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Big Player Blackjack Teams

Practical Advice on Win Rate, Bankroll, Bet-Sizing, Spotters, Camouflage, and Compensation

By Arnold Snyder
(From Blackjack Forum Online, March 2005)
© 2005 Arnold Snyder

At What Count Should You Call In A Big Player?

Question from a Player: I am looking for anyone who has experience with big player (BP) blackjack teams. I have been gambling for quite some time, most recently blackjack. I am very devoted and very much of a perfectionist. I’ve played in casinos solo and done fine, but I wanted to form a team. So, instead of looking for people I didn’t know, I found a bunch of players and trained them to count… we’re still in the process of learning. I thought it would be better for everyone to learn together, thought it would increase trust, etc.

Anyway, I’ve read much of the material out there and am still left with many unanswered questions. First, at what counts do blackjack teams call in their big players? Do the BPs vary their bets or do they flat bet—which works better? Also, if the BPs do vary the bet, what spread is needed? I’m assuming not much of one since they are only betting on positive counts.

I’m also looking for practical advice on paying for team lodging, meals, etc. with casino comps.

Arnold Snyder: The count at which you call in a big player depends on your bankroll, the number of spotters you have in the casino, the card counting system you’re using, and the house edge off the top.

You don’t want to leave your BP in an empty casino constantly circling the pit, waiting to be called into a game. Look up the term “Buzzards” in Cellini’s Casino Surveillance Glossary, and see Al Francesco’s comments on his preferred number of spotters in Interview with Al Francesco. Al Francesco was the inventor of the big player type of blackjack team, and ran such teams successfully for many years.

If you only have 3 or 4 spotters, you may have to call in your big player at a 1% or smaller advantage. If you have 6 spotters, you may want to call in your BP at a 1 1/2 to 2% advantage. Look at a frequency distribution for the games you intend to play and figure it out.

To understand how to use frequency distributions, see Beat the 6-Deck Game: How to Use Frequency Distributions to Determine Your Win Rate and Fluctuations. Essentially, the smaller your bank, the higher the edge you want when you call in your big player, but of course, you’ve got to look at the cost of paying those spotters.

Should Big Players Use a Spread or Flat Bet?

Question: Should the big players vary their bets or flat bet? Which works better? Also, if they do vary the bet, what spread is needed?

Arnold Snyder: If you must call in your big player at a smaller advantage, he should spread his bets up as the advantage rises. If you have enough spotters to call in your big players at only a higher advantage, they can flat bet. Again, look at some frequency distributions and work out the best plan for your blackjack team.

Using Casino Comps for Blackjack Team Expenses

Question: I’m wondering how the logistics of accommodations work for a blackjack team? Our team is a pretty small one, about half a dozen. Can you get a room for someone and it won’t be a problem (as in, the casino won’t try to see who’s staying in your room)?

Arnold Snyder: Look at Tommy Hyland’s remarks on this subject in Interview with Tommy Hyland in the Blackjack Forum Library.

The casinos may well try to see who’s staying in a big player’s room. If you’re not supposed to know each other at the tables, you shouldn’t show up together in rooms, coffee shops, etc.

Casino Surveillance and Blackjack Teams

Question: How much heat does a big player usually get, especially if he or she is foreign and has a good act? What about aliases? How necessary are they and what about the legality of them?

Arnold Snyder: The heat your BP gets will depend on your playing plan (again, don’t make him a Buzzard), his win, whether your signals are picked off, the casino, crowd conditions, etc. I would advise against any BP using an alias in casinos. The player will have to cash in a lot of chips and attempting to use fake ID for this could cause serious legal problems.

More Advice on Big Player Blackjack Teams

Question: I know this is a lot but I would appreciate as much input as possible from as many people as possible. I am determined to be one of the teams that makes it out there.

Arnold Snyder: Be sure to see the Interview with Johnny C. (of the MIT blackjack team) in the library and work out the math for your team just as you’d work it out for playing solo. Also, check out the articles in the table of contents (at the left of this article) for blackjack team play.

How Many Spotters Do I Need for My Card Counting Team?

Question: If a BP has six spotters, is it still possible to be profitable? I guess what i mean is, is one big player enough for six spotters?

Arnold Snyder: In order to make it profitable to employ six spotters, your BP’s bets have to be big enough, and placed at a high enough edge, that the earnings on them will pay for the house edge on all the spotters’ bets, plus cover your team expenses, and still return a good profit to you. This means you will need a considerable team bankroll.

Blackjack Teams and Fluctuations

Question: When considering the number of hands being played (for calculating team win rates and fluctuations), do you count all hands (including your spotters’ hands) or just the hands the BP plays? Are you able to get the benefits of reduced team fluctuation with only one BP?

Arnold Snyder: There are many different types of blackjack team approaches. With a seven-player blackjack team where all players are betting equivalent amounts (that is, not a BP/spotter team but an every-man-for-himself team), the flux will be cut significantly, as it is unlikely for all seven players to have negative flux at the same time. Players’ results on this type of team will smooth out each other’s flux.

With the type of team you’re talking about, a team that has one big player and six spotters, by contrast, there is no reduction in fluctuations. The flux for the team will essentially be the flux for the BP.

Spotter hands should be played at the table minimum bet, so they don’t really count much for anything in terms of team bankroll fluctuations when your big player is playing at a much higher level than the spotters are. However, if your spotters are betting $25 a hand and your big player can only bet $200, you’re probably not going to be profitable. If your big player is betting $2000 while your spotters are betting $25, the overall fluctuations will essentially be due to the BP’s fluctuations—the fluctuations on your spotters’ hands won’t significantly affect your team bankroll.

As a general guideline, for every spotter you have at work, you’d like your BP to be able to place bets at least eight times the size of the spotters’ bets (or more). So, with six spotters at $25 per hand, you’d want your BP to be able to bet at least 6 x 8 x $25 = $1200. If your bank doesn’t support this kind of action, then you should get your spotters onto lower minimum tables.

Six spotters betting $25 per hand, at 100 hands per hour each, is $15,000 in action per hour just on the spotters’ hands. If the house edge is one-half percent on these hands, the hourly cost of the spotters’ hands is $75. That’s not much, compared to what your BP might expect to earn. To keep this simple, let’s say your BP is flat-betting $1200 at a 1 1/2% overall win rate and getting to bet 75 hands per hour. He’s going to be making $1350 an hour. But you also have to pay all these spotters, whether a percentage or an hourly rate, and you may have to pay investors, etc.

To get closer estimates of the number of hands your big player will be betting, and his overall win rate, the cost of spotters’ hands, etc., you need info on exact game conditions, including rules, penetration, etc., as well as your exact betting strategy. Always try to use a strategy that will return a lot more than the minimum you would be satisfied with. Most real-life advantage play results in a lower return than players calculate on paper.

Also, your spotters should have different signals to tell the BP how strong the advantage is when they call him in—that is, their signals should indicate how much he should bet. This way the BP can choose a stronger opportunity when two spotters are calling him in at the same time.

With six spotters, you should be able to keep your BP in action most of the time. If not, then the penetration is probably too poor to make much money, even with a BP/spotter team approach.

With the right crowd conditions, your spotters may not have to play at all. If they can just stand behind tables and watch the games, this would be the most profitable betting strategy. In some crowd conditions, this works better than having your spotters seated and playing. It allows the spotters to move if a table is no good.

It also allows them to concentrate on tables where the BP will likely be able to get a seat. If the table fills up, they can move on. And the spotters themselves are not taking up seats, making it even more likely that a seat for the BP will be available. Obviously, you need the right crowd conditions for this.

Bet Sizing for Big Player Blackjack Teams

Question: When you said “your BP should be able to bet 1200 dollars a hand” ,did you mean top bet or minimum or average? How would adding a BP change this number, if at all? We are hoping to be working on a pretty healthy bank.

Arnold Snyder: I’m deliberately not being specific. Unless we specify the exact penetration, rules,, etc., we’re just ball-parking. And even if you do specify these things, then it depends on how well the crowd conditions will cooperate with your goal of getting your BP 75 hands per hour. Can your BP jump in with two hands? If so, that’s a plus.

The message is that you want to shoot for a very big spread by having your BP’s bets increase as the number of spotters increases. If you add a second BP, you’d ideally like to add more spotters. With two BPs, you will increase the number of BP hands per hour, but you’re not going to get 150 hands per hour with only six spotters.

Penetration will be a huge factor in the actual number of hands your BPs can play per hour. The deeper the better.

Calculating Your Blackjack Team’s Win Rate

Question: From your books, I am assuming the only way to find the average expectation for a game is to enter the rules, penetration, betting scheme, etc. and run the numbers, right? Put the edge into your profit formula from Blackbelt in Blackjack times hands per hour for the BP times average bet for the BP, to get the team’s hourly expectation?

Arnold Snyder: Yes, but remember that the way things work on paper is not always how they work in reality. Some of your spotters may make counting mistakes when fatiqued or distracted, or misjudge the deck penetration. Even a good BP may misread a signal now and then, or miss out on responding to a spotter with a higher count and edge because he’s involved at a table where the count and edge are lower. Or a civilian may climb into the only open seat, just before your BP reaches it.

This is why you want to find a strategy that should deliver a huge return, and avoid any strategy that has you thinking, “Well, this should be about enough to make it worth our time and effort…” When you look at the numbers on a potential blackjack team play, you want to be thinking that it looks extremely profitable.

Most pros, including many of the big blackjack team operators, will tell you that they actually get only about half the return in real world casinos that they expect on paper.

I strongly urge you to try a practice play at a low limit casino where your BP(s) and spotters can work out their signal problems and get a feel for the play before you ever try this with big money. If the first practice play doesn’t go well, do another one, and another, if necessary. Big Player call-in plays are extremely chaotic when you first try this type of attack. As a result of your first half dozen trials, you will likely be changing signals that don’t work, adding new signals that would be helpful to have, etc.

Also, I would again strongly advise you to look at my Beat the 6-Deck Game: How to Use Frequency Distributions to Determine Your Win Rate and Fluctuations and use PowerSim to generate frequency distributions for the actual games you’ll be playing, so you can look at how penetration affects the frequency of player advantages, and figure out betting strategies that at least work on paper.

If the frequency distribution shows that a 1.5% advantage occurs only 2% of the time, then you cannot expect your BP to be able to play 75 hands per hour at a 1.5+% advantage, even with six spotters. You need deeper penetration. If you look at a frequency distribution and you see that a 1.5% advantage or more arises 13% of the time, then with six spotters, you might be tempted to think your BP could get 6 x 13 = 78 hands per hour, assuming each spotter is seeing 100 hands per hour. But it doesn’t work this way. There will be times when more than one spotter will have this advantage on their tables simultaneously.

In this example, with two spotters, the probability that they would each have a 1.5% or more advantage at the same time would be 13% times 13%, so your BP would not have a chance to bet at a 1.5% advantage 26% of the time, but only about 24% of the time. The next spotter you add will have a chance of having a count with a 1.5% advantage at the same time as at least one of the other two spotters 13% of 24% of the time, and so on as you add more spotters.

You can add big players to take advantage of these simultaneous betting situations that arise, but you will also have one or both BPs standing around quite often when there are not two good tables available. So, even though it might be somewhat more profitable to have two BPs with six spotters, you have to think about how it looks in the casino. You really want your BPs in action, and not looking like buzzards in the pit. Blackjack team success is not just about the numbers. It’s about camo too.

Camouflage for Blackjack Team Spotters

Question: Also, doesn’t it look suspicious to have a spotter just flat betting the minimum? I don’t recall seeing anyone in a casino NEVER alter their bet. Do spotters need a small spread for cover?

Arnold Snyder: I don’t think flat betting ever looks suspicious. In fact, nothing makes a player more invisible to the house. If casinos had to start worrying about players who flat bet, they’d go nuts. It’s very common for players on a short bank to flat bet at blackjack and many other games.

Big Player Blackjack Teams and Shuffle Tracking

Question: I have a couple of questions about shuffle tracking. In a book about the MIT blackjack team, they spoke of shuffle tracking like it was something the BPs did. I would guess there is no reason why a BP couldn’t track shuffles, since he is theoretically seeing only positive counts and hence high cards. Are there blackjack teams that don’t do the whole betting with the count thing and only bet where they can cut a favorable slug?

Arnold Snyder: Well, now we know why the MIT blackjack teams never made any money tracking shuffles!

Shuffle tracking is definitely not a job for the big player, since he is generally not at the table throughout the shoe. Don’t even think about trying to incorporate something like this into your team strategy.

If you have an interest in shuffle tracking, that’s an entirely different approach, and one that I would not advise for most blackjack team attacks. Believe me, I tried training players for such a team myself, and abandoned it.

For now, if you’re looking to use a blackjack team approach, stick with the more traditional and proven methods. Keep it simple and very aggressive. If you want to look into more advanced techniques you might try down the road, study this stuff on your own and see if you have the talent for it.

Compensation for Blackjack Team Members

Question: What is the best way to pay members of blackjack teams? How about simply paying BPs a percentage when the team wins?

Arnold Snyder: We’ve just added an article to the library to help answer your question about compensation for BPs. The title is “How to Kill Your Blackjack Team: The Free Roll”.

BPs can be very important to the success of a team, and I don’t want to minimize their value. It can actually be difficult to find someone who is actually able to put out the money. Some of the big teams pay BPs an hourly rate as an advance against the percentage they’ll get when the team hits a win target. This helps to keep a good BP playing.

But paying a percentage of the win after every play is a terrible idea. Even with an extremely high edge (much higher than you get from card counting), a free roll may not be a good idea. Back in the early 1980s, when Sam Case was playing the Five Card Drop with Crazy Bob’s team in Reno, the advantage on the play was huge, and they gave Sam a free roll on the wins for his pay. He ended up making more money than anybody else on the team, with no risk (if I remember correctly, he made all the money), before they realized what a bad idea this free roll on wins was for a team play.

Big Player Team Plays and Simplicity

Question: I was reading the interview with Johnny C of the MIT team and he mentioned how his team started winning like crazy when they stopped using index numbers. Why would you earn more with a less precise strategy? Shouldn’t more index numbers be worth something?

Arnold Snyder: The reason the MIT blackjack team started winning more when they used the fixed strategy is not because of any intrinsic value in using fewer indices or fixed indices (in theory you’ll make more using every indice you can learn). The MIT team started winning more with a fixed strategy because the BPs made many fewer errors.

Card counters tend to greatly underestimate their error rates and the cost of these errors. Johnny C.’s bookkeeping records provided his team with hard proof of the cost of such errors. When you’re a card counter working solo, or you’re working with a blackjack team, simplicity is worth money. ♠

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How to Kill Your Blackjack Team

The Blackjack Team “Free Roll”

By Arnold Snyder
(From Card Player, August 23,1996)
© 1996 Arnold Snyder

Letter from “Blackjack Team Manager:”

I have taken a giant step in my blackjack playing career — I have formed a blackjack team with some of my card counting friends. Five of us have each contributed equal amounts to a joint bank, and we suddenly find ourselves black chip players. It is fun, even thrilling, to be playing at this level. The upside is the high roller treatment — the comps and personal attention from the casinos; the downside is the increased scrutiny.

On some weekends, we “hire” other card counters to back-count tables for us. In order to protect our blackjack bankroll, we have found counters who are willing to play for a percentage of our win on the nights they work for us, instead of playing for a flat hourly rate. This way, if we have a losing night, we don’t have to pay them at all. They trade this risk for the possibility of winning a lot more than they would get on a flat hourly rate.

Although our blackjack team bank at this point is in the hole, the hired card counters are making out quite well. In fact, it appears they will do better than all of us if it takes us much time to dig out of the hole we’re in. I think we might be paying them too high of a percentage on the nights we win. What percentage should they get?

Answer from Arnold Snyder:

On a blackjack card-counting team, you are making a major error by paying them any percentage at all. You will probably tap out your joint bank in the long run if you use this type of arrangement regularly. By paying “hired” counters or big players (BPs) a percentage of the win on individual playing sessions, you are “chopping the tops off” of your positive fluctuations, while suffering the full force of your negative fluctuations.

Since you don’t require the “hired” counters to reimburse you for any losses on nights you lose substantially, these guys are getting a free roll at your expense. You and your fellow team investors bear all the risk, while you hand over a portion of every random win. This is bankroll suicide.

Let me give you a radical example of how such an arrangement can be ultimately devastating. For simplicity, let’s say your blackjack team consists of four player/investors, all of whom have invested equal amounts (say $10K each) to the joint team bank ($40,000 total) with an agreement that you will all play an equal number of hours, and will ultimately (after doubling your bank) divide your win into quarters.

Now, let’s say you know a number of competent local card counters (or BPs) who will be willing to work on various nights for 10% of your team win on the nights they play. So, each night, you “hire” one counter on this basis. These hired counters have no investment in the bank, so if your team loses on any nights they play, they get nothing — but they also lose nothing (other than their time).

You figure that since, on any given night of play, you will have five players total — the four original player/investors plus one hired counter — each of you will ultimately be responsible for 20% of your win on the nights when you win. So, paying out only 10% of your win to a hired counter sounds like a good deal for your team.

But consider what happens if it ultimately takes you 100 nights of play to double your team bank, just due to the ups and downs of normal blackjack fluctuation. Let’s say on 50 nights your team wins money (with an average $4,000 win on your winning nights); and on 50 nights your team loses money (with an average loss of $3,200 on your losing nights). These would be fairly normal blackjack fluctuations in such a venture and would ultimately result in a $40,000 win, doubling your bank, after 100 nights of play.

But, what happens if you are paying 10% of each win to a hired counter or BP on your winning nights? Ten percent of $4,000 is $400; and $400 x 50 winning nights = $20,000 paid out to the hired help.

This means that if only one out of your five players has this arrangement to collect just 10% of your win on your winning nights, you would literally cut your 100 days’ winnings in half (from $40,000 to $20,000) with this one player collecting half of all your team’s 100 days’ winnings! At this rate, it would take you 200 nights to double your bank, and the hired counter, who put in only one-fifth of the total hours, with no monetary risk, will have profited as much as the other four of you combined!

Furthermore, imagine what happens if your team goes into a period of heavy negative fluctuations — which is not at all unlikely. Blackjack teams experience such losses all the time due to normal fluctuations. Imagine a scenario where you play for 100 days and have 50 winning days and 50 losing days, but your losses averaged $4,000 on your losing nights, and your wins averaged only $3,600 on your winning nights. This means that after 100 days of team play — without the hired counter — you will be down by $20,000, and facing a long period of “digging out.”

If, during this period, you were paying one hired counter 10% of your win on winning nights, the hired help will have already been paid $18,000, and your remaining team bank will not be $20,000, but only $2,000 — hardly a bank at all!

Paying win shares on short term positive fluctuations can devastate a team when it goes into a slump. No team can survive such an arrangement. This is why I say that what you are doing when you pay win shares on short term wins prematurely (i.e., prior to final distribution of the bank) is “chopping the tops off” of all your positive fluctuations.

Think of the logic: In order for a blackjack team to win $10,000, it will go through many winning sessions and many losing sessions. Ultimately, it will hit a point when the total win of its winning sessions will be $10,000 greater than the total losses on its losing sessions. You don’t just win $10,000; you more likely win $110,000, while losing only $100,000. If you are distributing win shares on a session by session basis, you will be distributing win shares on $110,000 when you ultimately had only a $10,000 win!

If you are going to enlist the aid of hired non-investor counters or BPs on your team, you either must determine a fair hourly rate to reimburse your hired help — based on a small fraction of your expected value from their playing; or, you must get the hired counters to agree to play for a percentage of the final win — when you ultimately break your bank — which could be many months later, and which could prove to be substantially larger (or smaller!) than what they might consider to be a fair hourly rate.

The free roll method you have developed to “protect” your team bank, incidentally, is a fairly common mistake for new blackjack teams. Unfortunately, this method protects nothing but the interests of the hired counters, to the ultimate detriment of your team. ♠

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Surveillance Glossary

Glossary of Casino Surveillance Terms

By D.V. Cellini
(From The Card Counter’s Guide to Casino Surveillance, by Cellini, 2003)
© 2003 Dominic Vail Cellini

[Editor’s Note: Most books on gambling provide a glossary of terms peculiar to that form of gambling. A book on card counting, for example, might describe terms like “camouflage” and “penetration” as they are generally used by most counters.

The glossary provided here by Cellini, from his book The Card Counter’s Guide to Casino Surveillance (an Arnold Snyder Professional Gambling Report), is not a glossary of card counters’ jargon, but a glossary of the terminology and slang used in the casino surveillance rooms by the agents who monitor the casino play.

Some of these terms may seem to be insensitive, or even insulting. Keep in mind that the purpose of providing this glossary is not to be politically correct, but simply to inform the reader of the actual terminology used. The common slang used by any special-interest group often provides a revealing glimpse into the psychology of the members of that group. –Arnold Snyder]

Anchor: The player seated at the last possible square (dealer’s far right hand), also known as third base. In face-up games, this player is frequently seeking the advantage of seeing the previously played cards before making a decision on his own hand.

Bi: A term used for unabashed lesbians (sorry, but it’s true, as surveillance people are by nature voyeuristic). Also a term used to order an observer to run a player through the Biometrica system.

Bum Rushed: Said of an angry player who seeks and finds the pit boss after being denied his claim.

Buzzard: A “Big Player” who circles the pit too much waiting for a signal from a spotter.

Call Number: A number input to the keyboard to bring up a certain camera.

Cat in the Hat: A player who is garbed in a fashion that is not consistent with the weather his surroundings, such as a coat in the middle of summer or wearing sunglasses indoors.

Channel: Another term for a camera, as in, “What channel is he on?”

Chaser: A non-advantage player who chases his losses. These player are usually steaming mad about their losses.

Chunker: A player that makes numerous small stacks of chips as wagers all over the green on a roulette layout.

Claimer: A person who makes false claims.

Clock him, Dano: A term used by supervisors to request a surveillance observer to run down (watch closely) a suspected advantage player.

D.A.R.: Daily Activity Report. Part of the surveillance observer’s shift report.

Destroyer: An observer who is instructed to watch all entrances laying in wait for an advantage player who has just left an adjoining or neighboring casino. Destroyers always work off of fresh or hot tips.

Dougherty: A “Dougherty” is an advantage player who makes all the wrong camo moves.

Green: A cheque with a house value of $25.00.

Grill Shot: A request for a facial shot of a suspected shot taker or advantage player.

Headstone: A player that has not left his seat for almost the entire surveillance shift and is passed on to the next shift, as in, “You’ve got a headstone on table 13.”

Heat Seeker: A team player who attempts to draw as much heat as possible on another table to keep surveillance from watching his team mates. This is a bold move and usually done at a precise time. It’s also known as “Russian BJ.”

Hit and Runner: An advantage player who “Wongs,” then leaves. Also a case bettor.

Hog Hunting: A cruel game once played for money by surveillance people. The goal is to find and photograph the ugliest person of the opposite sex in the casino for a given shift. I’ve seen up to $100 in the pot up for grabs. And they think card counters are bad people.

Hunch a Buncher: A player who makes wild bet spreads for no apparent reason. His play has been proven to be unskilled.

I.R.: An Incident Report. If a “cube misses the boat” (die misses the table on a craps game) and hits the carpet, an I.R. is generated. A typical day’s worth of paperwork in a surveillance room could easily weigh a pound.

J.N.R.: Just Not Right, said of a person who appears to be acting suspicious.

K: Thousand, as in “He’s in 10k,” or “He’s losing 5k!”

Keyboard: A computer-type keyboard that allows a surveillance observer to input the camera number of his choice.

Kibitzer: A nosey person who stands behind a player on a live game.

Meth’ed: A player who is more than obviously under the influence of speed or other stimulant narcotics.

Monkey: Any ten card (Asian term).

Mult-Plexer: Multi Vision, a piece of electronic equipment used in surveillance operations that allows up to 16 cameras to be recorded on to one VCR.

Nurser: A suspected advantage player who pretends to be drinking an alcoholic beverage for hours without actually drinking.

Paint: A 10 value card, either a jack, queen, or king.

Peek Freak: A hole carder.

Pict: A printed photo generated by means of either a computer scanner device or a medical scan device (ultra scan).

Pigeon: The perfect player (big loser) according to casino and surveillance people.

Port Number: A Switcher number that reflects the Pseudo number.

The Rags: The junk cards eaten (played) by an agent in order to use up a certain amount of cards or to steer cards (as in, “That player on square one was eating up the rags for the anchor.”)

Rat-hole: The act of attempting to physically hide one’s large denomination winnings (cheques). Usually attempted by an advantage player to reduce pit heat or scrutiny.

Red: A cheque with a house value of $5.00.

Review: The act of reviewing a possible incident, as in, “Do you guys do a lot of claimer reviews?”

Rimmer: Slang used by surveillance observers to convey credit players to the next shift.

Roller: A dealer or card cheat who turns on his friends after getting busted.

S.R.: Surveillance Room.

Scellard, or Scale: A degenerate player (loser). Also a kibitzer.

Scorpion: A player (possible advantage player) that has the financial means to “sting you” (hurt the casino).

Sign-in sheet: A log sheet of all non-pre-authorized people who have entered the surveillance room.

Slugger: A player who makes numerous attempts to cut the deck to locate a slug. Also a person using fake or lead tokens in a slot machine.

Special Ops: Special Observation, also known as a “Blow by Blow.” This is where the surveillance department scrutinizes the subject’s every move. It’s not something anyone would want to go through. It’s the equivalent of having a police car behind you at all times.

Spotter: A team player who counts cards and calls in a Big Player to his table to bet big when the count is high.

Squirrel or Chipmunk: A suspected advantage player who hops from table to table in reaction to signals from his “Spotters.”

Steamer: See “chaser” (above).

Survey Him: A term used by a shift manager or a surveillance supervisor to request an observer to run a suspected advantage player on the BJ Survey Voice counter-catching computer software.

Switch(er): An electronic monstrosity that converts the “pseudo” numbers (or camera numbers) into “call” numbers.

“T or P’er”: A “Take or Place” wager, usually made by an advantage player or a Chaser. The term “T or P” means “Take or play to table max.” The phrase is announced by the table dealer when an unknown amount of currency hits the layout.

T. C. Time:Tape change time in the surveillance room. This time is also commonly referred to as “Elbows and A-Holes” time.

Turner: The same as a heat seeker, but this player utilizes means other than making bold card counter moves. A turner may trip and fall or even jump on a live table and start dancing.

Walker: A player who makes a large wager then departs in an obvious advantage play.

Warpster: Player who adjusts his play according to the bends of the cards.

Webster: Said of a floor person who thinks he knows everything.

Witch: A female dealer who can’t “hold her own” (has been unlucky). ♠

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The Triplet System

Just Another “Overdue” System

By Arnold Snyder
(From Casino Player, September 1995)
© 1995 Arnold Snyder

Question from a Reader:  What do you think of the “Triplet” system that I recently purchased by mail order? The system is made for playing craps, but I think the theory behind it would be useful for blackjack also, or any other games of chance. The author even says you can use it for roulette, and describes how on the last page.

The system costs $100, but I only had to send $25 to get it. I’m supposed to send the other $75 after I win it from the casinos. It seems to me the publisher is pretty confident that I’ll win, since he sent me the complete system “below wholesale.”

Answer:  You purchased four photocopied pages for $25. The total cost to “manufacture” this system to the author/publisher/seller was realistically about 25¢. Add to this the cost of an envelope and a 32¢ postage stamp, and the seller’s overhead expenses on this sale come to about 60¢.

So, even though you were shrewd enough to buy this system “below wholesale,” I don’t think the seller is sweating that $75 you still owe him. I suspect most “shrewd” purchasers of this system never send the remaining $75 owed for one simple reason: This system isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. My heart goes out to the tree that died for this nonsense.

I agree with you that the “theory” behind this craps system would apply equally to all even money bets in any game of chance, assuming the theory was valid for the game of craps in the first place. But it’s not. Ironically, it’s slightly more valid for blackjack than it is for other casino games — but not valid enough to be profitable.

To simplify the author’s brainstorm, he is proposing that because it is unlikely to have three consecutive same results, you will make money if you wait until two consecutive same results have already occurred, then bet against the third occurrence. For example, if the pass line wins twice in a row, bet don’t pass. At roulette, if red comes up twice in a row, bet black, etc. The system combines this ploy with a martingale double-up betting strategy to be applied when you are losing.

At any given time in the past twenty years, you would have been able to find dozens of craps, roulette and blackjack systems on the mail order market espousing this same faulty theory. When I read your letter, and examined the “Triplet” system you enclosed, I almost tossed it in the circular file as just more garbage. I wanted to write you a short personal note telling you the system was worthless, but you failed to include your address on your letter.

Then, it struck me that this type of system is one of the most common types of phony baloney systems on the market, that seems to be based on “logic.” So, let’s debunk this theory once and for all.

It makes sense to many people that it is unlikely (or, at least, less than a 50/50 chance) that three consecutive same results would occur. If the crap table had an even money payout bet on the layout that three consecutive pass or don’t pass results would occur, and you could take either side of this wager — call it “triplet” or “don’t triplet” — we could all get rich by betting “don’t triplet.” This, in fact, is the analogy the author of the Triplet system uses in describing the “logic” behind his method.

The error the author makes is in assuming that the “don’t triplet” bet is just as strong after two of the three “don’t” results have already occurred, when all you’re betting against is the occurrence of the third result.

WRONG!

The reason the “don’t triplet” bet would be so profitable if it were on the layout with an even money payout is precisely because there are three chances for the triplet to fail. Using a simple coin flip example, we all know that with an honest coin there is a 50/50 (even money) chance that heads will come up. For two consecutive heads results, however, the odds are 3-to-1 against it. This is easy to see if we consider all possible results of two flips: (1) H,H; (2) H,T; (3) T,H; or (4) T,T. We only win once, but lose three times, with the four possible outcomes.

For three consecutive heads to come up, the odds are 7-to-1 against it: (1) H,H,H; (2) H,H,T; (3) H,T,H; (4) T,H,H; (5) H,T,T; (6) T,H,T; (7) T,T,H; or (8) T,T,T. Out of these eight possible outcomes of three consecutive flips, there are seven losses and one win, if we’re betting on three consecutive heads.

But, as soon as I stipulate that two consecutive heads have already occurred, the odds against the third occurrence are no longer 7-to-1. What I’m looking at is “H,H,?” where only that third result figures in to the bet, and we’re back to a 50/50 chance of it being either heads or tails.

If I pulled out an honest quarter, and offered you an even money bet that I could flip three heads in a row, you’d be very smart to take the bet, since the odds against me doing it are 7-to-1. In fact, you could give me 6-to-1 odds and still make money on this bet in the long run.

But if I said, “Wait until I flip two consecutive heads, then I’ll bet you that I can flip a third head,” you’d be foolish to give me anything other than even money, because it’s back to being a 50/50 proposition. At a crap table, or roulette table, you are giving the house odds on that third bet, because unlike our coin flip example, the house has a 1.41% advantage over you on the pass line, and a 5.26% advantage over you on the even money bets with a double-0 wheel. The Triplet system does nothing to change the house edge.

Any time you see a system which tells you to consider the likelihood or unlikelihood of occurrence of some result, based on results which have already occurred, don’t waste your time or money with it. I call these “overdue” systems, because the sellers often claim that when there has been a preponderance of reds, black is “overdue,” etc.

The reason I said that this “Triplet” system is slightly more valid if applied to blackjack than to other casino games is that computer simulations have shown that in blackjack, wins are slightly more likely to follow losses, and losses to follow wins. Unlike dice or roulette, the cards do have “memory.” I.e., cards which have already been played are out of the game until the next shuffle.

But don’t expect to get rich applying the “Triplet” system to blackjack. The total amount of the change in your win/loss expectation based on previous wins or losses at a blackjack table is measurable in thousandths of a percent — not enough to overcome the house advantage.  ♠

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The Pseudo-Tournament System

Let’s Pretend It’s a Tournament

By Arnold Snyder
(From Card Player, January 1994)
© 1994 Arnold Snyder

Question from a Reader: I have been playing blackjack and craps for about 40 years, and have been competing in blackjack and craps tournaments pretty seriously for about five years. I’ve always been a system player. Believe me, I’ve tried them all (except for card counting, since I do not have a good memory, and my eyesight is also poor). I have to admit I never really made any money at the gaming tables until I got into the tournaments. I’ve been making very good money at tournaments for about two years now.

Recently, I’ve been applying my tournament strategies at the tables even when I’m not in a tournament. In other words, I pretend it’s a tournament, and I have to beat the other players at my table using a fixed bankroll, with self-imposed betting limits, over a fixed (short) time period.

In my four decades of system play, I’ve never heard of a system anything like this. Have you? Since I’ve seen this approach win over and over in actual tournament play, I feel that a strategic approach to being the “best at the table” would work even when I’m not in a tournament.

Competing with the other players at my table, instead of trying to beat the house, strikes me as a more realistic approach. I know that I can’t always win, so my goal is to lose the least when everyone else loses, and to win the most when everyone else wins. Regardless of what happens at the table, I want to come out in the best shape. Doesn’t this make sense?

But, Bishop, as logical as this may sound, I’ve been having some serious problems applying this method, and I have suffered some tremendous losses in my attempts to compensate for the confusing situations that arise. For instance, as you might imagine, the other players at these “pretend” tournaments don’t abide by my imaginary rules. I try to adjust my strategy based on the units that other players win and lose (instead of dollars), but since new players suddenly enter “mid-round” as it were, and other “competitors” just as suddenly quit, this is more complicated than it might seem. Other players also make “illegal” bets (such as spreading to multiple blackjack hands), and constantly violate the “limits” I’ve imposed on myself, even if I translate their bets to units.

It seems to me that I should be able to win more often in these imaginary tournaments than I do in real tournaments, since my imaginary “competitors” don’t really know that they’re competing with me, don’t know when the end of a “round” is approaching, etc., etc. When I first came up with this idea, I thought I had the system to beat all systems. Just be the best at your table. It sounds simple. But how do I do this in the real world?

Answer: When it comes to systems, I thought I had seen them all. However, yours is a new one to me. But just because no one else has thought of this system before, does not mean it’s a valid, winning system. As a matter of fact, it is not a valid method for beating the blackjack tables. You will continue to “suffer tremendous losses” if you persist with this approach.

Consider what you know from your many years of experience.

For forty years, you’ve played blackjack and craps, but you’ve only made any real money in the past few years, by playing in tournaments. What does this tell you? That the systems you’ve been using simply don’t work — except in tournaments.

What is it about tournament play that is different from playing at the normal, house banked, gaming tables? Two major differences: One, you are competing with other players and not the house. (Obviously, you realize this.) Two, if you finish with more money than any of the other players, you will win the jackpot. (You seem to be totally ignoring this!)

In your “pretend” tournaments, there is no jackpot. Other than whatever money you might win from the dealer, there is no reward for being the best at your table. Since you obviously have a natural talent for competing with other players, proven by your success in real tournaments, you should reserve all of your serious play for tournaments. Don’t try to use betting systems to beat other players, unless those other players have put money into a pot that you will collect when you come out ahead of them.

Look at it this way: Make a list of all of the tournaments you’ve played in for the past two years. Then make three columns. List the amounts you’ve paid in entry fees in all of the tournaments you’ve competed in. List the amounts you’ve won and lost during play at the tables in all of the tournaments you’ve competed in. And finally, list all of the prize moneys you’ve collected in all of the tournaments you’ve competed in. Now, total up the columns and see what your net profit has been from tournament play.

Now, ignore both the entry fee column, and the prize money column, since your “pretend” tournaments don’t include either of these factors, and just look at the amounts you’ve won and lost at the tournament tables in the process of competing. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that this number is a net loss. How do I know this? Because if you are a successful tournament player, you will often tap out in the tournaments where you do not finish in the money (and this will be the majority of the tournaments you play). The reason you come out ahead in the long run in tournament play is because the prize moneys you collect for your aggressive betting strategies will exceed the total of your losses from entry fees and table play.

Using tournament strategies when there is no jackpot for the winner is a very foolhardy way to bet your money. So, you invented a new system. Unfortunately, it’s a lousy system. So, stick to the real tournaments.Send memorabilia from casinos and hardware stores for my soon to be published book,“Casinos and Plumbing Supply Outlets of America,” to the Bishop at Blackjack Forum Online.   ♠

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Oscar’s System

The Best Blackjack Betting System for Finishing a Trip with a Win

by Arnold Snyder
(From Player Magazine, November/December 1995)
© 1995 Arnold Snyder

Blackjack Betting Systems: The Long Run Vs. The Short Run

Players ask me more questions about betting systems for blackjack than just about any other topic. Not betting systems for card counters—just betting systems.

I always start by going into my spiel that pure betting systems don’t win in the long run. They can make you more likely to win in the short run (in the case of Oscar’s System, a lot more likely). But not in the long run. And the usual response I get is, “I don’t care about the long run. I’m going to Vegas this weekend. I just want to win on this one short run.” (Continued below)https://www.888casino.com/blackjack/free

As a matter of fact, there are betting systems that provide a player a much bigger chance of finishing a trip with a win than a loss. If you use this type of betting system, and you look over your records after years of play, you’ll see a whole lot of small wins—and one (or a few) big losses, big enough to wipe out the profits from all of your small wins, and then some. (Mustn’t forget that house edge!)

But, you don’t care about the long run. You just want a win this weekend. So, let’s look at what betting system works best in the short run. We can’t guarantee a win, but there is a logic to betting systems that can greatly increase your chances of success.

Types of Blackjack Betting Systems

There are two main types of betting systems for blackjack or any casino game—positive progressions and negative progressions. With a positive progression, the general theory is that you raise your bets after wins, which means that your bigger bets are primarily funded by money won. This is a conservative betting system insofar as a long string of losses will not wipe out your bankroll as quickly as with a negative progression.

With a negative progression, you raise your bets after your losses. This is more dangerous, since a bad run of losses can wipe you out quickly. In its favor, however, it allows you to win on a session in which you’ve lost many more hands than you’ve won. Since your bets after losses are bigger bets, you don’t have to win so many of them to come back, assuming you can avoid a truly disastrous series of losses that empties your pockets.

There are dozens of variations on betting systems that incorporate features of both the positive and negative progressions, in an attempt to create the “perfect” betting system that wins the most often with the least chance of busting out.

But the best system of this type I’ve seen for accomplishing this end was first published 40 years ago by mathematician Allan N. Wilson, in his Casino Gambler’s Guide (Harper & Row, 1965). Dr. Wilson called it “Oscar’s system,” named after the dice player who’d invented it.

How to Use Oscar’s Blackjack Betting System

Here’s how Oscar’s System works:

The goal for any series of bets is to win just one unit, then start a new series. Each series starts with a one-unit bet. After any win, the next bet is one unit more than the previous bet. After any loss, the next bet is identical to the previous bet. That is, if you lose a two-unit bet, your next bet is a two-unit bet until you have a win, at which point you raise your bet one unit to a three-unit bet.

That is the whole system, except for one stipulation—Never place any bet that would result in a win for the series of more than one unit. In other words, if you win a 4-unit bet, and you are now down only 2 units for the series, you would not raise your next bet to 5 units because of the 4-unit win; you’d only to 3 units, which would be all you’d need—if successful—to achieve a one-unit win for the series.

Oscar’s betting system combines the best features of both the positive and negative progressions. You can suffer much longer runs of losses without busting out than you can with a negative progression, since you don’t raise your bets after losses. Yet, a much shorter run of wins can get back your previous losses on a series, since you raise your bets following wins. It’s kind of brilliant, actually. Strings of losses hurt less, yet strings of wins pay more.

When Oscar told Dr. Wilson that he had been using this system for many years and had never had a losing weekend in Las Vegas, Dr. Wilson did some mathematical and computer simulation analysis on it. Was this possible? His findings were amazing. Using a $1 betting unit on an even money payout game, the betting progression is so slow that the player would bump up against the house’s $500 maximum bet (at that time) on only one series of every 5,000 played. On 4,999 of those series, the player would expect to achieve his $1 win target.

Since Oscar was shooting for a weekend win of only $100 (back in 1965, this was a very healthy win!), Dr. Wilson concluded that it was quite likely that Oscar had played on many weekends over a period of years with never a loss.

So, should we all start using Oscar’s system? One word of caution: Watch out for that one losing series. How much does Oscar lose when his system fails on that one unlucky series out of 5,000?

About $13,000.

You see, even though he’s just bumped into the house’s table maximum of $500, he’s gotten to this point by losing lots of bets in the $100+, $200+, $300+, and $400+ range during this horrendously long series. So, if you try Oscar’s system, you still have to be prepared to lose in the long run.

Oscar’s System: Sample Betting Sequences
BetResultTotalNext Bet
1L-11
1L-21
1W-12
2W+1done
BetResultTotalNext Bet
1L-11
1L-21
1L-31
1W-22
2L-42
2W-23
3W+1done
BetResultTotalNext Bet
1L-11
1L-21
1W-12
2L-32
2L-52
2W-33
3W01
1W+1done
Conclusion

No betting system will ever overcome the house edge in the long run. But they’re not worthless. Professional gamblers do find opportunities for profiting from various types of betting systems in gambling tournaments, as “camouflage” to disguise an advantage play that is not based on the betting system itself, and especially in online casinos where betting systems can be used to milk the casino “bonuses.”

To actually win at normal casino blackjack in the long run, however, you have to start by counting cards–not because card counting is the best or most profitable way to win at blackjack, but because the principles behind card counting are the same principles that are behind every type of professional gambling system at blackjack, even methods that don’t require counting. ♠

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Dubey’s No Need to Count System

Win at Blackjack without Counting Cards?

By Arnold Snyder
(From Card Player, December 1994)
© 1994 Arnold Snyder

Question from a Reader:  I recently read this book titled No Need To Count by Leon Dubey, Jr. (A.S. Barnes, 1980). This appears to be a fairly intelligent book about the game of blackjack, and Dubey does not strike me as a huckster. There isn’t any promise of vast wealth from using his system, and if anything, he seems to take a very sober and realistic (even pessimistic!) attitude towards anyone’s possibilities of making much money from casino blackjack.

The thing is, Dubey claims to have discovered certain non-counting techniques for beating the tables, and he also claims that the value of these techniques has been proven by computer simulations. In the many years I’ve been reading your column in Card Player, I don’t believe you’ve ever mentioned Dubey’s unique approach (it’s not just another “streak” system!), or any of the types of techniques he describes.

His system is such a radical departure from normal card counting systems, and also from the standard “betting progression” systems, that it seems to me that the blackjack cognoscenti would have elevated Dubey to guru status by now if his system had any merit. How come you experts totally ignore Leon Dubey, Jr.?

Arnold Snyder on Dubey’s No Need to Count System

Answer:  Actually, I did review Dubey’s No Need To Count back in 1983 (before I was writing for Card Player) in Blackjack Forum. The book is apparently still in print, and I suspect it has a fairly wide distribution as I’ve seen it in the gambling sections of many book stores. Perhaps a discussion of Dubey’s techniques is in order.

I agree with you that Dubey is not a “huckster,” and I suspect that the computer simulations he ran to verify his methods were honest. There are some extreme problems with applying his methods in the real world, however, and it is highly unlikely that any player would ever be able to make any notable amount of money by using his “computer proven” techniques.

The types of methods Dubey proposes are often referred to as situational betting techniques. Without counting cards, per se, certain playing situations will often indicate that the house advantage will be higher, or lower, on the next hand to be dealt.

Dubey was not, in fact, the initial discoverer of this relationship between the prior hand and the next hand dealt. As far back as 1978, Dr. John Gwynn and Professor Armand Seri published a paper which first described valid situational betting techniques — and Gwynn and Seri also based their findings on extensive computer simulations.

What Gwynn and Seri determined beyond any doubt were three facts:

1) If a player loses a hand, he will be more likely to win the next one — i.e., losing one hand is a positive indicator that the player’s expectation on the next hand has risen.

2) If a player wins a hand, he will be more likely to lose the next one — i.e., winning one hand is an indicator that the player’s expectation on the next hand has dropped.

3) If a player pushes a hand with the dealer, it is an even stronger indicator than a win that the player’s expectation on the next hand has dropped.

For a number of years following the Gwynn/Seri situational discoveries, blackjack betting systems began appearing which advanced situational betting theory beyond the win/loss/push indicators. Without going into the specific recommendations of Dubey’s book (some of which are included here), other situational advantage indicators are:

4) Following a non-ace pair split, the player’s expectation rises.

5) Following an ace split, the player’s expectation drops.

6) Following a hard double down, the player’s expectation rises.

7) Following any hand (player or dealer) which requires 4 or more cards, the player’s expectation rises.

8) Following any hand in which both the player and the dealer use 4 or more cards, the player’s expectation rises even more.

9) Following any blackjack (player or dealer), the player’s expectation drops.

10) Following any hand in which neither the player nor the dealer has taken any hits, the player’s expectation drops.

All of the above situational facts are true, and can be proven by computer simulation. A player who always raises his bet after the “positive” indicators, and who lowers his bet after the negative indicators, will have an expectation greater than a player who puts the same amount of money into action flat-betting. (We’re assuming that both players are playing basic strategy.)

Now, wouldn’t it be much easier (than employing a card counting system) for a player to just memorize the 5 positive indicators and the 5 negative indicators (mentioned above) and to raise and lower his bets accordingly?

Absolutely!

So, why aren’t we blackjack experts singing the praises of the situational systems?

The Problem with the No Need to Count System

The problem with utilizing this type of strategy is that none of the advantage indicators are very strong. In most games, they would simply indicate that the house had less of an advantage over the player, not that the advantage had risen to a player advantage.

In deeply dealt one-deck games, with good rules (dealer stand of soft 17 and especially blackjack pays 3:2), all of these indicators combined might provide the player who is making small bets of $5 and high bets of $100 (1-20 spread) with an expectation of about $1-$2 per hour. In other words, no individual situational indicator is worth more than a few hundredths of a percent, and all of them combined are not worth much more than a few tenths of a percent, in a deeply dealt one-deck game with a big betting spread.

Now I have nothing against any player making $1-$2 per hour, especially if he would otherwise be breaking even (or worse) just using basic strategy, so why don’t I advise players who are not up to the task of card counting to use this easy situational approach?

The answer to that is right in Dubey’s book. He admits that at the casino blackjack tables, his system “. . . so smacks of card counting that he (the dealer) very rapidly catches on to the fact that you are a threat. . . by the end of a single weekend my wife and I were known in all the casinos of Las Vegas. . . .”

If you want to know why this type of system “so smacks of card counting,” all you have to do is consider the situations which are used as positive/negative indicators. In every case, the positive indicators coincide with a probability that more low cards than high cards have just come out of the deck. The negative indicators correlate with more high cards than low cards having been dealt.

For example, Indicator #3 is that a push indicates a drop in player advantage. Why would this be true? It’s not that every push indicates this; but the most common push is a player 20 (two tens) vs. a dealer 20 (two tens), so that pushes taken as a group more often indicate that high cards have been removed from the deck.

Gwynn’s and Seri’s studies also showed that a player win was slightly more often a result of high cards coming out of the deck, and that a player loss was slightly more often the result of low cards coming out. Technically, it’s not the win, loss, or push that is really indicating the more probable result on the next hand, but the removal of high or low cards from the deck.

In fact, this type of situational play — despite the fact that you are not technically assigning count values to the cards — really is just a very weak card counting system. It’s not strong enough to win you any money, but it will be recognizable enough to casino personnel to get you kicked out of the game (assuming you can find a deeply dealt one-decker with Strip rules, so that you can even test your 1-20 betting spread).

So, situational play is valid, but not a very good moneymaking system. The main objection I have to Dubey’s book is that it is mistitled. Instead of No Need To Count, it should be titled Why You Need To Count.  ♠

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The Famous Martingale System

The Martingale: Progression to Depression

by Arnold Snyder
(From Card Player, April 1995)
© 1995 Arnold Snyder

(Note from Arnold Snyder: To learn how to win at blackjack over the long run, with or without card counting, start with our Intro to Winning Blackjack.)

Question from a Reader regarding the Martingale Betting System: I lost a substantial amount of my savings playing blackjack at [casino name deleted] in Atlantic City — almost $30,000. I admit that I was using a progressive betting system — a straight martingale, and I know that won’t give me any advantage — but even so, I feel pretty certain that I was cheated.

I was winning steadily for quite a few hours using this betting system (a simple double-up after a loss), then in a short series of hands that lasted only about 30 minutes — they totally cleaned me out. I was playing perfect basic strategy.

I have enclosed a chart which shows the series of bets I made, and the win/loss results that eventually bankrupted me. I would like to know your expert opinion on whether or not this could have happened in an honest game.

Can I take any kind of legal action against the casino if this series of hands is indicative of cheating? I have a friend who witnessed the debacle who can attest to the truth of what happened.

Answer: I have studied your results, and although anyone would acknowledge that you suffered an unusually unlucky series of hands — and an especially devastatingly unlucky series for any martingale player — the series of hands in and of itself would not be indicative of cheating. I highly doubt you were cheated.

The straight martingale is one of the riskiest betting systems any gambler could use. Any gambler who ever has used it with any regularity could tell you his own hair-raising “impossibly unlucky” tale of why he gave it up for more conservative betting methods.

Here is what happened to you:

1) You bet $10, and lost.

2) You bet $20, and lost.

3) You bet $40, and lost.

4) You bet $80, and lost.

5) You bet $160, and doubled down on your 11 vs. the dealer 8, and you lost.

6) This double loss required you to place a next bet of $480, which you then lost.

7) You placed a bet of $960, and split your 8s vs. a dealer 10, and you lost both hands.

8) This double loss required you to place a bet of $2880, which was higher than the $2000 table max. So you bet the max, and lost.

9) On your next hand, you bet the max again, and insured your 20 vs. the dealer ace. You lost both the insurance bet, and your hand when the dealer hit to 21. This put you behind by a total of $7880.

10) You then bet the max, and pushed.

11) You then bet the max and won!

You say that the above series of results took about 10 minutes, and that you do not recall the exact series of wins and losses in the approximately two dozen hands that you played over the next 20 minutes. You note there were a few wins interspersed with the mostly losses, but you had to have had 12 more max bet losses than wins (perhaps 18 losses and 6 wins?), as you left the table a $29,980 loser.

How “impossible” is this?

Unfortunately, not very.

You must realize that you were required to start placing max bets after only 7 consecutive losses. Once you are actually placing $2000 bets, a loss of $30,000 is not at all unusual. This would be equivalent to a $5 bettor losing $75 — which any experienced $5 bettor could tell you would not be uncommon. If you count your double loss on your split pair as two hands, you actually began your unfortunate series of losses by losing 10 hands in a row. How unusual is this?

If I were flipping a coin, with heads being a win, and tails a loss, the odds against me coming up tails 10 times in a row would be about 1000-to-1. That’s pretty unlikely, though far from impossible.

Blackjack, however, is less advantageous than a coin flip. In 100 hands, a basic strategy player will experience, on average, 43 wins, 48 losses and 9 pushes. Since a martingale bettor ignores pushes and lets his bet ride, we can ignore them in our analysis. For every 100 win/loss decisions, a basic strategy player will see about 53 losses and 47 wins.

With these win/loss proportions, the odds against losing 10 consecutive decisions are only about 500-to-1. Now 500-to-1 may seem nearly impossible to many people, but realistically, at any given time, a series of losses equivalent to yours is happening to dozens of players in Atlantic City, and to hundreds of people every day of the year in U.S. casinos. It’s happening right now to one out of every 500 people who are playing. How many tens of thousands of people are playing blackjack right now in U.S. casinos?

You must realize that if you had been flat-betting $10, instead of “doubling-up” to try to recapture your previous losses, you would only have lost $110 (and this includes both your pair split and your double down loss!), instead of being behind by $7,880 at the end of that first unfortunate string of losses. And your total loss at the end of the debacle would only have been $230, not $29,980.

The martingale is a systematic method of chasing your losses. There’s no other way to describe it. This is about the most foolish way to gamble. You violated the single most important rule for gamblers: If you can’t afford to lose it, don’t bet it. ♠

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The Cancelation System

The Cancellation System: Structured Steaming

By Arnold Snyder
(From Card Player, June 1991)
© 1991 Arnold Snyder

Question from a Reader: Have you ever tested a “cancellation” type betting system for blackjack? I’ve been counting cards for about six months and every time I really get into a hole, I use this cancellation system that I once learned for roulette.

More often than not, I dig myself out. I gave up on trying to beat roulette with this system, due to some unbelievable runs of bad luck, but the house edge at roulette is very high compared to blackjack. Have you ever heard of any professional blackjack players trying a cancellation type betting system?

Answer: I’ve heard of professional blackjack players trying most everything at one time or another, most often for temporary camouflage. But I do not know of any pro who uses any progressive betting scheme seriously.

A “cancellation” system usually requires paper and pencil to keep track of the bets. You start by writing down a series of numbers. You bet the sum of the first number and the last number in the series. If you win, you cross off both numbers. If you lose, you write the total of the two numbers down as your new last number. You continue playing until you’ve crossed off all numbers, then you start a new series.

Here’s the “logic” behind a cancellation system: Every time you win, you cross off two numbers (the first and last). Every time you lose, you add only one number (the sum of the first and last numbers that you had just bet and lost). Therefore, you can lose almost twice as often as you win, and still win your series. If you win your series, you will have profited by the sum of the numbers you originally wrote down.

With a cancellation betting progression, good luck wins quickly, and bad luck usually wins slowly. How wonderful! We should all be rich tomorrow. . . .

The problem, however, is that sometimes “bad luck” means losing more than twice as often as you win. When this happens, as I’m sure you discovered at the roulette tables, the series of bets you need to win your series becomes continually longer and the size of the next required bet keeps getting bigger.

You end up walking away from the table with empty pockets and a long list of numbers that may look “unbelievable” to you, but that is assuredly within the scope of normal fluctuation from the statistician’s perspective. Believe me, you will experience the same “bad runs” at blackjack that you experienced at roulette.

Cancellation betting progressions tend to appeal to compulsive gamblers. “Steaming” is a common term gamblers use that means chasing money you’ve already lost with money you can’t afford to lose. If you’ve already lost the $500 you told yourself was your “loss limit,” and you start chasing it with your grocery money, you’re steaming. When you lose your grocery money, you’ll have to start chasing that with your car payment.

Compulsive gamblers think their bad luck can’t last forever, so if they just hang in there, the tide will turn and they’ll recoup their losses. A cancellation system feeds this fantasy, since you don’t really need “good luck” to win—you just need luck that’s not abysmal.

Unfortunately, gamblers never seem to learn how atrocious luck can be and still be considered normal fluctuation to a mathematician. Although you may have “dug out” from a few of your card counting losses so far, I assure you in the long run, you’ll find yourself holding that long list of numbers, shaking your head.

Look at what you’re doing. You experience negative fluctuations using your counting system — so you stop counting and start using a worthless betting progression. Now you’re no longer placing large bets because you have the advantage (according to your count); you’re placing large bets because two numbers on a slip of paper tell you that this is how much you have to win to start recouping what you’ve already lost.

You’re steaming. With a cancellation system, the more you lose, the bigger your bets will get. They don’t get bigger because the count is going up. They don’t get bigger because the advantage has swung to you, based on the cards remaining to be dealt. They get bigger because you’ve already lost a bundle, so you’ve got to bet more to recoup.

The fact that there’s a strict pattern to a cancellation system — a betting structure that you don’t violate — does not make it an intelligent way to bet your money. This is simply structured steaming. Every time you lose, you raise your betting level. Any betting progression requiring you to bet more as you lose is not only stupid, it’s dangerous.

Valid card counting systems require bets based on both your advantage and the size of your bankroll. If your bankroll diminishes due to negative fluctuations, your bets should decrease proportionately. It has been shown mathematically, and by computer simulation, that not only is this the fastest way to maximize your bankroll with minimum risk, but to bet contrary to this is the road to ruin

You are on the road to ruin. If you’re just playing for fun, with money that is inconsequential to your way of life, then go ahead and fool around with betting progressions if you enjoy betting that way. But understand that you will assuredly lose more than you’ll win.

And don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re a card counter following an intelligent strategy. On the other hand, if you’re really serious about attempting to make money at the blackjack tables, forget all about cancellation systems or any other betting progressions.

If you continually find yourself steaming, and playing with money you can’t afford to lose, then you should seriously consider calling Gamblers Anonymous. You have a problem.  ♠

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Evaluating the Simplest Card Counting Systems

Battle of the Babies: A Comparison of the Red 7, Hi-Lo, and KO Card Counting Systems

By Arnold Snyder
(From Blackjack Forum Volume XIX #3, Fall 1999)
© Blackjack Forum 1999

[Editor’s note: This is a technical article on how to best evaluate card counting systems. It addresses how system sellers sometimes fudge results to make their systems look better.

The Search for the “Best” Card Counting System

New players typically search anxiously for the “best card counting system” before learning their first count. This article will provide simulation data on the Red Seven Count for comparison to the Hi-Lo and KO counts. It will also discuss important issues in the comparison of different blackjack card counting systems.

John Auston used the approach that has recently become commonly known as “score” to compare the Red Seven (Red 7), Hi-Lo, and KO count systems. For those unfamiliar with this approach, I would describe it very briefly as an attempt to compare systems and games on an even playing field, assuming we define “even” as an equal and constant risk of ruin, assuming the same starting bankroll and the same betting limits for each system in identical games.

In order to accomplish this in the sim, unrealistic bets are forced. For example, if the optimal bet is $137 with one system, but $138 with another, and $134 with a third system, then these are the bets that are placed. In practice, if these were human players and even if they had very accurately devised their count betting strategies to reflect a similar risk of ruin for identical $10,000 bankrolls, all would likely have bets of either $125 or $150—some slightly underbetting their banks, some slightly overbetting.

I can already see a barrage of letters from players asking me to explain why anyone would want an analysis based on such an impractical, nay impossible, betting methodology. Briefly, the purpose of this type of analysis is not to tell us our win rate to the exact penny per hour, nor is it to suggest that we should attempt to mimic the impractical betting strategies in the real world so that we may obtain optimal results.

The purpose is simply to evaluate the potential profitability of applying a system to a game assuming a given level of risk—one way of dealing with the “best card counting system” comparisons. Let me provide one practical example.

It is not difficult for me to set up a computer simulation where the Hi-Lo Count will outperform the Advanced Omega II (a much stronger and more difficult count), even when both counts are being played accurately and employing the same betting spread. All I have to do is play around with the betting strategies so that Omega II is waiting too long to put its big bets on the table. If I simply raise the true count by one or two numbers where these bigger bets are placed, then Hi-Lo will appear to be a stronger system. But in fact, the Hi-Lo is simply being played more aggressively and with a higher risk of ruin.

I first learned about this aggression factor back in the early 1980s, when I was working with Dr. John Gwynn, Jr. In order to compare different count systems using the same betting spread in the same game, I asked Gwynn to produce data showing the full range of possible betting schemes for each system based on the various true counts. For example, with the Hi-Lo Count, spreading from 1-2-4 units in a single-deck game, he would produce data showing the bet raises to 2 and then 4 units at +1 and +2, then +1 and +3, then +2 and +3, then +2 and +4, etc.

The data Gwynn and I came up with showed nothing about risk of ruin, but it did show that a player who wanted to optimize his percent advantage over the house could do so by raising his bets at precisely the right counts. A player who wanted to optimize his dollar return, on the other hand, could do so by betting more aggressively (placing high bets earlier), even though this tactic would lower his percentage return.

Whenever I published Gwynn’s system comparison data, I always chose the betting scheme that would provide the highest percent advantage to the player. I did this because it was more realistic. A player with an unlimited bankroll, in fact, will show the highest dollar return if he places his high bet as soon as he has even the slightest fraction of a percent advantage over the house. Players with unlimited bankrolls, however, do not exist. Such hypothetical players have no risk of ruin because they can always dig out more money.

In the real world, it is more meaningful to optimize the percent advantage than the maximum potential dollar win. In optimizing the percent advantage from Gwynn’s data for many systems in various games back in the early to mid-80s, and then up into the mid-90s using John Imming’s RWC software, I discovered that the optimal betting spreads were never intuitive. If I was spreading from 1-2-4-8 units in a 6-deck game, one system might perform best by raising bets at +1, +2, +4, and +5; while another’s optimal betting scheme would raise at +2, +4, +5 and +6; while yet another might perform best at +1, +3, +4 and +6.

When I didn’t examine every possible betting scheme for each system, I would often see data that would seem illogical. A system with a lower betting correlation and playing efficiency would appear to outperform a technically superior system. In almost all cases, as soon as I would look at the results of the optimal betting scheme for that system, defining optimal as the scheme that would produce the greatest percent advantage, the greater profit potential of a technically superior system would exhibit itself.

Optimizing system performance to obtain the highest percent advantage for each system does not ensure that all systems being so compared are playing with the same level of risk. This was simply the best way I knew to compare the various systems’ ultimate levels of performance.

Misleading Simulation Data for the KO Count

One of the worst examples of misleading simulation data from ill-chosen betting schemes can be found in Knock-Out Blackjack by Olaf Vancura and Ken Fuchs. They designed a unique method of attempting to simulate equivalent levels of risk in their system comparisons that produced data that computer programmers used to refer to as GIGO—garbage in, garbage out. The system comparison charts in Chapter Five of the 1996 edition and again in the Appendix of the 1998 edition would lead one to believe that the KO Count was superior to or equal to just about every other counting system on the planet, and especially powerful in one-deck games.

For example, the chart below reproduces the simulation data provided by Knock-Out Blackjack comparing the win rates for KO vs. Red 7, Hi-Lo, and Omega II, assuming 1-5 spreads in the one and two-deck games, 1-8 in the 6-deck games, and 1-10 in the 8-deck games, with all systems using the 16 most important strategy indices.

The Simulation Data Provided by Knock-Out Blackjack

 1-deck2-deck6-deck8-deck
KO1.531.110.620.52
Red71.461.080.610.50
Hi-Lo1.471.080.610.52
Omega1.521.150.680.57

When I first looked at this data back in 1996, my initial thought was, “Impossible! KO beating Omega II in a single-deck game? And beating Hi-Lo in all games?” I did not know whether or not it might beat Red Seven, but it was illogical to me that it would perform so powerfully, so consistently, in comparison with the balanced counts. I knew that Red Seven performed close to Hi-Lo in shoe games, and did occasionally outperform it, but never in single deck.

I ran some single-deck simulations myself using John Imming’s software, setting up the game and system conditions as described by Vancura and Fuchs, and quickly confirmed what I already knew—that KO was similar to Red Seven in performance, but notably less profitable than Hi-Lo and Omega II. In fact, it also slightly under-performed Red Seven throughout all the tests I ran.

I called Anthony Curtis, who was distributing the KO book through Huntington Press (now publisher of the second edition) and told Curtis that I thought the authors may have jerry-rigged the sims to make KO appear stronger than it actually was. I told him that in the one-deck sims I was running, Red Seven outperformed KO, not by much, but slightly.

Curtis assured me that he felt the authors were honest and that their simulation data was real, with no intention to skew the system comparison data. At this point, I had never met Olaf Vancura or Ken Fuchs, so I did not know if these guys were legitimate experts or big phonies. I have met and corresponded with both of them since, and I now know that, in fact, they are both gentlemen and scholars with no intent to deceive.

Here’s where Vancura and Fuchs went wrong. KO’s imbalance makes it strongest and most accurate when the running count is at its pivot. So, the authors, very logically, set up their sims so that KO was placing its high bets precisely at this point. The other systems, however, were then forced in their simulations to play with the same “average bet” that KO used.

The KO counting system is actually very easy to use and very strong. It is similar in strength to the Red Seven, which itself is close to the Hi-Lo in strength within certain confines. In fact, Hi-Lo is notably superior to both Red Seven and KO in one and two-deck games, and from many professional players’ perspectives, where accurate bet-sizing according to Kelly principles is important, Hi-Lo is also far superior in shoe games.

For most casual players, however, I still believe the unbalanced counting systems are the best choice because they’re simpler, can be played longer without costly errors, and allow the player to focus more on heat, getting away with a big bet spread, and other factors that matter more to your win rate than the count system you use.

I have been hesitant to publicly criticize Vancura’s and Fuch’s less than brilliant system comparisons in Knock Out Blackjack because the book really is one of the better ones on the market. The system is good. The explanations of blackjack and card counting are clear. There’s no get-rich-quick b.s., and I believe there was no intent to deceive.

I certainly don’t want to push new players away from Knock Out Blackjack and into the arms of one of the con-man books out there. Also, many serious players are already aware of why the KO system looks so strong in the sims Vancura and Fuchs provide in their book. There has been a lot of sim data posted on the various Internet blackjack sites that refute the findings in the KO book.

Also, anyone who looks at John Auston’s “World’s Greatest Blackjack Simulation” reports can see that KO’s strength is about what one would expect of a level one unbalanced counting system.

John Auston’s Comparison of the Red 7, KO, Hi Lo and Omega II Card Counting Systems

In the chart below, I am reproducing John Auston’s “World’s Greatest Blackjack Simulation” data for comparing KO with Red Seven, Hi-Lo, and Omega II in the same games that Vancura and Fuchs used in their book. The single-deck penetration was 65% and all other games were 75%. Note that in the single and double deck games, Auston did not provide sim data for a 1-5 spread, so I used his data for 1-4 in single deck, and 1-6 in double.

Auston’s Data on KO, Red Seven, Hi-Lo, and Omega II

 1-deck2-deck6-deck8-deck
KO1.321.290.340.20
Red71.341.240.440.39
Hi-Lo1.381.300.340.26
Omega1.641.540.510.56

Since the World’s Greatest Blackjack Simulation reports were published in 1997, many players have asked me why the KO data does not show any indication of the consistent superiority to other systems that KO is purported to exhibit in Knock Out Blackjack. The answer is simply that John Auston did not set up his WGBJS sims so that all systems had to conform to the “average bet” specs of the optimal KO betting strategy.

A few interesting points on Auston’s WGBJS data. Note that Omega II is in a class by itself, solidly trouncing the level one systems’ results in all games, as expected. Hi-Lo, KO and Red Seven go back and forth in their exhibitions of strength relative to each other.

Hi-Lo is slightly superior in single deck, while Red Seven and KO are about the same. Red Seven is slightly weaker in the double deck, where Hi-Lo and KO are about the same. Red Seven is stronger in both the six deck and eight deck, where Hi-Lo and KO are slightly weaker. If you actually look at all of the data in the WGBJS reports, you find that all three of these counts continually go back and forth, depending on the number of decks, penetration, and betting spreads. But none of them are a match for Advanced Omega II.

I would also point out that even these independently run sims—done with no attempt to bias the data towards any system—are inadvertently set up with conditions that are more favorable to the unbalanced counts, at least in comparison with the Hi-Lo. This is because John Auston used the “Illustrious 18” shoe strategy indices for all systems other than Advanced Omega II. These indices—which are the ideal indices for shoe games—are not the best 18 indices for one and two deck games. Since all but two of these indices call for Hi-Lo strategy changes at neutral to slightly positive counts (0 to +5), this is precisely the range of counts where both KO and Red Seven will perform best.

A Hi-Lo player who is using more indices for the common playing variations that occur both at negative counts and at higher positive counts would actually expect a performance level closer to the Advanced Omega II system (which Auston simmed with a full set of indices) in the one and two deck games. Red Seven and KO simply do not have a playing accuracy level comparable to Hi-Lo outside the limited Illustrious 18 range.

Also, Red Seven’s dominating performance in the six deck and eight deck games, where it solidly trounces both Hi-Lo and KO, is due to the way the system is designed, where it performs with maximum strength when the advantage has risen by about 1%. Because it is strongest at this point, this is where it will be placing most high bets.

In these shoe games with only 75% penetration, higher advantages only rarely occur. So, Red Seven is optimized to play in precisely these types of games.

I can assure you, however, that it is playing with more risk than Hi-Lo, so in reality it would require a larger bankroll to play Red Seven to its optimum performance in these games. Auston’s six deck WGBJS data shows Red Seven’s average bet to be 1.63 units, while KO and Hi-Lo are making average bets of only 1.42 and 1.47 units respectively.

If we were to force average bets of 1.63 units on Hi-Lo and KO, they would perform even worse in comparison with Red Seven. KO’s playing and betting accuracy do not optimize until a 2% raise in the player advantage has occurred, and Hi-Lo suffers from not counting the sevens, which raises the Red Seven’s betting correlation (BC) and playing efficiency (PE) enough at its pivot point to justify the more frequent higher bets.

John Auston’s risk-adjusted analysis, which we have yet to look at in this article, solves the problem of equalizing the risk factors for the various systems tested, but it is still unfairly skewed toward the unbalanced systems in hand-held games, because it again uses only the Illustrious 18 range of indices, with which the unbalanced systems perform best.

One other problem with the Red Seven data is that in all of these sims—WGBJS and risk-adjusted—the advanced version of the Red Seven system cannot be simulated as published in the 1998 edition of Blackbelt in Blackjack [editor’s note: the Advanced Red Seven can now be simulated using CVDATA, which was not available at the time this article was written].

In shoe games, for example, I provide index numbers for the Advanced Red Seven that are to be used only in the second half of the shoe. The player is advised to use only the six “simple Red 7” indices in the first half of the shoe, then switch to the advanced indices for the second half. The ability to “step up” to the much more powerful Advanced Red Seven when ready is something not available to players with the KO Count.

Also, although both the simple and advanced Red Seven indices are employed by running count, the Advanced Red Seven advises the use of the “true edge” method of estimating advantage for bet sizing, which is actually a simplified method of adjusting to the true count. In other words, the Advanced Red Seven player would be making strategy plays by running count, but some of these plays would not be made until after the 50% level of penetration was reached, while bet sizing is done by true count.

The performance of Red Seven in these simulations will be hurt by not employing these techniques. The sims will simply not show accurate data for the Advanced Red Seven’s true power.

Also, the SBA software used for these simulations was incapable of counting sevens by color. John Auston adjusted for this deficiency by essentially counting all of the 7s as +1/2, instead of just the red sevens as +1. In both the 1983 and 1998 editions of Blackbelt in Blackjack, I wrote: “One may even count all sevens as +1/2, or simply count every other seven as +1” in order to maintain the same imbalance as is provided by counting just the red sevens—and over the years not a few players have told me that this is what they do at the tables.” This method of unbalancing the count has a slightly better betting and playing efficiency than the traditional Red Seven, however. In prior sim comparisons published in Blackjack Forum, I always used Imming’s RWC software (no longer commercially available), which does allow counting by suit.

Also, Auston chose to simulate the Red Seven for his risk-adjusted analysis with the indices he derived from SBA, and which I published in the Red Seven Count edition of his “World’s Greatest Blackjack Simulation” report. So, both the betting and playing strategies used in these risk-adjusted analyses are different from those you will find in the 1998 (and 2005) edition of Blackbelt in Blackjack, which I believe to be superior. Just bear in mind that these comparisons are specifically for the 1997 version of the simple Red Seven as published in Auston’s WGBJ Sim.

More Problems With Comparing Card Counting Systems

Finally, the risk-adjusted method of analysis will give an unbalanced system an ability to bet far more accurately in all games than would be possible in the real world. A Hi-Lo or Omega II player who is using a true count system will truly know when his advantage is approximately +1/2%, +1%, +1.5%, +2%, etc., and he will be able to size his bets accordingly. This would also be true of an Advanced Red Seven player who is using the true edge method of bet sizing.

For a KO player or a simple Red Seven player who is purely going by the running count, an accurate bet can only be made at the pivot. If a Red Seven or KO running count is +6 above the pivot, the actual player advantage will be quite different in a six deck game if only two decks have been dealt than if 4.5 decks have been dealt.

This is why most professional blackjack players steer clear of the unbalanced counts—and why I added the true edge methodology to the 1998 Advanced Red Seven. If you are betting multiple black chips for every ½% rise in your advantage, or calling in a big player who will be doing this, you do not want to be constantly overbetting and underbetting your optimal Kelly bet—or most likely, a fractional Kelly bet you’ve chosen to minimize your risk.

So, as you look at this risk-adjusted comparison data, bear in mind all of these factors. The validity of the data extends as far as the assumptions used in the sims for playing and betting. Ultimately, Red Seven and KO perform very well compared to Hi-Lo, and I still believe these simplified unbalanced systems should be used by most players for practical reasons, in particular the cost of errors associated with inaccurate true count adjustments.

Again, I want to emphasize that Hi-Lo is being severely penalized in the hand-held games in the charts below by using the Illustrious 18. If you use the Hi-Lo in one or two deck games and you are using the Illustrious 18 indices, then you could probably do almost as well with Red Seven or KO—better, if your true count adjustments aren’t perfect. Most single deck players I know use many more indices than this in single deck, especially some negative indices that are more important than some of the Illustrious 18 in these games, and unbalanced counts are incapable of using more indices with accuracy.

Risk-Adjusted, One Deck, H17, DAS, 75% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-272.8366.5072.43
1-3133.13125.00131.95
1-4176.55168.39174.72

Risk-Adjusted, Two Deck, S17, DAS, 75% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-458.7955.8058.50
1-684.6481.7883.78
1-8101.1498.3999.75

Risk-Adjusted, Six Deck, S17, DAS, LS, 75% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-824.7122.7426.39
1-1029.4327.3630.99
1-1232.9130.8534.53

Risk-Adjusted, Six Deck, S17, DAS, LS, 87.5% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-840.4538.4040.72
1-1047.2645.3647.00
1-1252.0450.5051.89

Risk-Adjusted, Six Deck, S17, DAS, LS, 92% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-873.7471.5468.24
1-1085.2682.8377.57
1-1293.6291.0784.46

In the six deck comparisons above, we have a perfect illustration of the power of the pivot. Note that with 4.5 decks dealt (75%), Red Seven is the strongest performer. With five decks dealt, Hi-Lo and Red Seven pretty much equalize, both slightly outperforming KO. But look what happens when we go to 5.5 decks dealt out (91.67% penetration). Red Seven is now the weakest performer, as KO is capitalizing on its strength when many more opportunities arise for playing and betting with a 2% advantage.

The Red Seven (that is, the simple running count version tested here) simply performs better in shoes at most common levels of penetration, whereas KO performs better in the rare games with an extremely deep level.

Also, in some games under specific conditions, KO does outperform Hi-Lo in a risk-adjusted sim. For example, look at this six deck game with a less favorable set of rules:

Risk-Adjusted, Six Deck, H17, DAS, 75% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-86.606.666.30
1-109.209.959.83
1-1211.9012.5412.10

Risk-Adjusted, Six Deck, H17, DAS, 87.5% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-815.0315.1015.13
1-1019.6919.8219.50
1-1223.4323.7422.94

KO outperforms both Hi-Lo and Red Seven in these H17 games. Again, the explanation for these types of seemingly aberrant results is that at some levels of penetration, and with certain rule sets, the sevens (which Hi-Lo ignores) are important enough on some of the Illustrious 18 strategy decisions as to give these unbalanced counts, which count sevens, a slight edge. Also, the betting schemes are such that the optimal high bets happen to occur very near the unbalanced counts’ pivots, and counting the sevens also gives them a slightly higher betting correlation right at this crucial point.

Unless we are adjusting an unbalanced count to a true count, we cannot cite its betting correlation (BC) or playing efficiency (PE). For example, the Red Seven has a betting correlation of about 97% at the pivot, just slightly greater than the Hi-Lo. But the Hi-Lo has better than 96% betting correlation throughout the full range of counts that occur. It is simply incorrect to attempt to compare a balanced system with an unbalanced system based on BC and PE if you are using the unbalanced system as a running count system.

Now let’s look at some 8-deck back-counting risk-adjusted comparisons (below). We’ll look at the risk-adjusted results with six decks (75%), 6.5 decks (82%), and 7 decks (88%). Here again, we see that KO outperforms Red Seven at the very deepest level of penetration.

Risk-Adjusted, 8-Deck, Back Count S17, DAS, LS, 75% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-830.1428.7931.34
1-1037.8235.9438.40
1-1240.4937.1439.94

Risk-Adjusted, 8-Deck, Back Count S17, DAS, LS, 82% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-840.8238.7840.98
1-1052.0949.5951.52
1-1255.5651.5952.64

Risk-Adjusted, 8-Deck, Back Count S17, DAS, LS, 88% Dealt

SpreadHi-LoKORed Seven
1-857.7860.0056.36
1-1074.2073.1970.94
1-1278.5174.7572.29

Note that in most comparisons, regardless of the number of decks, Hi-Lo slightly outperforms both KO and Red Seven. I think in the real world, a good Hi-Lo player would outperform the unbalanced running count players more than these sim results indicate. In the hand-held games the Hi-Lo player would simply be able to use more strategy changes, and in the shoe games the Hi-Lo player would be betting more accurately according to his advantage throughout the full range of counts that occur.

Overall, as we would expect, the risk-adjusted comparisons do show Hi-Lo (accurately used) to be the stronger counting system.

For those of you who do not have John Auston’s “World’s Greatest Blackjack Simulation—Red Seven Edition,” I am reproducing below all of the running count indices that John used in that report as well as in his risk-adjusted analyses. Note that these indices assume that you begin your count at 0. The indices were specifically derived for the Red Seven Count that counts all sevens as +1/2 instead of counting just the red sevens as +1. This would not change any of the indices.

Some players who use the Red Seven in this way have told me that the easiest way to count by halves is to simply count every other seven as +1. I believe I actually first heard of this technique being used by players who did it with Wong’s Halves Count. I may even have read about the technique in one of Wong’s newsletters many years ago, or possibly in one of the earlier versions of Wong’s Professional Blackjack.

I was unable to find the reference in print but the technique has been used by some Red Seven and Halves players for many years. I do not believe my suggestion that Red Seven players might count in this way in the 1983 Blackbelt in Blackjack was the first reference to this technique in print. Those who use it swear it is the easiest and most accurate way to count with these systems.

I once ran some simulations using Imming’s RWC software to compare the difference between counting the red sevens as +1 and all sevens as +1/2, but the results were statistically insignificant. I suspect that I did not run a sufficient number of hands. (Computers were notably slower back then.) The simulations Auston used in his WGBG repots, his risk-adjusted analyses, and his truly amazing Blackjack Risk Manager software, are all based on sims of 400 million hands each, quite enough to obtain statistically significant data for practical comparisons.

Below, you will find all of the Red Seven risk-adjusted data that John Auston produced for this study. Some Red Seven players may regret that he did not run risk adjusted sims on the full range of rule sets that he did for Hi-Lo and KO.

John chose five different rule sets for his Red Seven single-deck analyses, and four different rule sets for each of the two deck, six deck and eight deck analyses. I don’t think a more exhaustive risk-adjusted analysis of this version of the Red Seven is called for at the present, as I believe that most Red Seven players probably use one of the versions (simple or advanced) from Blackbelt in Blackjack, rather than the version I published in the WGBJ sim report.

The Red 7 Simulation Indices
8-Deck6-Deck2-Deck1-Deck
Index/IRC0000
Insurance+20+15+5+2
16 vs 9+25+21+7+4
16 vs 10+9+6+2+1
15 vs 10+22+17+6+3
13 vs 2+1+1+1+1
13 vs 3-5-4-10
12 vs 2+20+16+6+4
12 vs 3+15+11+5+3
12 vs 4+9+6+2+2
12 vs 5-2+10+1
12 vs 60/-10*0/-7+1/-2+1/-1
11 vs Ace+13/+7+10/+4+2/-10/-1
10 vs 10+20+16+5+3
10 vs Ace+20/+18+16/+13+5/+4+2
9 vs 2+11+9+3+2
9 vs 7+21+16+6+3
10,10 vs 5+24+19+7+4
10,10 vs 6+23+18+7+4
 
Surrender
 
15 vs 9+17+14+5+3
15 vs 10+8+5+2+1
15 vs Ace+15/+1+11/0+3/0+1/0
14 vs 10+18+14+5+3
 
1-Deck Special
 
8 vs 5N/AN/AN/A+3
8 vs 6N/AN/AN/A+3
* Where two indices are shown, the first is for S17, the second for H17
Red 7 1-Deck ($Won/100)
(exact indices, sim counted all 7s as .5, to simulate counting only red)
 S17S17DASH17H17DASH17D10
26(1.15)
1-217.2827.666.3013.750.54
1-338.9352.1722.7034.324.36
1-455.0869.3536.5949.8613.53
31(1.20)
1-241.8956.3723.8736.615.38
1-377.3394.6554.4771.0123.56
1-4103.50122.0778.7096.2642.62
35(1.20)
1-250.4765.1029.9044.217.41
1-393.76112.4968.7288.0131.37
1-4126.53145.7399.16121.1055.52
39(1.25)
1-281.9899.3755.2472.4322.40
1-3143.75164.25111.00131.9563.09
1-4187.64207.98152.38174.7297.81
Red 7 2-Deck ($Won/100)
(exact indices, sim counted all 7s as .5, to simulate counting only red)
 S17DASS17DASLSH17DASH17DASLS
52(0.95)
1-418.8928.686.5915.86
1-629.6942.6917.3328.63
1-836.4851.8423.5137.43
62(0.95)
1-430.7446.0618.1529.61
1-645.4566.4832.1348.54
1-855.0779.4041.5560.99
70(1.00)
1-443.7463.6626.8043.71
1-663.3890.7044.7568.54
1-876.12107.5557.0985.50
78(1.00)
1-458.5084.4339.9961.79
1-683.78119.1964.0695.05
1-899.75140.6780.13116.71
Red 7 6-Deck ($Won/100)
(exact indices, sim counted all 7s as .5, to simulate counting only red)
 S17DASS17DASLSH17DASH17DASLS
4/6(0.90)
1-88.7017.262.418.32
1-1010.8320.674.5411.32
1-1212.4623.146.6213.85
4.5/6(0.95)
1-814.4326.396.3015.62
1-1017.8030.999.8319.96
1-1220.2634.5312.1023.20
5/6(0.95)
1-825.1940.7215.1327.42
1-1029.8147.0019.5033.61
1-1233.4951.8922.9438.35
5.5/6(0.95)
1-844.0368.2429.6451.26
1-1050.9477.5736.3360.70
1-1256.2484.4641.3467.69
Red 7 6-Deck Back Count ($Won/100)
Integer to rightof $ amount is Running Count of 1st bet (IRC=0)
(exact indices, sim counted all 7s as .5, to simulate counting only red)
 S17DASS17DASLSH17DASH17DASLS
4/6(0.90)
1-121.32 (17)32.50 (14)18.29 (17)26.15 (17)
1-225.20 (14)38.00 (14)20.86 (14)30.63 (14)
1-426.59 (14)40.47 (11)22.43 (14)32.58 (14)
1-827.57 (11)41.60 (11)23.17 (14)33.79 (14)
1-1227.77 (11)41.74 (11)23.31 (14)34.42 (11)
4.5/6(0.95)
1-131.34 (17)47.17 (17)26.03 (17)39.65 (17)
1-235.97 (14)53.93 (14)30.34 (17)45.07 (17)
1-438.07 (14)57.38 (14)32.43 (14)48.72 (14)
1-838.91 (11)58.85 (11)33.73 (14)49.75 (14)
1-1239.69 (11)59.80 (11)33.52 (14)50.30 (14)
5/6(0.95)
1-146.55 (17)68.09 (17)40.32 (17)60.00 (17)
1-254.08 (14)76.25 (14)46.05 (17)67.21 (17)
1-458.12 (14)82.10 (14)49.61 (14)71.57 (14)
1-858.79 (14)83.85 (14)51.14 (14)73.84 (14)
1-1259.50 (14)85.39 (11)51.08 (14)73.69 (14)
5.5/6(0.95)
1-173.47 (17)105.13 (17)65.39 (17)97.56 (17)
1-284.15 (14)117.91 (14)71.43 (17)106.00 (17)
1-490.14 (14)126.42 (14)77.30 (14)113.40 (14)
1-890.66 (14)126.28 (14)78.47 (14)115.95 (14)
1-1290.88 (14)127.47 (14)78.44 (14)115.83 (14)
Red 7 8-Deck ($Won/100)
(exact indices, sim counted all 7s as .5, to simulate counting only red)
 S17DASS17DASLSH17DASH17DASLS
5.5/8(0.90)
1-84.039.800.223.19
1-106.1712.061.635.47
1-127.5614.282.937.47
6/8(0.95)
1-87.3014.781.797.24
1-109.4117.923.939.92
1-1211.6820.465.7212.61
6.5/8(0.95)
1-811.7121.274.5412.51
1-1015.2325.527.6716.92
1-1217.7028.729.8820.04
7/8(0.95)
1-818.8532.3210.0921.61
1-1023.1838.1914.6027.11
1-1226.4642.4417.8231.28
Red 7 8-Deck Back Count ($Won/100)
Integer to rightof $ amount is Running Count of 1st bet (IRC=0)
(exact indices, sim counted all 7s as .5, to simulate counting only red)
 S17DASS17DASLSH17DASH17DASLS
5.5/8(0.90)
1-114.89 (17)23.29 (17)12.50 (17)18.52 (17)
1-217.52 (14)26.85 (14)14.29 (17)20.95 (17)
1-418.75 (14)28.49 (11)14.95 (14)22.75 (14)
1-819.19 (11)29.57 (11)15.63 (14)24.02 (14)
1-1219.53 (11)29.97 (11)15.56 (14)23.82 (14)
6/8(0.95)
1-121.43 (17)31.34 (17)16.84 (17)25.68 (17)
1-223.85 (17)34.78 (14)18.85 (17)29.47 (17)
1-425.63 (14)38.40 (14)20.29 (14)32.28 (14)
1-826.54 (14)39.25 (11)20.72 (14)33.03 (14)
1-1226.60 (11)39.94 (11)21.39 (14)33.10 (14)
6.5/8(0.95)
1-128.95 (17)40.98 (17)23.53 (17)36.36 (17)
1-232.99 (17)47.44 (17)27.10 (17)41.67 (17)
1-435.37 (14)51.52 (14)28.96 (14)44.36 (14)
1-836.80 (14)52.41 (14)29.93 (14)46.23 (14)
1-1236.45 (14)52.64 (11)29.97 (14)46.46 (14)
7/8(0.95)
1-140.30 (17)56.36 (17)34.55 (20)50.00 (17)
1-246.51 (17)65.72 (17)40.22 (17)59.46 (17)
1-448.30 (14)70.94 (14)42.14 (17)61.91 (14)
1-849.76 (14)72.29 (14)43.55 (14)63.85 (14)
1-1249.83 (14)72.29 (14)43.71 (14)64.20 (14)

In summary, the “best” blackjack card counting system for you, whether the Red Seven, Advanced Red Seven, KO, Hi-Lo, Zen, or some other count, will depend partly on your current abilities as a card counter and partly on the games you actually play in. I hope this article will help you better understand some of the issues involved in blackjack system simulations and comparisons. ♠