What is the Floating Advantage effect?

Floating Advantage is an interesting quirk in card counting that has been examined by many Blackjack experts over the last few decades. We know that higher true counts have higher advantages for the player. Intuitively we would think that a specific true count always has the same advantage. But it turns out that the advantage of a true count increases as we travel more deeply into the shoe.

In this chart we display advantages for true counts from TC 0 to TC +10. But we also provide these values by shoe depth. The Red bars show the advantage of true counts 0 to +4 in the first deck. True counts above +4 don't exist in the first deck because the running count never gets high enough to divide by the five remaining decks to reach these true counts. (We saw this earlier in the discussion on count ranges.)

We see that the advantage starts out negative at TC 0 and increases for each count. The green bars show the second deck in the shoe, etc. Look at the bars at true count +3. The green bar is taller than the red bar, the blue taller than the green, yellow taller than the blue, etc. The deeper we travel, the more this true count is worth.

The definitive article on Floating Advantage can be found in Don Schlesinger’s Blackjack Attack.

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 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger