When to leave?

[noodleZ]

Alright, I've been teaching myself to count for the past week using CVBJ. I decided to take my practice to the kitchen table and I managed to lose for the first time. I dealt myself from 6 decks and the game started alright, then took a quick nose dive and I started losing my minimum bet. The count got high and I doubled my bet and won a few hands, but I ended up down 12 units with 3 decks left and a true count of -1. I got frustrated with myself and just stopped the game.

When should one leave the tables when the count goes negative?

[positiveEV]

You won't win all the time by counting, it's just that over the time your wins will be bigger than your lost. This is what many people fail to understand.

You should leave when the count gets negative if you can, but if you think it will draw too much attention (IE: it's the 10th time you do it in 20min) then you should try to judge the situation yourself. If the count gets negative at the beginning of the shoe then you should leave because it's very unlikely that it will turn positive very soon.

[EasyRhino]

Ideally, don't play a hand in any negative count. Or even a zero count. Realistically, people will try to wong out at a count of -1, or -2 if they're really stuck at the table.

In terms of toughening yourself up for losses though, I recommend playing some in high counts. Either use CV, or take you kitchen table cards and alter the composition (intentionally create a low-then-high shoe, or replace low cards with a lot of high cards then just bet big).

[noodleZ]

So, let's say my game was a real one. I would have been right to leave at -1 and just find a new game, correct?

[positiveEV]

In a perfect world, you would leave if the count is not higher than 0, but 75% of the counts won't be higher than 0 so you can't actually do that in real conditions. Leaving at -1 seems more realistic.

[Thunder]

I don't know if there is any validity to this but I find more often than not, when I am 7 bets or initial units ahead, that's when the cards start to take a turn downhill. Sometimes you can sort of feel when the shoe is changing because the rate at which you're winning seems to slow down until you are just grinding it out. Again this is just based on my observations.

[EasyRhino]

I don't think there's any validity to that.

Noodz, there's all kinds of different ways to wong (Blackjack Attack has a couple of chapters dedicated to the subject). But one simple, fairly conservative approach would be to wong in with a TC of +2 or even +3, and wong out with a TC of 0 or -1. (Personally, I'd hang in with a TC of 0 if there was still a lot of the shoe left).