Pavel said:
Say I was playing 2-deck and since with KO this means the IRC is -4, how do I calculate a true count, and how will I know when that true count is "good".
You don't calculate a true count with unbalanced counts. That's the beauty of the system.
I'm going to use an 4-deck shoe as an example, because it avoids fractions. Because there are more low cards than high cards, at some point, you've seen 16 more low cards than high cards (if at no other time, when all the decks are dealt out you will have a running count of +16).
If one deck has gone by, then you would expect 4 extra low cards to come out naturally. So your true count is 12/3 = +4. What if two decks have gone by? You'd expect 8 extra low cards to come out naturally, so your true count is 8/2 = +4. What if three decks have gone by? You'd expect 12 extra low cards to come out naturally, so your true count is 4/1 = +4.
The beauty of an unbalanced system is that when the running count equals the "pivot" - (4 x decks) for K-O and (2 x decks) for Red 7 - that the true count is equal to the running count no matter how many decks remain. Generally, the running count is started negative so that the pivot numerically equals the true count for easy memorization of where the pivot is: -(4 x decks) + 4 for KO and -(2 x decks) + 2 for Red 7. This gives pivots of +4 and +2, respectively.
So what if the running count doesn't equal the pivot? Well, that's the drawback of unbalanced systems. As you move away from the pivot, the true count and running count start diverging. This is the price you pay for the simplicity of the unbalanced system. The count is most accurate when you're close to the pivot.
Generally, to minimize this limitation, you pick a system whose pivot is between +1 and +5. Now, your count is most accurate when the game is most "interesting" to you and where you're making most of your strategy decisions. You don't care if your running count is -8 and the true count is -4, but a true count of +2 is very interesting because that's where you first show an advantage over the house. Likewise, a true count of +4 is very interesting because that's where a lot of strategy changes are made and where big jumps in betting occur.
I have never used Red 7 or K-O, so if you want any further opinion, you should either read "Blackbelt in Blackjack" by Arnold Snyder (a big fan of Red 7) or "KO Blackjack", respectively. Or, ask some of the people on this board. There seem to be a lot of KO fans here.
