How to tell if you have the nerves to card count

You've been on a horrible losing streak this night. You have 20 in a 6 deck game and the dealer has an ace showing and she asks if you want insurance. The TC=+2.5 and you have out your biggest bet of the night at $200. You've got $75 left to play with Do you insure for less? :laugh::devil:

Just how many of you would deviate from strategy and take insurance. Honestly

Depends on your aversion to varience. If you insure then 95% of the time the most you will lose is 100$ if you take insurance and you will most likely win your 200 dollar bet. When the TC is 2.5 the difference between taking insurance and not taking insurance is probably very small in the long run. If you think about it this way at a TC of 0 the dealer will have blackjack 30.8 percent of the time. For insurance to be worth it you need the dealer to have blackjack 33.3% of the time. The indice for taking insurance is +3 so just splitting the 2.5% difference with a TC of 2.5 the odds of the dealer having a blackjack is probably around 32.5%-33%. That means you are losing .3-.8% of your 100 dollar bet which is 30 to 80 cents. You would have to ask yourself, is risk aversion worth that much?

Borderline

In this case it would depend on the composition of the 20. If it were A,9 I would take it, if it were X,X I wouldn't, especially if this occurred well into the shoe.

First of all counter's don't play or worry about streaks, gamblers do.

I wouldn't take insurance if your Index Play is at TC+3.
If the dealer shows a BJ you still have $75 to continue in a + advantage situation.
If the dealer doesn't have BJ you have a better chance of winning or pushing w/20.
If you insure and lose both the insurance and the hand your out completely.
As Bjbob said, there is some minor difference to the %'s in the hand composition, but I do not see a large enough difference to change the way you play.

BJC

Edit: Per Cacarulo for Expected Value and Hand Probabilities for(6D, S17, DOA, DAS, RSA=0, RSP=4) is:
A,9 v A is 0.659607 and T,T v A is 0.654582

Never!

However, once when I was getting killed in a high count, and was also concerned about the PC watching me, I asked if I could have even money on a BJ when the dealer had a 10 showing, because the way things were going, I was sure he had an Ace underneath. Fortunately, he said no (and stopped watching the table, too.)

Thunder

The truth is....I would not ever play serious BJ in a 6d game.

Thankfully I have plenty of other options. 6d is a gamble and not at all what the early advantage players, book writers, ever had in mind. There are many here who feel 8 D games are beatable

As to the question, my indice for that game is TC+3, so no...and it is totally your fault for taking an As* kickin, which was avoidable.

CP

Its a 200 dollar bet, in order to best your ods of making that very situation profitable you dont take insurance.

You may run out of money tonight, by not taking insurance, but yoru more liekly to run out tonight if you do take insurance.

Even if you run out of money tonight, its only in the sum of tonight, and the many nights to come that you will win money, you **WILL** lose money on many of your trips to play blackjack.

your remaining 200 shoudl be replacable at some time in the future, even if you ahve to work a few months to save it up again, in the future you will play more, and in the future your wins wil negate that tiny loss.

If the 200 is THAT important to you, you shouldnt have been gambling with ti to begin with.

No, would not have taken any insurance.

Not to be nitpicky here but this scenario sounds like a typical new counters problem. First thing I see wrong is a bankroll problem. Maybe a spread problem, and no confidence in the plan that needed to be addressed before even one hand was dealt. Yes you take insurance if the count calls for it, at least I would. If a $200 bet is your biggest of the night at a TC of 2.5, then you either are overbetting as you should have a big enough trip bankroll to handle a night full of small to to mid size bets seeing that this $200 bet should not even be close to max bet based on a realistic bet spread. This is even if the cards were not falling your way. Or you are overbetting on low counts and your risk is too high for your bankroll. My point is the right play is a no brainer if you put the rest of the gameplan together correctly. If I was losing a lot of minimum to low end spread bets, I would not be tapped out at the end of one night. But still to the point, if you learn your count and indices, stick with them and do not deviate because you're afraid to lose. If thats the case, stop playing now is the better move.

I love it. You guys are so bright, you're always try to read between the lines even if there is nothing there.

This isn't something that happened to me fyi but rather just a scenario I thought up. (I don't bet $200/hand in BJ in a +2.5 count and have been counting for almost 3 years now so I know better than to take insurance)

CP,

6 deck and 8 deck are both beatable games. Often better than the lower # of decks because of the poor pen. that often comes with it

I think one of the real questions here is "what is the real true count at this point?" Since both the player(A,9) and the dealer both have aces and it is getting close to the cut card @ 4-4.5 decks, the appearance of 2 aces would, if calculated first, render an inaccurate TC calculation in this particular situation.The ignoring of the two aces in this case would bring the TC back to +3.5 and therefore, crossing back over the ins. threshold. The exact opposite TC effect would be true with the two 10's.

Bj Bob
Are you talking Reverese using RPC true to form by keeping a SC of the aces to make your betting decisions? If that is the case, then I would agree with your case but the player would need a SC of aces.
I dropped the SC of aces in multideck because of all the replies I received to my questions about this issue from a number of long time players who determined is was not required. If only I can set up CVdata with the Ace SC(I can't figure out how to set it up) I would run some sims for my own knowledge.
Would someone using HiLo consider the ace SC?

BJC

Even if using hi-lo you would, in this case be better served not to reckon the aces for the insurance decision momentarily since you have the extra information which is pertinent to the calculation of the 10's/ non tens ratio. Once the information on the down card becomes known you may re-add the aces and continue on as normal. I do this all the time and it sharpens your call, especially in SD where every card is critical to the 2:1 ratio.

I see where your coming from but I wonder how many others would agree in 6-8d. Since I haven't played SD/DD since my visit to LV a decade ago, I haven't paid much attention to the CD variables.

BJC

what if, what if, what if


Thunder, same bet, same $75 left. What do you do if you had to split?
You do not have an insurance problem, you have a bankroll or triproll problem complicated by the option of insurance.

ihate17

Not the case at all. BJ Bob hit on the solution- it depends on what you see out on the table. You could have started out the hand with a max bet count and a bunch of 10's may have been dealt out reducing the count by the time you have to make an insurance decision. I've started a hand with a max bet out and been at a negative count after everyone got their cards; very easy to do with deep pen.

There are situations where partial insurance is a correct risk-averse bet, just as it is sometimes correct to take even money on a BJ at a count lower than you would normally take insurance. It's also reasonably cheap cover, given that correct insurance play is one of the most accurate tells for a counter. According to Snyder taking insurance at any count higher than a minimum bet costs you very little.

With my level 2 count,(Ins+6) I like to insure 1/4 my bet(1/2insurance), @+3, especially if im playing two hands.

I get what you're saying, and what I say still rings true. First off it should be a given for any experienced, good counter to make his playing decisions based on all the information available. Which means regardless of what the count was when the bet was made, as the new round is dealt out any playing decision or indice move should be made based on the current count. So basically, you can't change the bet you just put up, but you can change your playing decision based on what may be the new count. I thought that would be a given on how its played. When its my turn to play my hand I know what the current TC is, I don't care at all at this point what it was the previous round.

As far as taking insurance in premature counts, if you do it for risk aversion, or as cover, thats one thing. I personally choose not to do this too much, but I understand if somone may feel the need to. What I said in my quote was, do not deviate from your indices you have learned with your count because of fear of losing. That is not an acceptable reason for deviating from which you know is right. I also still stand by my statement that if fear is a consideration in your decision making, you should not be betting that money.

How to tell if you have the nerves to card count

For all the reasons Bojack said, God bless him for making me feel that sometimes I may actually live on this planet and it may not really be a dream within a dream after all, not only does this guy have the nerve to card-count, he probably also has enough nerve to jump out of an airplane without a chute lol.