• Effect of hands on results between 12-16
• Setting up hands, allocation of points
• Counting hands
• Basic idea of the strategy
• Determination of RC and TC
• Betting strategy
• Best-known card counting strategies
• Psyhology of Blackjack

determination of RC and TC

The essence of the card counting is to get coordination points based on the differentiation results of the card groups and the percentile values belonging to them. By these coordination points you can continuously watch your advantage or disadvantage over the dealer. This is essential in the determination of the bet increase and strategy as well.

The most important thing to keep in mind is the fact that the advantage/disadvantage belonging to a hand is affected by the changing number of cards. That is why you need to define the concept of RC and TC and to understand the difference between them.

• RC is an abbreviation for the expression "running count" or "rolling count".
• TC is the abbreviation for "true count".

The RC is the direct result of counting of plus-minus card groups showing the ratio between the two card groups among the remaining cards. The advantage/disadvantage belonging to a certain RC figure will be continuously changed in the course of dealing, proportionally to the decreasing number of cards.

So various advantages/disadvantages are connected to the same RC values at various parts of the shoe.

You need to determine the TC values in order to convert the changing advantage/disadvantage belonging to the same RC at various parts of the shoe into a real, balanced result, by that you can approach the ideal percentile results of a single deck game. You get the correct, theoretical value of TC by dividing RC by the number of the remaining decks, i.e. by the 1/52 of the number of remaining cards. In practice nobody can make this calculation. Thus, in practice the TC calculation is done by dividing the RC value by the number of the remaining complete decks. This is an easy process and the results are not much different from the exact mathematical result. As the dealer places all played cards into the discard tray in the corner of the table, you can determine the number of the decks played, and based on this, the number of remaining ones. So in this case you watch the number of the remaining decks, from which the dealing is done.

In case of six decks this can be demonstrated by the following example.

In case of a given number of cards played:

• 6 decks = 312 cards
• played cards: 120
• remaining cards in the shoe: 192 = 192/52 = 3.69 decks

so theoretically it would be TC = RC/3.69 but in practice the 3.69 will be rounded to 4: TC = RC/4

So you can see that practically it is necessary to round twice, at first in the case of determination of the number of remaining decks then after dealing to round TC to a whole number. Several methods are used for rounding. These have one thing in common: all they make the TC value incorrect.

Thus, in practice the correctness of TC (advantage) depends on two factors:

• error in the estimation by the eye of the number of played decks,
• rounding error in division of RC.

By much experience you can reduce these errors to a level where they do not influence your practical results.

This is the classical approach for calculating TC. We do not say this is not working but because of the above reasons it is not ideal. In part four, based on the results of the simulator BJ777 we shall demonstrate a method by which it is possible to simplify the practical game and to increase its effectiveness.

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