Card Counting

For those who are going to count against a 1 or 2-deck shoe, you may want to learn a simple Level I counting system that keeps a side count of Aces. When playing with 1 deck, we expect to see one ace per quarter-deck played in a normal distribution. For example, if a quarter deck has been played and no aces have come out, the remaining deck is 'rich' one ace. For betting purposes I can temporarily add +1 to the count, yet for playing purposes the true count without adjustment is correct. Got that concept? If a quarter-deck has been played and 2 aces have come out, the remaining deck is 'poor' by one ace, so I would lower the count by 1 (that is, 'add' a minus 1 to the count ) just for betting purposes, since my opportunity to receive a natural has decreased. Since there are only four aces to track in a single deck game, I find omitting the ace in the count improves the play of the hand, yet I can still 'adjust' the count for betting purposes. This is a very powerful addition to your game, but it is better to just use it in single-deck play because mentally keeping track of an ace adjustment is difficult.

A system that will let you do this is the Hi-Opt I system, where the card 3 through 6 are counted as +1 and all the 10-value cards are counted as -1 and Aces are counted as zero. If switching between single and multi-deck shoes, you could use Hi/Lo for multi-deck play and Hi-Opt 1 for single deck play.

The first counting systems were geared toward single deck, because at the time that was the most popular game. Nowadays, most people play (and therefore count) with a multi-deck shoe. But for those who are playing single-deck games, the most difficult aspect about it is computing the true count. First you must train your eyes to measure the number of cards which have been played. Then, the hard part is doing the division. In a multideck game, we're dividing by a whole number but in single deck, you're always dividing by a fraction - which is harder. For example, if you're at a single-deck game and a quarter-deck has been played, with a running count of 6, the true count is 6 divided by .75 = 8.