Black
jack Strategies
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Do
you know the best and simple blackjack tip?
Card counting! Don't you have to be some sort of mathematical
genius or have a photographic memory to count cards?
Not
really. Even if the casino is using multiple decks,
keeping track of the cards is a only a matter of counting.
All you really need to count cards is the ability to
count up to plus or minus twelve or so... by ones.
The
first card counting BlackJack Tips
were developed by our old friend Dr. Thorp.
He determined through mathematical computation that
the card that has the most influence on the deck being
in a favorable condition (for the player) was the five.
When the deck is low in fives, the player has a higher
advantage than if it's sparse in any other card. Logic
dictated that for a very simple card counting strategy,
simply keep track of the abundance (or lack thereof)
of fives. This is the basis of his "Five Count"
BlackJack Tips which
was later improved to include tens and renamed the "Ten
Count" system.
Today,
there are many different BlackJack
TIPS. Typically, the more complex a
system is, the better your advantage should you master
it. However, the difference between card counting System
X and System Y is usually so small that ease of using
the system becomes more important than gaining an additional
.15 % advantage (or whatever it is). This discussion
is restricted to a single card counting system: the
high/low (also called the plus/minus) point count. This
strategy is very easy to master. Two other methods that
I recommend if you're serious are the Advanced Plus/Minus
and the "Hi-Opt I" systems. The former is
similar to the high/low but assigns fractional values
to certain cards as opposed to integer values which
are easier to add in your head. The latter method is
considered one of the most powerful BlackJack
Tips of all time.
The
quick and dirty reason why BlackJack
Tips works is this: The player gains
an advantage when a deck has a shortage of cards valued
2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. When a deck has a shortage of cards
valued 9, 10, Ace; the player has a disadvantage. If
you can tell when the deck is rich in 9's, 10's, and
Aces you can do one of the following things:
When you playing Black Jack, bet more
money when the deck is favorable to you.
Alter your Black Jack Basic Strategy
play to account for the favorability, thereby increasing
the odds of winning a particular hand.
Now lets discuss the +/- Point Count. As you can see
from the small chart below, a plus value is given to
low cards, and a minus value is given to high cards.
Notice that 7, 8, and 9 have a value of zero. This is
because their overall effect is negligible as compared
to the others. Some systems use a value of -2 for the
Ace instead of -1 and give a value of +1 to the seven
instead of zero.
PLUS
(+1) MINUS (-1)
2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | A
1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1
As
you may notice, this is a BlackJ ack
Tip know as "balanced system" . There are
20 cards in a deck that are valued +1: two through six.
There are 16 ten value cards and 4 Aces in a deck (20
total) that are valued -1. The remaining 12 cards (7,
8, 9) have a value of zero. At the end of a deck the
count should be zero. A good drill to practice is to
get a deck of cards, turn them over one by one, and
keep track of the count. If you enter a Black
Jack game mid-way between the deck or shoe,
flat bet until the cards are shuffled. Once the cards
are shuffled commence counting from zero.
A
quick example using ten cards: the following cards are
shown in the course of a hand: A, 4, 7, 10, 10, 9, 10,
2, 10, 5. The first value is -1 (the Ace) & the
second is +1 (the 4) = 0 (the current total hand count).
The next card is the 7 which is zero so disregard it.
The next card is a ten so the total count is now -1.
The next card is another ten, giving a total count of
-2. The next card is a nine which has a value of zero
so ignore it, total count is still at -2. Next is a
ten, total count is at -3. Next is a two hich adds +1
to the minus three yielding a total of -2. A quick look
at the next two cards shows that the two will cancel
each other out (-1+1=0). So at the end of a hand of
ten cards dealt to 2 players and the dealer, the point
count is minus two. This provides you with the knowledge
that your are at a slight disadvantage. Your next bet
should either be the same or a unit or two lower.
From
this example you see that it would be easier to count
cards if you play in a "cards-up" game. That
way you can see all the cards as they are dealt and
count them as they go by. When the dealer deals fast,
just count every two cards. You still count each card
but you only add to your total count after every two
cards since many times the two values will cancel each
other out to give a net value of zero, which doesn't
need to be added to your total. If you play in a cards-down
game, you may want to consider playing at third base.
The reason being is that in a cards-down game you only
see the other players' cards:
if
you peek at their hand (not polite but it's not cheating
like in poker)
if a player busts
when the dealer settles each players' hand.
When there are other people at a table, all this happens
rather quickly and you may miss a few cards here and
there, which essentially invalidates your count. You
can't control how fast the dealer deals, but you can
slow things down when the dealer prompts you for a play
decision. For one deck, alter your wager according to
the following table:
Bet
Units +/- Running Counts
1
2
3
4
5 +1 or less
+2 or +3
+4 or +5
+6 or +7+8 or more
Example:
After the first hand of a one deck game, the point count
is plus four and you just bet a $5.00 chip. Before the
next hand is dealt, wager $15.00 (three units of $5.00)
as the above table mandates.
What
if there are four, six, or more decks instead of just
one? I recommend that you perform a "true-count"
rather than trying to remember different betting strategies
for different number of deck games. By doing a true
count, the above table can still be used.
The
True Count is found with the equation below. I provide
an example along with itfor the case of having a running
count of +9 with one and a half decks left unplayed.
It doesn't matter how many decks are used, you just
have to have a good eye at guesstimating the number
of decks that are left in the shoe. I just measured
the thickness of a deck of cards to be 5/8 (10/16) of
an inch. Hence the thickness of a half deck is 5/16
of an inch. One and a half decks would be 10/16 + 10/16
+ 5/16 = 25/16 or a little over an inch and a half.
You probably see a relationship here. The number of
decks is approximately equal to the height of the cards
in inches.
Looking
at the table of betting units above, the proper wager
would be four units.
If
you have trouble keeping the count straight in your
head, you can use your chips as a memory storage device.
After every hand tally up the net count and update therunning
or true count by rearranging your chips.
One
last thing. There is no a Black Jack
rule or law that says a dealer cannot count cards. A
dealer may count cards because he or she is bored but
more likely is that the casino may encourage counting.
The reason being that if the deck is favorable to the
player, the house can know this and "shuffle up".
This is also called preferential shuffling (a game control
measure) and it vaporizes your advantage.
Shuffle
Tracking
This is a fairly new technique (probably the best black
jack tip) that has not been publicized very
much. The best definition I have seen is this one: "'Shuffle-tracking'
is the science of following specific cards through the
shuffling process for the purpose of eitherkeeping them
in play or cutting them out of play." The concept
of Black Jack tip "Shuffle
tracking" appears to have resulted from bored mathematician's
research and computer simulation of shuffling cards.
Of
course, just because someone shuffles a deck (or decks)
of cards does not mean that the cards are "randomized".
The methods mentioned in the two previous sections (Basic
Strategy and Card Counting) assume a random order of
cards. (According to some authors, a single deck of
cards must be shuffled twenty to thirty times to ensure
a truly random dispersion. If a Casino is using a 6
deck shoe, that's 120 to 180 shuffles!) As in the Card
Counting section, I am going to restrict the discussion
to the basics of shuffle tracking as the combination
of references listed atthe end of this section provide
a complete discourse of the topic.
A
beneficial (to the player) shuffle for a one deck game
is executed by dividing the deck equally into 26 cards
and shuffling them together a minimum of three times.
This allows the cards to be sufficiently intermixed
to yield a fairly random distribution. An adverse shuffle
prevents the cards from mixing completely.
The
simplest example is the Black Jack
Unbalanced Shuffle. As its name implies, the dealer
breaks the deck into two unequal stacks. As an example,
let's say you are playing two hands head on with the
dealer and the last 10 cards in the deck are dealt.
The result of the hand was that both your hands lost
to the dealer primarily due to the high percentage of
low value cards in the clump. Note that if you were
counting, you would have bet a single unit since the
deck was unfavorable. The dealer is now ready to shuffle
the deck, and separates the deck into 31 cards in one
stack and 21 in the other stack. The dealer shuffles
the two stacks. If the shuffle is done from the bottom
of each stack on up, the top ten cards of the larger
stack will remain intact without mixing with any of
the other cards. Those ten cards can remain in the order
they were just dealt throughout the shuffle if the process
of bottom to top shuffling is not altered. You are now
asked to cut the deck. If you don't cut the deck, the
10 cards that were dealt last hand will be dealt as
your first two hands. The result will be the same as
your last and you will lose the two hands. However,
if you cut the deck exactly at the end of those ten
cards, you have just altered the future to your benefit.
Those cards will nowbe placed at the bottom of the deck.
Should the dealer shuffle up early, you will avoid them
altogether. In addition, if you were keeping count,
you would know that the deck was favorable during the
first 3-4 hands since there would be an abundance of
tens in the portion of the deck that will be played.
You would accordingly increase you bet size to maximize
your Black Jack winnings.
On
the Black Jack Some dealers will unknowingly
split the deck into unequal stacks. However, more often
than not, they are required to split the deck into unequal
stacks. If they are required to do this, they are performing
the House Shuffle. The casino has trained the dealer
to shuffle a particular way... on purpose! Why? In the
long run, the house will benefit from this because most
players will not cut any bad clumps out of play. If
you have played Black Jack in a casino,
how much did you pay attention to the way they shuffled?
Like most people you were probably oblivious to it.
There
are a number of shuffle methods, some of which have
been labeled as: the "Zone Shuffle", the "Strip
Shuffle", and the "Stutter Shuffle".
The Zone Shuffle is particular to shoe games (multiple
deck games) and is probably one of the most common shuffle
methods. It is accomplished by splitting the shoe into
4 to 8 piles depending on the number of decks in the
shoe. Prescribed picks from each pile are made in a
very exact way with intermittent shuffles of each pair
of half deck sized stacks. The net effect is a simple
regrouping of the cards pretty much in the same region
of the shoe as they were before, thereby preventing
clumps of cards frombeing randomly mixed. If the dealer
won 40 hands and you won 20, this trend is likely to
continue until you are broke or until the unfavorable
bias is removed through many shuffles.
What
if the players are winning the 40 black jack
hands and the dealer only 20? If the dealer has been
mentally keeping track of how many hands each side has
won in the shoe, the dealer will probably do one of
two things. One is to keep the shuffle the same, but
'strip' the deck. When a dealer strips a deck, he/she
strips off one card at a time from the shoe letting
them fall on top of one another onto the table. This
action causes the order of the cards to be reversed.
The main consequence is to dissipate any clumping advantages
(a bunch of tens in a clump) that the players may have.
Thesecond thing the dealer may do is simply change the
way they shuffle to help randomize the cards.
