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Counting Cards

Counting cards? Don't you have to be a math-expert or something? Well...no, you don't. You only have to know + and - . There are some different systems to use but I'll just tell about the most used that is also the most simple one, but it's still very effective.
Why count? The reason is simple, if you count cards you can turn the odds to your favour and then win money.
What you do is to count high and low cards to get an idea of how many low and high cards there are in the deck. The reason for this is that the dealer has a bigger disadvantage if the desk has more high cards. For exampel the dealer has a bigger chance of getting bust when he has 16 if there are more high cards. The dealer can't stand on 16 but the player can. Here is a chart for how to count;

2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
A
+1
+1
+1
+1
+1
0
0
0
-1
-1

As shown there are five cards with +1 and five cards with -1, so if you count a whole deck you should end at 0.
The point of this system is to bet money when the deck is more advantageous to the player and less otherwise, or not to play at all which is better but maybe not so fun. Presume that the bank uses one deck (more often 6 or 8 i used) and that you are playing 1 chip as your main bet. This is a chart for how to play in different positions. Note that this is for international rules and not the swedish ones.

Bet
Count
1
2
3
4
5
+1 or less
+2 or +3
+4 or +5
+6 or +7
+8 or more

So if you are playing for $10 as main bet and after a while you are on +4 then you should play for $30 instead. If you are not playing at all when you are on 0 or below you don't have to bet so much when on a possitive count but you'll make more money if you do.
Usually more than one deck is in use, so what to do then? You use a system called 'true count'. You do it like this; You divide your 'count' with the number of desks that are left to get a 'true count'.
Exampel: You have a count of 8 and there are 3 decks left. Your true count then will be 8/3=2,66 . It can be a little hard to know how many decks that are left but you can see pretty good how many are left. Then you use the chart about to see how much to bet and then use your true count instead of the normal count. There is usually a greater chance for a high true count later in the deck. And if you'r playing in the beginning of a deck you don't have so much control as later on.