Chapter Plus Eight
Many different card-counting systems have been developed over the last 40 years each with its own strengths and weaknesses. No strategy used by a human can be perfect — they all contain compromises. This chapter will describe the more common strategies, looking more at the differences than at overall results. The only accurate method of measuring the overall effectiveness of a strategy is through simulation. However, we can make many very close approximations using characteristics of the strategies. Before we talk about the strategies, we have to talk about the metrics used to describe a strategy.
Card counting techniques include the following measurements:
The first three metrics were coined by Peter Griffin in The Theory of Blackjack and are used to estimate quickly the effectiveness of a strategy’s tag values. First, let me repeat a table from the FELT Chapter.
|
Effects of Removal and Tag Values |
||||||||||
|
|
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
A |
|
EOR |
.38 |
.44 |
.55 |
.69 |
.46 |
.28 |
0 |
-.18 |
-.51 |
-.61 |
|
REKO |
+1 |
+1 |
+1 |
+1 |
+1 |
+1 |
0 |
0 |
-1 |
-1 |
|
FELT |
+1 |
+2 |
+2 |
+2 |
+2 |
+1 |
0 |
0 |
-2 |
-2 |
Effects of Removal are the effects on advantage from removing a single card of that rank from a deck of cards. The tag values of a counting strategy must roughly approximate the ratios between the
© 2009 Norman Wattenberger
