regarding the math of counting and player advantage

this is kind of a tech-geek question but I am curious about something maybe you all on this board can give me your two cents. It seems like (and I could be wrong) whenever I am playing a BJ simulator and have the advantage over the house I naturally do better but when the advantage (in terms of count, basically an abundance of high cards vs. low) gets very high I SEEM to not do as well as when the advantage is a bit lower but still positive. This could just be a "sample set" issue where I noticed it the last 10 times but if I saw it one million times I would be proven wrong. The other question I have is this, is there a certain specific mix of remaining cards at a given + count that performs better than other? For instance under any counting method with the same positive count will things work out better if the defecit of low cards is mainly do to the absence of say 2's rather than 5's. In a nut shell is there a more ideal remaining card composition at a given count than others and has anyone ever experimented to see if there is a seperate low card running count that acts as a "kicker" to the normal count in the same way you might keep a specific ace count running on the side.

gern blanston,

This is in fact an easy question. If you know that all the cards remaining are 8's, bet the max and split to as many hands as possible, but don't bust. The dealer is guaranteed to bust his 8 up + 8 in the hole with the next 8.

Dog Hand

You are completely correct but I was thinking maybe about having more 3's than 2's or more 5's than 2's actually. I think the 5 is more lethal to a dealer than a 2 so if 5's are missing from the deck in greater abundance than 2's does that help? Lets try this as well: If you were to make a new counting system focussed only on half the cards in the deck, specifically the low cards, would you do better if the missing 5's count ran well ahead of the missing 2's count.

gern blanston,

... because is turns any dealer stiff hand (hard 12 to hard 16) into a pat hand.

The concept you are seeking is called the Effect of Removal (EoR): how much does the player's edge shift as each card is removed from the remaining pack.

Click the link below to see EoR tables for both playing and betting. As you'll see there, the effects are larger for smaller number of decks. That's logical: if you remove one 5 from a single deck, the density of 5's remaining has just fallen from 4/52 = 1/13 to 3/51 = 1/17. Try it with an 8-deck shoe and you get a change from 32/416 = 1/13 to 31/415.

Hope this helps!

Dog Hand