For a Few Dollars More

I hear a lot of complaints that nowadays one cannot make a living anymore at Blackjack and some of my professional acquaintences have reconverted to civilian crafts. I say there is still room for improvement. You have to squeeze the orange thoroughly. Let me explain.
In Blackjack literature it has been convincingly argued that playing multiple hands doesn't add to your win rate due to additional variance and card consumption.However there is a notable exception that hasn't been sufficiently addressed.
We all know this akward feeling when the count is rising and rising but no paint is hitting the felt. But now the cut card is poised to come out and you wonder what should be your next bet. I hope that your answer is that you play your max bet at least on two but preferably on three spots.
However in my view this is still unsatisfactory.
Imagine 2 decks are left and the running count is still at +12 (not uncommun). Since you have a hawk's eye you know that the cut card will come out next round. So there is only one thing to do, cover all the emnpty spots with your personal max bet (or the table limit)
Suppose this limit is $200 and the running count is +12. That means you have an advantage of 6% and if you are alone at the table you can bet $1000 more than usual, this means that your expectation on the next round is $60 more than usual!
Besides you even have an additonal advantage for going deeper into the shoe and benefitting from what I would call the depth prime. This can be very significant for well cut games.

Francis Salmon
<

1. If there are 2 decks left and the cut card is about to come out, you're playing a very poor game.

2. Not many casinos will let a player play more than 3 spots.

Running count of +12 with 2 decks remaining = TC of +6. I don't think you have a 6% advantage at TC of +6. Probably more like 2.5%?

saw the light with Stanley Ko's preeminent publication and jumped ship to higher win rates in 1999.

You are right. 6% would be the advantage at the 1 deck level.
But the substance of what I said is still valid.

Francis Salmon

And how often does the dealer shuffle early when you do this. House rules probably require making sure there are enough cards to deal the hand. Any dealer knows two decks might not be enough because they learned math from the PB.

s17 ds ls rsa strip rules 6 deck with +12 True your average edge is 7.17%

h17 ds ls rsa rules +12 average edge is 6.86%

s17 ds (AC Rules)avg edge at +12 True is 6.25%

This assumes 5.5 decks dealt out of six. (best case)

Ran a bunch of double deck games s17 ds using the I-18 and the edge at +12 is 6.04% with 1.5 dealt out. Most of the sims didn't have the edge getting to 8% until around +17 True. Obviously this is the average edge across all penetrations and does not count a specific case of the floating advantage for which I only know from memory at the 1 deck level. (Floating advantage of double deck is worth around 0.3% with 1 deck left) and worth around 0.5% on shoes with 1 deck left. Safe to say that any +12 or +17 True Count will be happening on the final round of a shoe so it includes a good chunk of the Floating Advantage.

Squeeze the orange, nobody knows what the hell you're doing.

This is from Norm's Qfit software and he has it posted on this site. Here is the URL:

http://www.qfit.com/cardcountingindexes.htm

Enjoy

nycpro

His numbers ran true in all the time I have played.

When the DD pen gets wonderful so does the advantage

I always disagreed with the .5 per 1 TC

I believe the true count is true more so at the end of the shoe (6-8 dk.) then at any other time. Best time to milk the cow in my view. Thanks for all the post on this subject. Good Cards, LWC.