Smash Vegas

Now that you’re familiar with the principles of card counting we can talk about a system most find much easier to use than Hi/Lo; the Knock-Out system.

Unlike Hi/Lo the K-O system is unbalanced as there are more +1 cards than -1 cards in a deck.  The running count is changed as follows:

The reason this system is so much easier to use is that it is designed to remove the need to convert to a true count.  It does this by using different initial running counts (starting points) depending on the number of decks.  The deck is then favourable whenever the running count reaches the relevant key count.

So as an example suppose we’re playing a 2 deck game.  The running count starts at -4 and we play and keep a count as in Hi/Lo (except 7 is a +1).  As soon as the running count hits +1 we know that we have the advantage.  It’s the fact we don’t need to convert to the true count that makes this easier - we’ve traded remembering a few more things for fewer calculations at the table.

Just as before we want to ramp up the betting as our advantage increases.  I’d suggest the following schemes:

Note that you can usually get away with a higher bet spread the more decks there are.

So that’s the K-O system.  There are other systems which give a more accurate estimate of advantage, but this system is so easy to use at the table I think it’s more than worth the trade off.  Later on we’ll be looking at how different card counting systems compare.

Once you have the basics of counting down (i.e. actually being able to keep a running count) it is relatively easy to try out new systems and they all give pretty similar results, so don’t get hung up on which one you use.  Learning the Hi/Lo and K-O systems are a great start.

Next time we’ll be talking about how to actually get away with card counting.

If you want a downloadable guide then here’s my PDF.