Too strong at the start – I often say that you have no business in a casino until you have studied the game and can use a strategy nearly flawlessly. Unless you are there just for entertainment and do not expect to win. This is a little too strong an admonition. You do need to have a sense of a casino. You really cannot fully comprehend card counting without first having played a few hands in the casino environment. However, the first time playing should not be for stakes that matter to you. Just play a bit at the cheaper tables. And then you really should avoid casinos until you can properly put in action a winning strategy.

Instead, I just jumped in headfirst. I read the book and therefore must be a card counter. You do not want to spend months undoing the damage inflicted on yourself before you have a good grasp of the battlefield.

Wrong strategy/Wrong indexes – St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Beware the man of one book.” I started using the Thorp Ten Count because it was the only strategy that I had heard of. I had read only one book. Beat the Dealer is a great read for an historical reference and an understanding of the history and background is very useful. However, there exist strategies that are more refined today. This is good since the rules of Blackjack are tougher today, primarily because of Beat the Dealer. Now in my defense, there were very few good books on Blackjack in the mid-’70s.

In the early days, the books that did exist also provided huge numbers of indexes (indexes are strategy variations that you must memorize). Instead of learning the important indexes perfectly, I learned all the indexes imperfectly. Since then it has been discovered that most of these indexes are of little value and simply lead to increased errors — particularly if you are silly enough to play one week after buying a book. I only used the Ten Count on this one trip. Since then I have used Revere Point Count, a more refined count. Today there are modern counts that are slightly less powerful, but far easier.

Lack of practice – Was I any good at the mechanics of card counting, or even of playing basic Blackjack? I did not even know. Anyone can learn card counting. But can he win? You can teach someone the rules of Chess in ten minutes. That doesn’t mean he has a chance against the worst five-year-old in a Chess club, blindfolded. (I once taught a dancer in a “gentlemen’s club” the

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger