Archive for November 11th, 2010

Five’s in Black-Jack

[ English ]

Counting cards in chemin de fer is a method to increase your odds of winning. If you’re beneficial at it, you’ll be able to basically take the odds and put them in your favor. This works because card counters raise their wagers when a deck wealthy in cards which are beneficial to the gambler comes around. As a basic rule, a deck rich in 10’s is much better for the player, because the croupier will bust far more frequently, and the player will hit a chemin de fer much more often.

Most card counters maintain track of the ratio of great cards, or 10’s, by counting them as a 1 or a – 1, and then offers the opposite 1 or minus one to the lower cards in the deck. Several methods use a balanced count where the quantity of very low cards would be the same as the variety of 10’s.

But the most interesting card to me, mathematically, will be the five. There were card counting systems back in the day that engaged doing nothing a lot more than counting the variety of fives that had left the deck, and when the 5’s had been gone, the player had a massive benefit and would increase his bets.

A great basic system player is acquiring a 99.5 percent payback percentage from the gambling den. Every 5 that has come out of the deck adds 0.67 per-cent to the gambler’s expected return. (In an individual deck game, anyway.) That means that, all things being equal, having one 5 gone from the deck offers a player a tiny advantage more than the casino.

Having 2 or three 5’s gone from the deck will basically give the player a quite considerable edge more than the gambling house, and this is when a card counter will generally raise his wager. The dilemma with counting 5’s and nothing else is that a deck reduced in 5’s occurs fairly rarely, so gaining a major benefit and making a profit from that situation only comes on rare occasions.

Any card between two and 8 that comes out of the deck increases the gambler’s expectation. And all nine’s. ten’s, and aces enhance the casino’s expectation. But eight’s and 9’s have extremely modest effects on the outcome. (An 8 only adds point zero one % to the player’s expectation, so it is usually not even counted. A 9 only has point one five % affect in the other direction, so it is not counted either.)

Understanding the effects the low and superior cards have on your anticipated return on a wager could be the initial step in discovering to count cards and wager on blackjack as a winner.