Penetration (not the dirty kind)

OK I was thinking about the penetration that I recieved at different casinos I've been too (I know I know, shut up Bevis). The only place that I can remember is the El Cortez in downtown Vegas. It was a full table of 7 spots dealing 2 hands plus the dealers hand. At 2.7 cards per hand that's 43.2 cards delt or about 83 percent penetration. The one time the count was up to a true of 10 the dealer shuffled up on us, every other time we got two hands out of the deal.

All in all it was fun but there were too many people at the table to take advantage of good situations. My question is how do I accurately determine penetration on the fly? Should I keep an index card in my pocket with some common conversions done out ahead of time? Maybe a table that has number of people at table, number of hands delt and then what kind of penetration is there?

Also if you've played at the el cortez can you get similar penetration when you are alone with the dealer? I'm guessing not but you never know.

"All in all it was fun but there were too many people at the table to take advantage of good situations."

You can only take advantage of situations in blackjack if you recognize them,ploppies dont. The only thing they seem to recognize is the mysterious FLOW of the cards. When the good cards come out and ploppies win, the count starts dropping...yet they start betting more money because they think the flow is good when it has actually taking a nose dive. This is why they lose tons of money in a game with good penetration.

If you cant see the cut card,the best way to check out pen while on the run, is simply look at the discard tray. If it looks interesting,stick around and see what's up.

Since the TC was plus 10 on the first round, many more cards on average were dealt. This was probably the reason for the dealer shuffling,besides why bother to gamble your money under such terrible conditions?

Well there were more cards delt because of all the small cards so that does make sense. The only real bad conditions were that the table was full. Table min was low and I was still getting into the swing of things, I'd definately like to visit the El Cortez again, maybe early morning and see what happens.

So, for example, if you are at a table with one other player and four rounds are dealt, penetration is 0.4 (i.e 0.4 deck remaining before the shuffle)computed as 1-(5%*3*4)and 0.55 penetration before you make your last bet for that deck [1-5%*3*3)]

You can also use this rule of thumb to compute the portion of a deck remaining after each round and to then compute true count. For example, in the 4 rounds to 2 players, after the first round, there is 0.85 deck remaining (multiply the running count by 1.2--approximately equal to 1/0.85). After the second round, multiply the running count by 1.4--approximately equal to 1/0.7. After the third round, multiply the running count by 1.8--approximately equal to 1/0.55.

You'll need to memorize a short table of reciprocals--but that doesn't take long to do.

P.S. When Wood Allen was asked if sex is dirty, his response was "Only if you do it right"

If you're heads up, you need at least 5 rounds dealt (some say 6).
for 2 spots dealt, you need 4 rounds dealt.
for 3 spots dealt, you need 3 rounds dealt (some don't play this).
if 4 or more spots are dealt, I don't play.

So the number of players are really important as far as how well things go. It's understandable because you can get more hands in in a favorable situation. Do most people here agree about the 4 or more, let the ploppies play idea?

This raises another point with me in particular, my next trip will be with my family and we all play blackjack though I'm the only one trying to play well which would make sense because my parents have much more experiance on me in the game. My brother however hasn't played much but seems to get more than his share of blackjacks and he plays wheel of madness games. Anyway there are four of us so if we want to play together which surely won't be the whole time we pretty much have to invade an empty table.

Since I'm going with my family how effective will that be for cover? I'm thinking of having one of my family members count the aces with chips while I count, indicating the count with my bet. This will be obvious to my family since they'll know my betting schedual. Also we'll be at $3 tables solittle heat is expected.