The game of blackjack changed in the early 1960s. Suddenly, player hands at single and double deck games had to be placed facedown on the table when standing. That move was intended to thwart the ability of card counters to analyze the cards properly.
For decades, that game change indeed hurt the serious blackjack player’s ability to make precise moves. A player needs to know what’s been dealt in order to adjust his or her card and betting strategies appropriately.
But, after many years of R&D, I was able to crack the code. And in 2002, in the First Edition of Cutting Edge Blackjack, I introduced my method for identifying those facedown cards. For the first time in 40 years, those cards were no longer a mystery.
(Howard Schwartz, Las Vegas’ “librarian for gamblers,” was among those who gave that method, and the book, glowing reviews. He said it gave players more “optimism” for success. And he said I was blazing “new territory.”)
And in that book – with the advent of my new facedown card identification method – I noted: “In a way, casinos are doing you a favor by requiring players to place their first two cards facedown when standing. Those hands can tip you off to conditions that make card strategy decisions easy to figure if you know how to interpret the facedown cards.”
As Howard Schwartz remarked, I was the first to identify the five different categories of cards the facedown cards might fall into. Each reveals something about the composition of those cards.
The most important are the first and second categories. The First Category includes the cards players immediately stand on. The Second Category are cards players stand on after taking hit cards.
The only author before me who took a stab at this did no research (as I’ve done) but suggested you assume cards immediately stood upon are two high cards. If you read my book, you’d see in graphic detail how foolishly simplistic that idea is.
For one thing, the composition of the facedown cards changes in likelihood depending on what up card the dealer has.
Anyway, I started with a statistical study of what kinds of hands players stood on in every conceivable card situation. But the solution could not be a simple one.
Just to give you an example:
Versus the dealer’s 2.57 percent of the hands players tend to immediately stand upon consist of one high and one low card. But 35 percent of the hands are two high cards.
A simple-minded analyst would suggest you assume all such hands are a high and low card. But there are two many hands of two high cards to make that foolish assumption.
I eventually came up with a two-tiered approach, then, to identifying the facedown cards. And in one chapter I explained the method I developed, using a card counting method I invented decades ago but no longer use for key strategy decisions. It does work fabulously well, however, in uncovering the identity of the facedown cards. In another chapter, I provided another way, a non-card-counting method, to ferret out what those cards are, based upon my analyses of the types of hands players stand on.
For instance, take this fact that I discovered in doing my research for all of this:
Second Category cards versus the dealer’s 4 through 6 consist entirely of 2s through 6s.
That tells you a lot about the dealer’s likelihood of scoring or busting. For instance, look at the example above.
Don’t you think it might make sense to double on your 8-point hand here?
When there’s an imbalance on the table heavy in low cards, the undealt cards are heavy in high cards. So here the dealer’s highly likely to bust – much more so than normal.
Have blackjack questions? Send them to rharvey2121@netscape.net. For more info see http://www.blackjacktoday.com.
