Professional Blackjack is 350 pages of card-counting advice for beginners to experts. It presents the high-low and the halves. The high-low is the best combination of simplicity and power, and probably is the most popular system used by card counters. Halves is a level-3 system that yields almost perfect estimates of your advantage, information you need to determine your optimal bet size.
The 1994 edition of Professional Blackjack contains 100 tables, not counting the tables in the appendixes. The tables give strategy index numbers for a variety of rules. The book also contains results of simulations for various sets of rules, so you can learn how valuable one rule is compared to another; for example, you can turn to page 185 and learn that to a card counter, double after split is about the same value as late surrender.
The book is chock full of information. For example, have you ever wondered how much expectation someone gives up by standing on sixteen against an eight? For single deck, page 315 tells you that the various two-card sixteens each lose at a rate of about 53% if you stand and 43% if you hit, so the cost is 10%. For six decks, page 331 tells you the numbers are 51% for standing versus 45% for hitting, so the cost is 6%.
Professional Blackjack is available from Amazon
