How much do strategies matter?

There exist numerous counting strategies, and each strategy can be varied by number of indexes and side counts, and each of these is affected by bet spreads and rules. No attempt will be made here to compare the millions of combinations. I will present a couple of charts to provide an indication of the degree of differences.

Here we will compare a level I, level II, and level III strategy. The level of a Blackjack card counting strategy is defined by the magnitude of the tag values. For example, Hi-Lo, a level I strategy, counts cards as -1, 0, or +1. Zen counts cards as -2,-1, 0 +1, or +2, and is therefore a level II strategy.

The green area is the gain at different penetrations for Hi-Lo using the top 20 indexes with a bet spread of 1-16 and common Las Vegas Strip rules. The red area indicates the increase in gain switching to the 1980 version of Zen, a level II strategy, and the blue area shows the increase by switching to Halves, a level III strategy. As we can see, the increase in complexity does result in some gain — but it is not large. The gains would be somewhat larger with more indexes as the higher-level counts allow more accurate indexes. There may also be some negative offset of moving to a more complex strategy because of an increase in error rates.

www.qfit.com/book/z82Chart.gif

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger