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“I think that each member of the team, after duly qualifying to play, should be treated as a machine that, robotically, puts in hours in an attempt to make money.”
Don Schlesinger,
Blackjack Attack: Playing the Pros’ Way, 3rd Edition
We’d been dreading this night for a while and Domenic wasn’t making things any easier. Tonight was the night we entered the next phase of our skill set: deck estimation. Domenic had different ideas. He was getting the itch. Inherently, we knew that the itch was synonymous with a desire to gamble, to throw money away. We’d gone into the seminar with Semyon believing that blackjack was a gamble. But by now we’d come to realize blackjack was a game of math. It was numbers, statistics, and calculations. It wasn’t a gamble if you played it correctly. All one needed to do was pick up a copy of Arnold Snyder’s Blackbelt in Blackjack or Stanford Wong’s Professional Blackjack to see that it was all about the numbers—the math that went into determining who was the long-term winner, the casino or the player.
Gambling meant playing hunches, not statistics. It meant making good decisions only some of the time, not all the time. It meant playing cards when you had the itch, not when you were ready to play perfectly; and we weren’t ready. I’d remembered the words of Emerson that my high school English teacher often recited. “Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” The quote had always stuck with me. I knew that when it came to being successful in school or in life, I couldn’t count on luck. It required hard work—the cause of an eventual effect. Our goal was to play without feeling, to operate like machines, oblivious to both the monumental wins or the devastatingly bad beats. This was a game of longevity, where applying the methodology over and over again would yield long-term positive results. The game had little room for human emotion.
Like everyone, I’d made many decisions over my life-time. Some were good and some I regretted. When it came to blackjack I was aware enough to know that I had a special opportunity in front of me. I was starting from the ground up and I was enjoying the process. I wasn’t yearning for the bright lights of the Strip. I was appreciating the progress I was making, the development of my skills, and the camaraderie that was forming. We were all learning the game methodically and we agreed that we wouldn’t move to the next stage until we’d mastered the current one.
It wasn’t a coincidence that our commitment was to a game in which every decision had real consequences. I was not about to start my blackjack career by making the number-one mistake—getting the itch and playing before I was fundamentally prepared to win. On occasion I wondered how I would fare, but any illusions I had about hopping in my car and driving two hours to the nearest casino were quelled by the reality of all the warnings I’d read about.
Domenic emailed earlier that day to say he couldn’t wait any longer. He was heading to Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun instead of meeting us for practice. He wanted us to come along.
“I know we’re not perfect yet but we’re close. I’m happy to drive. Let me know if you guys are in.”
I called D.A.’s cell phone immediately.
“Did you get Domenic’s email?” I asked, dumbfounded.
“That guy is going to lose his shirt,” he replied, equally annoyed.
“Yeah, no kidding. He’ll probably gamble his kids’ college educations away. There’s no way I’m going.”
“No shit. Meet you at seven for deck estimation?”
We met as scheduled and began the process of perfecting our ability to estimate, at any given time, how many decks have been played in a shoe.
The running count is just one piece of the puzzle. Analyzed in a vacuum, it’s worth very little. Although the running count is an expression of the composition of the remaining cards to be played, what’s equally important is the saturation of those cards.
For instance, if there’s a running count of, say, 15 and five decks remain to be played, that’s a much different shoe than a running count of 15 where only three decks remain. It’s the concentration of good cards that matters most and it’s the richness of good cards in the pack that is the basis for playing and betting decisions. This saturation of good cards relative to decks remaining is known simply as the true count. To calculate the true count, you divide the running count by the number of decks remaining.
Taking the example above, if the running count is 15 and five decks remain, you divide 15 by 5 and get a true count of +3. On the other hand, if you have a running count of 15 with three decks remaining, you divide 15 by 3 and your true count is +5. In other words, the true count represents the number of extra “good cards” per each deck remaining. Five extra good cards per deck is much better than three extra good cards per deck.
More important, the true count provides a clearer understanding of the advantage. Every value of +1 in the true count equates to roughly 0.50% of playing advantage. Using this math, we can account for the built-in house edge which begins with the perfect basic strategy player usually being at about a -0.50% disadvantage. To do this, we offset the true count by subtracting one. So the true count minus one, multiplied by 0.50% = player’s edge.
Therefore, a true count of 9 equates to a 4% player advantage: 9 (true count) – 1 (house edge offset) = 8, and 8 x 0.50% = 4%.
The key is to accurately determine the number of decks remaining to be played by looking at the discard tray to see how many decks have already been played. In other words, if in a 6-deck shoe two decks have already been played, then four decks remain to be played.
After each round is dealt the cards are scooped up by the dealer and disposed of in the discard tray to the dealer’s right side. The discard tray is visible to all of the players at the table until the end of the shoe when the cards are reshuffled and placed back into the shoe to be dealt. During play, as the discard rack begins to fill up, a card counter must estimate how many decks have been played to determine how many decks have yet to be played.
The MIT teams estimated decks to the nearest quarterdeck. In other words, they could estimate within 13 cards (out of 312 in a 6-deck shoe) how many decks had been played.
So would we.
The first thing we did was order dozens of decks of cards from a supply company that sold previously used playing cards from real casinos. After compiling 6-deck shoes, we numbered each card on its face, from 1 to 312. We spent hours carving off a random number of decks from the pile and estimating how many decks were left. We did it over and over again, checking our estimates against the corresponding number on each card. For instance, if we estimated that two decks were in the discard rack, the number on the card we cut to would need to be close to 104 (52 x 2 decks).
We designed a series of deck-estimation checkouts to test our skills. One checkout consisted of us taking turns building various-sized piles in the discard tray, with the other person correctly identifying within a quarter-deck how many decks had hypothetically been played. In addition, we were sure to make the conversion from the number of decks played to the number of decks remaining to be played.
“One and three quarters played, four and a quarter remain.”
“Three and a half played, two and a half remain.”
The next step was to calculate the true count. After all, dividing a running count of, say 14, by 3.25 decks remaining isn’t easy. But we learned some shortcuts from a website, which outlined tips and tricks for dividing any running count by any quarter-deck increment.
As our skills continued to develop, we reached out to Semyon to see if there were any opportunities for us to somehow affiliate with him. At his seminar he claimed that his playing days were over, but we were still hopeful that he might be managing a team somewhere. Or maybe he’d just be interested in helping out a couple of up-and-comers. Unfortunately, he maintained that he was no longer active in the game and referred us to the website of a former MIT teammate of his, Mike Aponte.
D.A. and I had become sponges for anything and everything blackjack. We devoured every website and book on the subject so we were familiar with Mike’s site, as well as his status. We pondered hiring Mike for a private training session, but his price was a bit high for us—certainly higher than Semyon’s one-day fee.
Nevertheless, the site had a true-count calculator program for a variety of test settings, depending on how challenging you wanted it to be. It was a basic calculator that displayed a random running count, along with a random number of decks remaining, and the user would have to input an accurate bet based on the true count and the offset. The tests were timed and allowed very little room for error.
In short time, we were passing the online true-count conversions at the highest settings. We’d become proficient in the next phase of our development—deck estimation and true-count conversion.
Had I really spent six months dedicating myself to a game designed for players to wager their hard earned money based on efficient betting in advantageous situations? In a very real sense, I already did that at my day job as a financial advisor, advising clients on their investment portfolios, standard deviation and risk, expected rates of returns, and probabilities. Why was this any different? I was challenging my mind in ways I never dreamt possible. I was training my brain to process tremendous amounts of information, teaching myself that it can sometimes be difficult to make the right decision even if you know what that decision is, and I was beginning to look at myself with more confidence than I ever had before.
Oh, and the shortcut for dividing 14 by 3.25 was simple. Triple 14 to get 42, then add a decimal: 4.2. This provides a nearly accurate true count to work with (the actual calculation being 4.3).
I was getting good.