Tarzan's DHME count
Tarzan's DHME count
Let's go into the basics of the "Tarzan Count" in a broad brush sort of way. As was mentioned before the cards are broken down into groupings. To give you an idea of how this works, take a deck of cards and remove the 4 aces. Now split the cards up into 3 groups as follows:
2-5's
6-9's
10's
You will notice that these are 3 equal piles, essentially 1/3 or 33% of the deck each, 16 cards in each pile. This ratio of these groupings of course remains constant regardless of the number of decks.Your count is on these 3 groupings of cards and aces. What is the advantage of knowing (when the TC is nearly neutral) that 15 more 2-5,s have been played than 6-9's and 13 more 10's have been played than 6-9's? The answer is obvious. The most prevalent cards coming are likely 6-9's!
These three groupings are counted with relevance to each other and aces are only counted as a 4th grouping only as a finite number of aces played with no correlation relative to the three groupings. Once you achieve perfection there is more if you wish to add it, tracking number of 9's played of the ratio of the 6-9 grouping but let's not worry about or go into that just yet or here as I wish to keep this simplistic.
This number of cards played in a given grouping is also easily broken down to a PERCENTAGE of likelihood relative to penetration of a shoe game. For instance:
33% 33% 33% (qty. played)
2-5's 6-9's 10's X
These are the percentages at the beginning of the shoe. Let's say you are playing against 6 decks and want to know an accurate percentage of the relevance of each burned/used card that has been played. In a 6 deck shoe:
Decks Remaining / Impact on percentage of each card (rounded)
5 / .41% per card per grouping, round to .4%
4 / .52% per card per grouping, round to .5%
3 / .69% per card per grouping, round to .7%
2 / 1.04% per card per grouping, round to 1%
This is essentially the basis along with sims to provide applicable index plays. This is not something that you need to memorize over and above the count but you will find yourself calculating these percentages as you go after using this system long enough, hence the rounding factor.
Let's put this into an example---
You are playing a six deck shoe and upon looking over at the discard rack, you see that you have spent 4 decks; There are 2 decks remaining. The count is "8-4-0-(12)" . This is to say that 8 more 2-5's have been played than 10's, 4 more 6-9's have been played than 10's, and 12 total aces have been played out of 24 total.
Now let's evaluate this. TC conversion is TC4. There are 12 total aces remaining in the two remaining decks (this is obviously a good count warranting a higher bet with a few extra aces in there to be had as icing on the cake!). Let's predict the percentage of likelihood of what the very next card will be (we are rounding this as they might get upset about you bringing your calculator to the blackjack table). Our chart shows that this far into the shoe each card has a whopping 1.04% effect! We round this to 1% and we know that for the very next card:
Grouping Percentage
2-5,s 25% (There is a 25% chance the next card is a 2-5)
6-9's 29% (There is a 29% chance the next card is a 6-9)
10's 45% (There is a 45% chance the next card is a 10)
Aces............................There are 4 aces beyond the norm, 12 remaining in 2 decks, meaning "aces rich"
You don't actually need to know these percentages. You merely need to understand their concept for deriving the index plays involved and know and understand those.
Let's go back to the count itself for a moment. How do you very very rapidly count these three groupings? It's EASY!! Pathetically easy. You know how you break a fraction down to it's simplest terms? For instance, 4/8 breaks down to 1/2? You are doing the same thing! You have a set of 3 numbers that all correlate to each other (The aces are simply a finite count by themselves)---- If you have a count of "12-4-5-X" this breaks down lowest terms by deducting from each! "12-4-5-X" becomes "8-0-1-X". There is always a ZERO in the group and you have subtracted 4 from each group. To go on and on without breaking it down to simplest terms is not feasible if not impossible. You merely need to know how many of a given grouping have been played OVER AND ABOVE the other groupings and not the totals. If you practice this simple mathematical breakdown to simplest terms it becomes very easy to you and you are able to do the breakdown as you go and as you are counting.
Let's do a common sense application of all this. Let's say the count is -------> "15-0-15-X" and you have 3 decks remaining of the 6 deck shoe. You are heads up and "play all" in a nomidshoe. Obviously you would have a minimum bet out there at this point but....do you hit a 13 against the dealer's 2? This is the added advantage of this type of count in a nutshell, this particular example.
There is more to add after the count becomes second nature (if you want to go further), which is a side count of 9's with regard to the ratio of 6-9 grouping played which also comes to play on what I call the amazingly illustriously luminous 50 or so index plays that go with "the whole enchilada".
There are books and references available on "DHM EXPERT", I think. This is the system I have used for over 20 years, having never even tried or done anything else. I like it, I trust it.
I hope I slapped all this down accurately as it was off the top of my head but I'm sure if I made any mistakes, my fellow blackjack pros will provide additional critique!!
http://www.blackjackinfo.com/bb/showthread.php?t=13098&page=2
