Card counting has been with us now for around 50 years and that is an awful long time. It is only with the advent of the internet that the knowledge of how to count has become more widespread. But yet it is like any other subject in that to really master something requires more than just basic knowledge. All fields when taken seriously enough almost become like an art form and the real complexity with blackjack stems not from learning basic or learning how to count rapidly or strategy deviation charts or anything like that but the human element and the psychology that runs deep within the game.

However this is for a later article and the biggest error that novice card counters make in casinos is that they learn a running count but then incorrectly apply it. If you know about card counting then you will no doubt have learnt a system like the hi-lo for example where cards two through six are counted as +1 and tens and aces are -1 with sevens, eights and nines counted as zero. This counting system is by far the most common system in use over the past 50 years or so.

But the running count is only the first step in defining how great your edge is and it cannot be used on its own to define your betting strategy. I will give an example to show what I mean, imagine if you had a running count of +10 after one deck had been dealt in a four deck shoe. Now the ratio of high cards to low cards would be far less than if you arrived at the same count of +10 and there were only half a deck remaining (assuming that the dealer dealt that deep into the shoe). It is clear then that the edge for the player in the second instance would be far greater.

To find your real edge in blackjack then you have to convert the running count to the true count. To do this then you simply divide the running count with the number of decks left to be dealt. So in our example, the count of +10 with three decks to be dealt would reveal a true count of +3.33 while in the other example, the count of +10 with only half a deck left would show a true count of +20. These are massively different and to convert the true count to an edge then remember that the true count has to reach +1 for the player to have overcome the house edge.

Then the player’s edge increases by roughly 0.5% for every true count increase. So a true count of 3.33 would show a player edge of over 1% while a true count of +20 would be a player advantage of 9.50% which is absolutely crushing in gambling terms but also rare in blackjack and advantages like these do not come along all that often. But you need to realise the difference between running count and true count because learning the running count will not be enough by itself.