5’s in Twenty-One
April 6th, 2011 at 16:22
Counting cards in black-jack is really a way to increase your chances of winning. If you are very good at it, you can basically take the odds and put them in your favor. This works because card counters raise their bets when a deck rich in cards which are advantageous to the player comes around. As a basic rule, a deck rich in 10’s is far better for the gambler, because the croupier will bust more often, and the gambler will hit a twenty-one far more often.
Most card counters maintain track of the ratio of high cards, or ten’s, by counting them as a 1 or a minus 1, and then gives the opposite one or – 1 to the reduced cards in the deck. A number of methods use a balanced count where the amount of low cards is the same as the quantity of 10’s.
But the most interesting card to me, mathematically, may be the 5. There have been card counting methods back in the day that required doing absolutely nothing far more than counting the amount of fives that had left the deck, and when the five’s were gone, the gambler had a big advantage and would elevate his bets.
A great basic method player is getting a nintey nine and a half percent payback percentage from the gambling house. Every single 5 that has come out of the deck adds point six seven % to the gambler’s anticipated return. (In an individual deck casino game, anyway.) That means that, all things being equivalent, having one five gone from the deck provides a gambler a tiny benefit more than the casino.
Having 2 or three 5’s gone from the deck will really give the gambler a fairly significant edge more than the gambling den, and this is when a card counter will generally increase his bet. The problem with counting 5’s and absolutely nothing else is that a deck low in 5’s occurs pretty rarely, so gaining a major benefit and making a profit from that situation only comes on rare situations.
Any card between two and 8 that comes out of the deck improves the player’s expectation. And all nine’s. ten’s, and aces improve the gambling establishment’s expectation. Except eight’s and 9’s have extremely smaller effects on the outcome. (An 8 only adds point zero one % to the gambler’s expectation, so it’s typically not even counted. A 9 only has point one five percent affect in the other direction, so it is not counted either.)
Understanding the effects the minimal and great cards have on your expected return on a wager will be the first step in learning to count cards and bet on pontoon as a winner.