Witness the first-round card situation graphic shown here. There’s just one player, which is what the old school basic strategy/card counting researchers tested for exclusively and recommended (wrongly).
How would the old schoolers bet in the next round?
The World’s Greatest Blackjack Book (1980), reliant upon computer-simulated data from IBM’s Julian Braun (as so many old school books were), gave this betting advice (not atypical of the old school approach taken by other books):
“The simplest method is to bet the same number of chips as your running count.”
This would have you doubling your bet with a very small variation in the composition of the undealt cards, even though I don’t believe anyone would argue that would ever create a situation where your likelihood of winning had doubled (especially with a four-deck game that book used for its strategies).
The book was based on the HI-OPT card counting system, a dumbing-down of the already-ineffective Hi-Lo card counting system. The HI-OPT system (said by Lawrence Revere in 1969 to be “practically worthless for four deck play”) counts the 3s-6s as +1 and the 10s as -1, thereby counting even fewer cards than the Hi-Lo (which counts the 2s-6s as +1 and the 10s and Aces as -1).
Why the HI-OPT ignores such important cards as 7s, 8s, 9s and Aces is beyond me. And why it considers it OK to focus on such a small number of cards in trying to track imbalances is also puzzling.
Let’s look at your reality at the casino, though, when using this (or any other) old school betting method. How does this work with the card situation pictured here?
The HI-OPT count, with two 3s and one 10, is +2. It ignores the other cards. That’s one of its mistakes. My research shows that when the 9s are played out (as is the case here), you face a double digit likelihood of losses in the next round. The same is true when Aces are overdue (as is the case here). The dealer will beat you in 45 more rounds than you will beat him or her when the dealer’s up card is an Ace. The dealer’s busting rate overall is in the single digits when getting an Ace. We obviously don’t want the dealer to get an Ace. Another bad situation is the fact that the 10s are highly overdue in the next round (because the dealer’s just as likely to get them as you).
So the worst part about HI-OPT is that it doesn’t give an accurate read on what’s likely to happen in the next round.
Another of the many faults of the HI-OPT approach is that it will never identify a situation in which there’s a more than 50 percent likelihood of anything occurring. How could it, when it only considers two groups of 31 percent of the cards and ignores the rest? (It ignores the great majority of cards in this card example for instance.)
As a result, Humble, Cooper and Braun (the authors) would have you double your bet into losing situations such as the card example here.
Is that really the way to go? And final question: why do card counters think the old school card counting approach (where you divide the cards into two arbitrary “high” and “low” groups) is an accurate way to keep track of the cards?
Richard Harvey is an acclaimed blackjack strategies innovator, expert player, blackjack coach and bestselling author of Blackjack The SMART Way (the NEW Gold Edition), Cutting Edge Blackjack (the NEW Third Edition), NEW Ways To Win MORE at Blackjack and the audio book Richard Harvey’s Blackjack PowerPrep Session. Have blackjack questions? Send them to rharvey2121@netscape.net. For more info see http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
