The Great Revelation

The Great Revelation

One of the most frequently-asked questions here and at other Blackjack discussion sites (like www.BJ21.com/ and others) is about which counting system one should use. I teach the Hi/Lo system in my "GameMaster's Blackjack School" and I also use it for attacking multi-deck games, whenever and wherever I play. This didn't come about by accident. Like so many others who get involved with this game, I tried other, more powerful counting "systems" but have ultimately settled on the Hi/Lo for multi-deck games and the Hi-Opt 1 count for single-deck games. There are many good counts available and most are more powerful - in one way or another - than the Hi/Lo, so it would seem that one of those counts, like the Zen count, Wong's Halves Count, the Uston Advanced Point Count and so forth would be worthwhile to learn. By the way, I've reviewed a lot of these systems in my series "Counting Systems", which is in the archives of the Blackjack page here. Why so many systems? Is it an ego-thing for the system creators? Probably, at least in part, but a better explanation requires us to travel back in time - back to when your favorite card counter, The GameMaster, was just an aspiring Jedi sitting at the feet of his Yoda. It was 1978....

The first casino in Atlantic City, Resorts International, had opened in May and it was packed from open to close (there was no "24/7" back then). They were making $$$ hand over fist, about a million a day and that's back when a million bought something. Blackjack was extremely popular, of course, and in AC it was probably the best game available in the universe, let alone the U.S. of A. Four decks, the dealer stands on A-6, double on any first two cards, double after splitting pairs, plus (drumroll, please) early surrender. Yes, early surrender against all dealer up cards - 10, Ace, whatever - so the player who used the proper Basic Strategy had a 0.28% edge over the house! Can you believe it? Well, it's true and the owners of that first casino, Resorts International, didn't like it one bit. However, they had no choice in the matter, because at the time the rules for all of the casino games were set by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, not by the casino, but Resorts was literally raking in the dough, so the pain was tolerable. Very few people truly understood the impact of "early" surrender, but as word spead that the game could be beat, not in the abstract sense that "all" Blackjack games can be beat, but really, really beat - even without counting - Blackjack became the darling of the gambling public. However, just as it is today, the great majority of players had no concept of Basic Strategy and most thought it was foolish to give up on a hand by surrendering it without playing. Naturally, they didn't have the slightest idea about "expected value" or other esoteric concepts like that - you were stupid to surrender, period. As lamented as that game is by those of us who counted cards back then, it's not what I want to talk about here, but it's part of the story, so I had to include it.

I was recently rearranging my gambling library (over 100 books, mostly on Blackjack) and I happened upon a book I hadn't seen in years. It's an obscure title, only 94 pages in length and bound in paper covers but it cost me (as I recall) $100 back in 1980, which was no small piece of change then. What was presented in this book changed the concept of card counting forever. You see, up until then we knew Blackjack was beatable and we knew how to beat it, which was of course by counting the cards and betting small when the casino had the advantage and betting big when we had the edge. Our concept of winning was based primarily upon the counting system we used. If you could make "x" at a game with the Hi/Lo count, then you'd make "x+" with a more powerful count. Simple and, up to a point, absolutely correct. That was the primary reason why all of those more powerful (but more complex) counting systems were developed - to make more $$$ at a given game for the same expenditure of time and capital.

What we were doing then was evaluating a game primarily by its rules - double on any first two cards, good; double only on 10 and 11, bad - and then we'd attack the game with whatever counting systems we had chosen. Obviously in AC at the time, any count would get the $$$ but even the most optimistic of us knew these "candy store" rules wouldn't last forever. As the casinos' screams of agony (there were two by then) over the Blackjack game they were "forced" to offer intensified, I began looking for ways to keep my edge even if the rules weren't as liberal. Naturally, my first step was to learn a more powerful count, so I began to teach myself Stanford Wong's Halves count. It didn't take me long to master it, but using the Halves count didn't make a big difference in my win rate because the rules were still so great.

But it was my insurance for the day when the rules weren't so great.

Then, in 1980 a guy using the pseudonym of Arnold Snyder flipped on the lights by publishing "The Blackjack Formula", which is the book I referred to earlier. About a buck a page, but at least to me, ultimately worth every penny. The Blackjack Formula itself was a mathematical equation into which you'd plug various known quantities about a game like the number of decks, the casino's edge "off the top", your bet spread, the Betting Correlation and Playing Efficiency of the count you were using and so forth. This was, for all you "kids" out there, prior to the invention of the PC, but a pocket calculator could eventually solve the equation and voila! you'd have a basis of comparison for one game played in a certain way versus another game played (or bet) in a different way. Nice. Also handy and totally relavent to the succesful counter's quest: Find games worth playing, which we all had to do when the rules for AC Blackjack were changed in June, 1981.

But that was not The Great Revelation. I had nearly forgotten what Arnold Snyder taught us all back then, but was reminded of it in his latest "sermon" as the Bishop of Blackjack, which is in the Fall, 2003 issue of Blackjack Forum (Huntington Press, $59 for 4 issues per year). As he said in the sermon, what he taught us was the importance of penetration, that is, how many cards in the deck(s) are dealt before the dealer shuffles. Oh, we already knew that if the dealer dealt out only half the cards or some other ridiculous percentage, the game involved was a waste of time, but it had never really been quantified. That is, until The Blackjack Formula came along. By using the Formula, it quickly became evident to me that penetration was far more important than the counting system one was using and was almost as important as the bet spread. And the book was chock-full of handy little tables that gave us instant evaluations of many popular games. Want to get a 1% edge at a (now gone) single-deck Vegas Strip game? The book showed that you'd need a 1-4 bet spread and penetration in the 35-card (70%) area. That's no great revelation today, nor was it back in 1980, but what the tables also showed was that so many games we thought were super-profitable really weren't! For decades, the "downtown" Vegas games (single-deck, the dealer hits soft 17, double on any two, but not after splits) had been a magnet for counters. After the publication of The Blackjack Formula, we knew it was worth playing only if we could get head-to-head with the dealer, use a 1-4 bet spread and make sure we got at least 70% penetration. So, the book also told us which games to avoid. And it further showed us that almost any half-decent counting system would get the $$$ if it was used in a game with reasonable penetration.

Today, we have much more sophisticated tools for evaluating different Blackjack games, bet spreads, counting systems, penetration and so forth. What I use the most around here is Statistical Blackjack Analyzer, which runs simulations at the rate of about twenty five or thirty million hands per minute. Per minute. Ah, the power of the PC! Such a massive simulation gives us data in which we can have great confidence and that's obviously very important when you're about to push out a $500 bet. In sim after sim, it has always been clear to me that the big $$$ in Blackjack aren't made by the count you use, but by playing games with above-average penetration.

So, we've moved on from Arnold Snyder's The Blackjack Formula and that's how it goes in profit-making ventures like card counting. Money begets money and it's never going to change. If I'm going to risk my $$$, I want great information and confirmation that it's going to work. In the past, we operated a little bit by "the seat of our pants", but that's out now. Researched, rehearsed, re-hashed, examined and confirmed is the way we do it today. Sure, all that takes some of the fun and excitement out of the game, but if we wanted fun and excitement, we wouldn't be card counters, would we?

So, did the advent of the PC finally take all of the mystery out of Blackjack? Are the Arnold Snyders of the Blackjack world out of the picture now? Is there nothing left to learn? Are there no new areas of profit left? Fortunately, the answer is "no". I just heard about a book that will revolutionize shuffle tracking, which is the art and science of identifying, among other things, profitable "slugs" of cards that appear as you're playing in a 6- or 8-deck Blackjack game. It's a difficult skill to master, but counting looked that way to me 25 years ago. Then again, maybe this new book is just a rehash of the "old" shuffle-tracking techniques that were introduced in 1994, but never really caught on with the card-counting community. Let's face it, you haven't seen any articles on shuffle tracking here.

However, the author claims to have broken new ground and says this is The Answer when it comes to shuffle tracking, but the damn thing is $50 a pop from Huntington Press. Well, just between you and me, I've already ordered my copy. The author? Oh, it's a guy named Arnold Snyder.

I'll see you here next time.

The Great Revelation

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