I want to Learn Halves!

Stanford Wong said this in his Professional Blackjack: If you can do well with Halves, then you will never want to switch back to Hi-Lo.

I know Halves has nice data but those 0.5, 1, 1.5 is hard to put them together when 5,6 players on the table.

I have few Question about Halves.

1. is it profitable on 8 decks shoe game?

2. any tip for counting with Halves? ( like Hi-Lo, when you see 3,5 and J,Q you can forget about these counts becuz it's 0 . but Halves is +0.5 in this case.) anybody can tell me how to count fast ?

3. how can I train myself to count with Halves?

A lot of people play halves doubled
Which means tag values would change from 0.5 to 1, 1 to 2
and 1.5 to 3

Sure, this count would be more profitable in a 8 deck game.
You would have to run some simulations to see exactly how much more.

It will come down to personal preference, and how much work your prepared to put in

Buy personally i dont know why you would not just play Hi/Lo

A quick look at Norm's canned sims in CVCX gives this for an 8D shoe, S17, DAS, LS, 75% pen:

hi-lo, spreading $10-$120, produces about $21.00 per hour...

Halves, same spread, produces almost $19.00 per hour.

Presumably halves has a slightly better BC than Hi-Lo (.99 vs .97 on Norm's web site), although I'm not a halves user, so I am not sure what the "difference" is on these two sims. The two I used are hi-lo full indices vs halves full indices... Note that these are the canned sims distributed with CVCX, I manually set the betting unit to $10, and the spread to 1-12, using the same options on both for penetration, rules, etc.

Moral of the story seems to be, however, that in an 8D shoe, counting systems are pretty close. If you were to do this comparison for SD, halves wins easily. The plus for hi-lo is the "self-canceling" aspect where many cards (10-2) don't have to be counted at all, as you mentioned, making it a lot easier, particularly in shoes where the RC can go way up or way down...

A quick look at Norm's canned sims in CVCX gives this for an 8D shoe, S17, DAS, LS, 75% pen:

hi-lo, spreading $10-$120, produces about $21.00 per hour...

Halves, same spread, produces almost $19.00 per hour.

That win-rate does not take risk into account. For this you need SCORE:

For the conditions you gave the SCOREs are: HiLo=18.95, Halves=20.10, according to CVCX on-line.

I should have taken a reasonable bankroll and let CVCX compute everything from min unit on... doing that, I get this:

HiLo, $10K bank, spreading 1-12, unit=$10 (CVCX chosen), hourly win rate = $17.98, cScore = 19.61, RoR = 11.3%

Halves, $10K bank, spreading 1-12, unit=$10 (CVCX chosen), hourly win rate = $20.07, cScore = 21.94, RoR = 11.2%

I didn't notice that I had checked this with a $3K bank, something I had entered a few days back when someone elsewhere asked about RoR for a trip bankroll of $3K.

So halves actually comes out better on both. But the effort hardly seems worth it for such a small return, assuming mainly 8D shoe games dealt 75%.

You were correct, your comparison was better due to my screwed up B/R number...

"this game sucks". A score of 20 says it all...

Professional Blackjack gives the difference between Halves and HiLo for the base 6 deck game as winning $17 vs $16. A lot more work for a 6% difference in win rate. I used Halves as a professional player the last 8 years or my play after switching from HiOpt 1 HiOpt 2 to HiLo and found I tired after 8 or 9 hours of play. With HiLo I never was able to play long enough where I felt I was going to make mistakes. I have no regrets though.