Card Counting in chemin de fer is really a way to increase your chances of winning. If you are excellent at it, you can actually take the odds and put them in your favor. This works because card counters raise their bets when a deck rich in cards that are advantageous to the gambler comes around. As a general rule of thumb, a deck wealthy in ten’s is better for the player, because the dealer will bust far more usually, and the player will hit a black-jack more often.
Most card counters maintain track of the ratio of good cards, or 10’s, by counting them as a 1 or a minus one, and then gives the opposite 1 or minus one to the low cards in the deck. A few methods use a balanced count where the number of low cards will be the same as the amount of ten’s.
Except the most interesting card to me, mathematically, will be the 5. There have been card counting techniques back in the day that included doing absolutely nothing more than counting the number of fives that had left the deck, and when the 5’s had been gone, the gambler had a huge benefit and would increase his bets.
A very good basic technique gambler is acquiring a 99.5 per cent payback percentage from the betting house. Each and every five that has come out of the deck adds 0.67 % to the player’s expected return. (In a single deck casino game, anyway.) That means that, all things being equal, having one five gone from the deck offers a player a little advantage more than the house.
Having two or three five’s gone from the deck will in fact give the gambler a pretty substantial advantage over the casino, and this is when a card counter will generally raise his wager. The difficulty with counting five’s and absolutely nothing else is that a deck low in 5’s happens pretty rarely, so gaining a large advantage and making a profit from that scenario only comes on rare situations.
Any card between two and eight that comes out of the deck raises the player’s expectation. And all nine’s. ten’s, and aces boost the casino’s expectation. Except eight’s and 9’s have very tiny effects on the outcome. (An 8 only adds point zero one % to the gambler’s expectation, so it is usually not even counted. A 9 only has point one five % affect in the other direction, so it’s not counted either.)
Understanding the effects the reduced and good cards have on your anticipated return on a wager would be the initial step in learning to count cards and bet on black-jack as a winner.