How To Speed Count In Blackjack
Card counters operate under the (correct) assumption that even perfect blackjack strategy is a losing proposition. That’s because basic strategy gives no indication of the likelihood of a dealer or player bust. Basic strategy requires you to hedge your bets in certain playing situations, meaning you are just as likely to win as to lose.
Blackjack speed count is a counting system for Blackjack that has been recently developed. It is designed in order to increase the players’ edge at the casino. It was established by Henry Tambourin and Frank Scoblete, who were Blackjack professionals who had invested two and a half years in making this counting system.
Keeping a running count improves on basic blackjack strategy by indicating when you can deviate from that strategy and still have a decent chance of winning. If you know there are more small cards than large ones, you can safely take hits on those pesky 15 and 16 point hands and improve your chances of beating the dealer. You can use a running count to know when to increase your bet size to maximize your profits, and when to decrease your bets to protect yourself from potential losses.
How to Play Blackjack (Part 5) – How to Count Cards in Blackjack. There is only one practical, and legal, way you can place yourself in a position of having an edge when you are playing blackjack. This is by learning to become a card counter. But it must be emphasized that card counting isn’t for everyone. The true count is easy to work out, you simply divide the figure you have for the running count by how many decks are still to be dealt. If you’re playing a blackjack game in which there are six decks, every true count moves the houses advantage half a percent in favour of the player.
These changes in the bet size are known as a “betting spread,” a tool used by counters to increase profits and decrease losses without drawing the attention of the casino. Ideally, you can make small changes to your bets without the casino figuring out that you’re a card counter and (politely) asking you to leave.
Betting Spreads and Positive Expectation
The name of the game in card counting is turning blackjack into a positive expectation game. Peter Griffin’s book “The Theory of Blackjack” worked out some numbers pertinent to card counters. Using standard Las Vegas rules and a basic High-Low card counting system, a player’s advantage with perfect strategy when the count is zero is -0.56%. According to Griffin, each increase by 1 of the running count improves the player’s advantage by +0.5%. Naturally, every decrease by 1 of the count reduces the player’s advantage by 0.5%.
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Positive Count and Percentages
We know that, statistically, a standard Vegas game of blackjack will only offer certain counts some of the time. Positive expectation only happens with a +2 count, which will only happen about 8% of the time. Truth be told, a positive count can only be expected about 18% of the time you’re playing–that’s why it is important to spread your bets, even if you’re keeping a running count and playing according to basic strategy.
What’s the Best Bet Spread?
People much smarter than you and me have determined that a bet spread between 1 and 5 units is the best way to avoid undue attention from the casino. By this reckoning, you should bet 1 unit for a +1 count, all neutral counts, and all negative counts. A +2 count means 2 units, a +3 count means 3 units, a +4 count means 4 units, and anything over +4 means you bet 5 units. Going over 5 units is likely to attract unwanted casino heat.
Using this system and perfect blackjack strategy, you can expect a positive return of about 0.14%. You’re not going to get rich with small wins under this system, but it will turn a negative expectation game into a positive one.
Larger Bet Spreads
The only way to increase your expectation is to use a 1-10 unit bet spread, which is sure to get you kicked out of any casino eventually. Still, as long as you can get away with a 1-10 unit spread, you can play with an edge of about 0.57%, or about three and a half times greater than with a 1-5 unit spread.
Since casinos have implemented rules and strategies to counteract card counting, the easy to beat blackjack tables have disappeared. Casinos are now instituting a 6:5 blackjack payout rule, for instance, that automatically makes the game not worth the time it takes to count cards and develop a bet spread. Perfect blackjack strategy is often as good as you can get at today’s blackjack tables, since even the most aggressive counting and bet spreading gives you only about a .5% edge.
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If you’ve read any of the blackjack content on this site, you already know what a card counting system is. You’re probably also aware that there are multiple methods of counting cards, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Speed Count blackjack is another of these counting systems.
The Speed Count is the system promoted by Frank Scoblete and Henry Tamburin in their book Golden Touch Blackjack. If you want the complete details for how the Speed Count works, you should probably buy a copy of the book.
On the other hand, I’m not convinced that this is a worthwhile counting system to learn. There are better systems with the same advantages as the Speed Count that also lack some of the Speed Count’s drawbacks.
This post is meant to provide you with a high-level overview of how the Speed Count works.
I don’t want to get into too much detail about the theory behind card counting, because I’ve covered it elsewhere on the site. But in brief, here’s what you need to understand about counting cards:
The best hand in blackjack is a natural (a 2-card hand totaling 21). This hand pays off at 3 to 2 odds, and it can only be made if you get an ace and a 10.
Since the distribution of cards in a deck is random, sometimes you’ll have decks which become lopsided in terms of their ratio of high cards to low cards. (Aces and 10s are high cards.)
When you have a deck with a lot of 10s and aces, the probability of being dealt a natural and getting that 3 to 2 payout goes up.
A card counter tracks—in a general way—which cards have been dealt, so that he has a rough idea of how lopsided (or not) the deck has become. When the deck is rich enough in 10s and aces, he raises the size of his bet.
Most systems add 1 to the count when a low card is dealt and subtract 1 from the count when a high card is dealt. When the count is positive, you bet more. When it’s 0 or negative, you bet less.
Some players also adjust their strategy decisions based on the count, but most of the value from counting cards comes from raising and lowering your bets based on the count.
The different counting systems count different cards with different values. Some systems are balanced, which means there’s an equal number of high cards as low cards in the deck. Some systems (like the Speed Count) are unbalanced.
Here’s the other tricky thing about counting cards:
You must take into account how many decks are being used. The more decks in use, the less of an effect on the deck’s composition each individual card has.
You do this by converting the running count into a true count. To do this, you divide the running count by the number of decks left in the shoe.
An unbalanced system like the Speed Count eliminates the need for a conversion from the running count to the true count.
Why the Speed Count Is Different from Other Card Counting Systems
Now we can get into the nitty gritty of why the Speed Count differs from other card counting systems. We also look at how and why the Speed Count works in theory.
The premise behind the Speed Count is that the average hand in blackjack consists of 2.7 cards. Also, on average, one of those 2.7 cards is a small card (2, 3, 4, 5, or 6).
Most card counting systems involve adding and subtracting. At the very least, you have cards worth +1 and cards worth -1.
The Speed Count eliminates half that equation. The only cards you count are the small cards, and they each count as +1. All the other cards in the deck are treated as 0.
How To Count At Blackjack
To put this into action, you count all the small cards you’ve seen at the table, then you subtract the number of hands that were dealt that round. Include the dealer’s hand. If someone splits, then you count both those hands, too.
If you’re playing at a table with 3 players and a dealer, you’re looking at a total of 4 hands. If the total number of small cards is greater than 4, you’ve seen more than the average number of small cards dealt. This means you can raise your bet on the next hand, because the deck is richer in 10s and aces than it should be.
What Kind of Edge Can You Get Using the Speed Count?
I usually use Norm Wattenberger’s site to get an idea of how effective a card counting system is, but he doesn’t list the Speed Count there. That’s not a good sign, by the way, as Wattenberger is pretty thorough.
I saw one site claim that the edge using the Speed Count is 1% over the casino, but the same site claims that this is 3X the edge you’d have playing blackjack using basic strategy. That’s clearly questionable, as a basic strategy player doesn’t HAVE an edge against the casino. (If you triple the casino’s edge, the game gets worse for the player.)
I did see a reference to the KO counting system, where one of the creators of the Speed Count, Henry Tamburin, admitted that the KO offers a bigger edge against the casino. Tamburing also claims that the Speed Count is easier to use.
It’s hard for me to imagine a card counting system getting much simpler than the KO, but okay.
I did see a forum thread where Norm Wattenberger discusses the Speed Count and compares it to the KO system. According to him, the Speed Count offers an advantage that’s only a fraction of what is claimed in the book. Apparently, the KO system is more powerful and just as easy to use.
Most of the websites with pages about this leave off an important step. As with any unbalanced count, the Speed Count starts at a number different from 0. This number is based on the number of decks being used in the game. The forum thread I mentioned suggests that the starting count with 6 decks is 27.
Some Thoughts on Frank Scoblete and Henry Tamburin
How To Speed Count In Blackjack Games
I’m not as much of an expert on counting cards as some people are. But I am an expert on gambling writers and gurus. I’m not as familiar with Henry Tamburin’s stuff as I am with Frank Scoblete’s stuff, but I can offer some observations about Scoblete’s work.
A lot of his advice is bad.
Some of it’s REALLY bad.
I read his book Guerrilla Gambling about 15 years ago when I first got interested in writing about gambling for a living. Even then, as a neophyte, I was disappointed in some of the bad advice in the book. For example, he suggests the video poker machines are worse than craps, which just flat-out isn’t true. (Both games have their advantages and disadvantages.)
He also has a lot of advice in that book about biased roulette wheels, but I’ve discussed in multiple posts about how trying to clock a roulette wheel is a fool’s errand. I won’t repeat that criticism here.
Scoblete is best-known now for his advice about learning how to influence the dice when playing craps. I’m skeptical in the extreme of this scheme, although I don’t doubt he makes a lot of money from his seminars and DVD’s on the subject.
All that said, Scoblete seems like a nice enough guy.
Henry Tamburin, on the other hand, seems to offer much better advice more of the time.
But let’s face it. Neither of these guys are the ones you should be learning to play blackjack from.
The real experts in blackjack and card counting are the guys like Arnold Snyder and Stanford Wong. The Red7 Count from Snyder is probably more powerful than the Speed Count while being just as easy to use.
The Speed Count in blackjack is an interesting enough card counting system that completely eliminates the need to account for both high cards and low cards. You just track the low cards and the number of hands dealt each round.
Sadly, to the best of my estimation, the Speed Count isn’t powerful enough or accurate enough to make it worth your while. If you’re looking for an easy, unbalanced card counting system, try the Red 7 or the Knockout system instead. Both are more powerful and just as easy to use.