COUNTING CARDS AT BLACKJACK
Its
important to note from the beginning, that you
can't count cards playing online because even if you know how to count
cards, each new deal in Blackjack at online casinos, is
from a full shuffled deck...
The card counting systems are a lot more complicated from the rules of our Basic Strategy.
So we will try to keep it realy simple since most of these methods where developed when the game was actually played with only one deck of cards.
For a more advanced introduction to card counting systems visit Paignio.com.
Historically, the first efforts for the mathematics' application to the game Blackjack started in 1953.
The first article was published in the September of 1956 in the issue of the Journal of the American Statistical
Association and was evolved by Baldwin, Cantly, Maisel and McDermott.
By this article he was inspired the professor of mathematics Dr. Edward O. Thorp and developed the first counting systems.
The key to knowing whether or not the player has an edge over the house, is having an idea of whether the
remaining cards in the deck are predominantly high, or predominantly low, as a high card rich deck swings the
odds of winning in favor of the player.
The probability or winning from double down and split plays also increases when the deck is high card rich.
So if you know the remaining deck is high card rich, you know that you have an edge over the house -
and to do this you need to track the cards already dealt.
All the counting systems give to certain cards a positive price and to certain others a negative one.
For each and every card that appears on the table, you need to calcualte the sum by adding/subtracting the value of the card
that your counting system uses. So when the time comes for you to play, depending on the total you know more or less if you have an
advantage or not:
Below is a table of the simplest counting card method:
|
POSITIVE PRICE (+1) |
NEGATIVE PRICE (-1) | |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
A |
| +1 |
+1 |
+1 |
+1 |
+1 |
0 |
0 |
0 |
-1 |
-1 |
For the system above, the higher the total, the bigger advantage the player has to win the next round.
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