6s are +1 point. The black deuces (but not the red 2s) are also grouped in with all the 4s, 5s and 6s as a +1 to “unbalance” the system. That eliminates the old stumbling block of converting to a true count, and enables the user to bet and play entirely by the running count. To avoid ever dealing with negative counts, the KISS player begins his running count off the top of the shoe at a positive number, then pluses and minuses his count from there. When the count rises to a given point, he will have the advantage and should begin increasing his bets. In addition, six hands should be played differently from basic strategy at that same point due to the extra supply of available high cards. The KISS Count also recommends taking insurance at a specific running count or higher. Once a player becomes comfortable with the short KISS I system, he can opt to upgrade to KISS II by simply adding the 3 and the 10-spot to his count structure as +1 and -1 cards, respectively. Beyond that, he can later upgrade to KISS III by adding in the 7 on the low side and the ace on the high side. The KISS II and III systems come with a table of 21 dedicated hands that get played differently at various running counts.
How To Speed Count In Blackjack Simulator
PERFORMANCE
In a typical six-deck game, the KISS I Count, used correctly will gain about a 1/2% net advantage over the house. The KISS III is a full scale unbalanced plus/minus counting system and performs on a virtual par with the standard Hi/Lo count. Not to beat a dead horse, but it must continually be emphasized that no card counting system has the room to perform up to its ability without proper bankrolling. As usual, you will need 12 maximum bets in your pocket in order to play the KISS Count right. Complete detailed instructions on how to play and use all three KISS Counts are presented in Blackjack Bluebook II by Fred Renzey. It retails for $16.50 and is available at Amazon.com or look for the Blackjack Bluebook ad on the pages of this magazine.
— Fred Renzey is a poker and blackjack expert, author and gaming columnist. For a copy of his 218-page poker manual, 77 Ways to Get the Edge at Casino Poker, send $17.50 to: Fred Renzey, P.O. Box 598, Elk Grove Village, IL 60009.