card count strategy

i would like to hear comments on this card counting strategy. i'm guessing its been analyzed already and written about already but I've never seen it in writing. $125 is your high bet. $25 is your low bet. i am considering that on average an 8 deck shoe is neutral 1/3 of the time; positive 1/3 of the time and negative 1/3 of the time. you start off the shoe making your top bet of $125. you continue making your top bet until the shoe goes negative by more that -1 per deck. at that time you drop your bet all the way down to $25. if a dealer deals 99 hands per hour on average you will make 33 bets at $125 with a .5 disadvantage losing ($20) (disregarding cents)on average with total action of $4125. on average you win $82 on the 33 positive hands considering a 2% advantage with total action of $4125. on average you will lose 2.5% betting $25 on 33 hands of a negative deck losing (20) on total action of $825. your edge has been cut about in half to just .5% and you will average about $42 per hour instead of about $84 per hour. not good. but you will be getting more comps because your making your high bet more often. also you have completely disguised yourself as a card counter because no card counter makes his highest bet off of the top of the shoe. My conclusion: the strategy is good. do you agree or disagree?

Has an appalling ROR. If that doesn't upset you...well, fine.

Why don't you just try wonging in at only positive count?

You will likely go broke in a hurry. Unless you are bankrolled to play a huge spread you should play 8 decks with a Wonging only approach. The alternative is to play a white rabbit strategy, but that will take more BR than Wonging only at say plus 2 TC or better.

Invariably, I get labelled as a Table-Jumper.

Sitting at the 8decks w/ a -EV count is death, tho.

beginning with your statement "that on average an 8 deck shoe is neutral 1/3 of the time; positive 1/3 of the time and negative 1/3 of the time". The COUNT may be negative, neutral and positive roughly a third, but you are playing at a disadvantage during not only the negative counts, but also the neutral counts and even some of the smaller positive counts. This means you are only playing with any kind of advantage about 12% of the time (for an 8 deck game, 75% pen). You are playing with your desired 2% advantage far less than that, maybe 2% of the time depending on exact penetration and rules.

This very small percent, playing with a 2% advantage is exactly why, you need a much larger spread to beat this type of game.

So I would start over and re-figure your calculations and you will see 1.) you are playing with a very, very slight advantage and because of that, you can not afford to give any of it away with cover betting like placing your max bet in negative or neutral situations.

thank you. your points are well taken. I thought that because I am dropping my bet all at once instead of gradually I would gain something by having less of a disadvantage on the negative side.

Disagree with you. Your count frequencies are all wrong. You're making $125 max bets into house advantages far more than you think you are. If the rules and cuts are good you *might* be playing a break-even game but I suspect not much better than that. Your chances of being a long term winner after 10,000 hours is still probably a coin-flip. That's not the sort of game serious players who play for a living want to be playing.

earlthepearlmonroe,

Using CVData, I simmed 400-million rounds of an 8D, H17, DA2, DAS game with 6.5/8 pen for a heads-up HiLo counter playing one spot. The counter bet $125 off-the-top of each shoe, and continued to bet $125 as long as the TC was 0 or higher. Once the TC fell to -1, he bet either $25 (for negative and 0 TC's) or $120 (for positive TC's). I didn't use $125 for this latter case, so as to distinguish between the off-the-top bets and the later positive TC bets.

Overall, the player's IBA was negative: -0.133%. As you can see from the table below, his IBA was negative for both the 5-unit ($25) and 25-unit ($125) bets. The only bets for which he had a positive expectation were the 24-unit ($120) bets.

If you consider the above numbers, you'll see that the player played 41.0% of his hands with 5-unit bets, 6.5% of his hands with a 24-unit bet, and the remaining 52.5% of his hands with a 25-unit bet. Thus, only 6.5% of his hands have a positive expectation, and they aren't even the hands with the largest wagers.

Hope this helps!

Dog Hand

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