Counting cards in twenty-one is a way to increase your odds of winning. If you are very good at it, you can in fact take the odds and put them in your favor. This works because card counters increase their bets when a deck wealthy in cards which are advantageous to the gambler comes around. As a general rule, a deck wealthy in ten’s is much better for the gambler, because the croupier will bust a lot more usually, and the gambler will hit a black jack much more often.
Most card counters maintain track of the ratio of superior cards, or 10’s, by counting them as a 1 or a – 1, and then gives the opposite one or – one to the reduced cards in the deck. Some methods use a balanced count where the variety of very low cards is the same as the variety of 10’s.
But the most interesting card to me, mathematically, will be the 5. There had been card counting systems back in the day that included doing absolutely nothing a lot more than counting the variety of fives that had left the deck, and when the five’s have been gone, the player had a huge advantage and would raise his bets.
A excellent basic strategy gambler is obtaining a 99.5 per cent payback percentage from the casino. Every five that’s come out of the deck adds 0.67 % to the gambler’s anticipated return. (In an individual deck casino game, anyway.) That means that, all other things being equal, having one five gone from the deck offers a player a little benefit more than the house.
Having 2 or three 5’s gone from the deck will basically give the gambler a pretty significant advantage more than the casino, and this is when a card counter will usually elevate his wager. The difficulty with counting 5’s and absolutely nothing else is that a deck low in 5’s happens fairly rarely, so gaining a big advantage and making a profit from that situation only comes on rare instances.
Any card between two and 8 that comes out of the deck raises the gambler’s expectation. And all 9’s. 10’s, and aces improve the gambling establishment’s expectation. But 8’s and nine’s have really little effects on the outcome. (An 8 only adds point zero one percent to the gambler’s expectation, so it is normally not even counted. A 9 only has point one five percent affect in the other direction, so it is not counted either.)
Understanding the results the reduced and superior cards have on your expected return on a wager could be the initial step in learning to count cards and wager on black jack as a winner.