Counting Only the High Cards

The A/10 Front Count is one of the few counts listed in Blackjack Bluebook II by Fred Renzey. If you're not familiar with it: count only the 10's and A's; know when two, three, and four decks have been discarded. That's pretty much it. I'm looking for insight from other players on this. Anything at all. In theory it seems an alright edge for the novice or lazy player, but I tried it out for a several hours on CV and I really don't see any difference from not using it. At first it seemed the count was ALWAYS in my favor so I fooled around with deck biases and it was still the same. Shoe after shoe I had a supposed advantage. I'm wondering if this method was thrown in the book as b.s. filler material or if CV isn't as realistic as everyone claims it to be. I'm guessing it's the former and not the latter.

Just curious, is there any other information out there on counting only the high cards? Why wouldn't a simple system like this work?

Why not just use KISS I? It is the simplest counting system in the world. Then you can upgrade to KISS II, then to KISS III. Although A/10 Front count works in theory, you will miss the edges for the rest of the decks. And A/10 Front count requires a lot of table hopping, which is unrealistic in the real casino environment.

Most card counters (more than 90%) fail to be real AP using any kind of card counting system, I don't believe using A/10 Front count will get you anywhere.

The A/10 Front Count is a recreational system for the recreational basic strategy player who doesn't want to learn +/- counting and doesn't want the work of keeping track of the cards all the way through the shoe. It works by trading off the need to track low cards in exchange for accurate discard tray estimation, and then deducing the shortage of lows by the known excess of highs at that penetration point. It's both way easier and way weaker than real card counting. It provides a very tiny, almost academic net advantage, if used according to its softened "wong in/wong out" ground rules by indicating at the first two deck mark whether to leave, finish the shoe with flat bets, or raise it up. If you're going to take that count to its next level by adding up the A/10's through the third and fourth decks, the discard tray estimation can get rather nebulous and as Bjtocki advises, it might be time to go with Kiss I.

Learn and use the Kiss III count-it works!

Buy a copy of "Blackbelt in Blackjack" by Arnold Snyder.

The book contains some very easy to use counts, such as "Hi-Lo Lite"

It even includes a full PRO level count -- THE ZEN COUNT

How about the Thorp Ultimate count-now there's a piece of cake!

I don't think it is any easier than traditional Hi-Lo. Actually I think it is more confusing because you have to calculate the true edge by

True Edge = Running Count / (2 X Remaining Decks)

I think it is much easier to just

True Count = Running Count / Remaining Decks

I mean additional 2x for the remaining deck calculation is required and by my experience it requires more brain power. But I agree that Hi-Lo lite indexes are easier because they are rounded, but again you can use Lite's rounded indexes by multiplying them by 2, which I think it is much more practical.

But again, you can use the original Hi-Lo indexes if we are using only I18 & Fab4, because there are only 22 indexes to be memorized, hmmm...