I included this quote because I could not have put it better. After running a couple hundred comparison simulations, I came to the same conclusion. Now to be fair, near the end of Cookbook, Arnold mentions NRS and also provides rules of thumb that will alter the normal flat betting and use of playing indexes within a slug if the high cards come out quickly. I have also talked to pros who use the Cookbook method, but make “NRS-like” changes to betting if they see the count change sharply during a Play Zone. Cookbook will probably also allow larger spreads without identification as a counter. However, the method I will describe here is NRS.

NRS dates back to 1981 and the exact source is not known other than that it was used by the early MIT Teams. I am not going to include all the formulae here. What I will do instead is explain the basic principles and describe the free NRS Calculator at www.qfit.com/book. You can find the formulae, along with derivations, on the Web at:

games.groups.yahoo.com/group/blackjackcardcounterscafe/message/22118

First, let us define the problem. We normally bet and play according to a true count — the running count divided by the remaining decks. We can do this because we know that on average the excess high or low cards indicated by the running count are evenly distributed among the unseen cards. So, if we have a running count of +10 and five decks remain, there will be on average two excess high cards per deck in the remaining cards. However, if we are shuffle tracking, and we are in a Play Zone, we have additional information. We know that the excess high cards are not evenly distributed. We need a new method to calculate the true count. And that is exactly what NRS is.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger