Card Counting in black jack is a way to increase your chances of winning. If you’re very good at it, you can really take the odds and put them in your favor. This works because card counters elevate their bets when a deck wealthy in cards which are advantageous to the gambler comes around. As a general rule of thumb, a deck rich in ten’s is much better for the gambler, because the dealer will bust a lot more generally, and the player will hit a chemin de fer more often.
Most card counters maintain track of the ratio of superior cards, or ten’s, by counting them as a 1 or a minus 1, and then provides the opposite one or – 1 to the very low cards in the deck. A few techniques use a balanced count where the variety of reduced cards is the same as the variety of ten’s.
Except the most interesting card to me, mathematically, could be the five. There have been card counting systems back in the day that involved doing nothing more than counting the amount of fives that had left the deck, and when the five’s had been gone, the player had a big benefit and would increase his bets.
A very good basic method gambler is obtaining a nintey nine and a half percent payback percentage from the gambling establishment. Each five that’s come out of the deck adds point six seven per cent to the gambler’s expected return. (In a single deck casino game, anyway.) That means that, all things being equal, having one 5 gone from the deck gives a player a little benefit over the house.
Having two or three five’s gone from the deck will in fact give the player a pretty considerable edge more than the gambling house, and this is when a card counter will typically raise his wager. The problem with counting five’s and nothing else is that a deck low in 5’s occurs fairly rarely, so gaining a large benefit and making a profit from that situation only comes on rare instances.
Any card between 2 and 8 that comes out of the deck raises the gambler’s expectation. And all nine’s. 10’s, and aces improve the gambling den’s expectation. But eight’s and 9’s have very modest effects on the outcome. (An eight only adds 0.01 percent to the player’s expectation, so it is usually not even counted. A nine only has 0.15 per cent affect in the other direction, so it is not counted either.)
Understanding the results the very low and good cards have on your anticipated return on a wager will be the first step in learning to count cards and bet on pontoon as a winner.