Question of the Day - 12 January 2025

This question comes down to which count best combines easy and accurate, and to what level should you sacrifice one for the other.

For example, the easiest system is one that players used back before the first card-counting systems were published. You watch for aces and if you go halfway through the deck without seeing one, you raise your bet significantly.

Unfortunately, although that system could win money in the single-deck games dealt in Las Vegas in the 1950s, you’d be unlikely to get an advantage over the house with it in any of today’s games.

The related "ace-five" count, in which you count +1 for every 5 you see and -1 for every ace had the same problem: It’s a valid counting system and easy to learn and use, but not powerful enough for multi-deck games. Hence, stronger counts were developed

Peter Griffin, author of the seminal The Theory of Blackjack, used a multi-parameter system in which he balanced the 3s, 4s, 5s, and 6s against the 10-valued cards and kept separate side counts of the 2s, 7s, 8s, 9s, and aces. But very few players with average math ability could learn this count system, let alone use it in a casino. Plus, Griffin's system is ideal for deeply dealt single-deck games, which don’t exist much anymore.

As for more accurate systems that are also practical, there are many "advanced" counting systems: Uston’s APC, Bryce Carlson’s Omega-3, Wong’s Halves Count, Snyder’s Zen Count, Hi-Opt II, Revere’s APC, and others. But most professional players steer clear of these higher-level and/or multi-parameter counting systems, because they’re more mentally fatiguing and more likely to cause errors.

While many counts have been developed and compared over the years, the question of power vs. ease of use really boils down to comparing single-level and multi-level counts. A single-level count uses only +1 and -1 as its tags, as in the most popular, the Hi-Lo count. Whereas a multi-level count will typically have two or three tag levels, as in the three-level Uston APC. The good multi-level counts are more powerful, but not by as much as you might think, and after decades of debate, most experts agree that the extra power isn’t worth the extra effort (and likely higher error rate). This thinking has resulted in the Hi-Lo becoming the gold standard of blackjack counts and the count most referenced in books and articles on blackjack.

That said, we don’t feel that Hi-Lo is the best answer to the specific question of “which one should I learn?” For that, we recommend the Knock-Out Count from our book Knock-Out Blackjack. Note that the subtitle of the book is “The Easiest Card-Counting System Ever Devised,” and we believe that to be true. Also a single-level count, what makes K-O easier to use is that it’s “unbalanced,” which eliminates the need for some of the more difficult mental adjustments during play, e.g., converting “running count” to “true count.” The win rates of the two counts are similar, but K-O Is much easier to use and the count we recommend that new players learn.

You can find a couple of dozen articles about blackjack counting systems, with mathematical analyses and comparisons of systems using computer simulations, in our Blackjack Forum Online archives.