Five’s in Chemin de Fer
Sunday, 23. January 2011
Card Counting in black jack is really a way to increase your chances of winning. If you are very good at it, you may really take the odds and put them in your favor. This works because card counters elevate their bets when a deck rich in cards that are advantageous to the player comes around. As a basic rule, a deck wealthy in ten’s is much better for the player, because the croupier will bust extra often, and the player will hit a chemin de fer far more often.
Most card counters maintain track of the ratio of good cards, or ten’s, by counting them as a 1 or a – 1, and then offers the opposite 1 or – one to the reduced cards in the deck. Several methods use a balanced count where the variety of reduced cards could be the same as the amount of ten’s.
But the most interesting card to me, mathematically, is the five. There have been card counting methods back in the day that involved doing absolutely nothing extra than counting the amount of fives that had left the deck, and when the five’s were gone, the player had a huge advantage and would raise his bets.
A great basic strategy player is getting a 99.5 % payback percentage from the gambling establishment. Every single five that’s come out of the deck adds point six seven per-cent to the gambler’s anticipated return. (In an individual deck game, anyway.) That means that, all things being equivalent, having one 5 gone from the deck offers a gambler a small benefit more than the casino.
Having two or three five’s gone from the deck will in fact give the player a quite substantial edge more than the casino, and this is when a card counter will usually elevate his bet. The issue with counting 5’s and nothing else is that a deck lower in five’s happens fairly rarely, so gaining a huge advantage and making a profit from that scenario only comes on rare occasions.
Any card between 2 and 8 that comes out of the deck boosts the gambler’s expectation. And all nine’s. ten’s, and aces enhance the betting house’s expectation. But 8’s and 9’s have quite little effects on the outcome. (An 8 only adds 0.01 per-cent to the gambler’s expectation, so it’s generally not even counted. A nine only has 0.15 % affect in the other direction, so it is not counted either.)
Understanding the results the very low and superior cards have on your expected return on a wager could be the first step in discovering to count cards and play black jack as a winner.
Posted in Blackjack by Claire