Thunder said:
Ok let me ask you this AM. If say one deck has already been played. You start watching the game and from the time you started watching the game, the RC is +3. Which is more likely to have happened. There have been a higher proportion of high cards that have gone out already, the RC has been neutral, or the count was already high? I'm saying the first scenario is the likeliest. From what I understand, you're saying absolutely no. Can you explain why mathematically?
Look at the question conceptually. Suppose you begin backcounting off the top of a six deck shoe using the Hi/Lo Count. One-and-a-half decks have been cut off behind the cut card. After getting a half deck into the shoe, the RC is +11 -- making your current TC +2
.0.
Question #1: What RC are those 1
.5 decks behind the cut card likely to be? Remember now, everything you know about the unseen cards is most likely to be proportionally distributed throughout. Therefore, your best answer is +3
(creating a +2.0 TC for those "dead" cards). That leaves a +8 RC for the remaining four decks yet to be dealt
(also a +2.0 TC).
Now, what if instead, you began backcounting that shoe after the first 1
.5 decks had been dealt -- but this shoe had no cards cut off and was going to be dealt down to the last card! It just so happens that again, after counting a half deck, you also had a +11 RC. What you've now got is 2 decks in the discard tray and 4 decks yet to be dealt.
Question #2: How are those first 1
.5 decks in this discard tray any different than the 1
.5 decks behind the cut card from the first scenario? Put another way, what if instead of cutting off 1
.5 decks with a cut card, the dealer burned 1
.5 decks into the discard tray? Both ways, you're merely sampling and counting 26 random cards from somewhere in the pack!
So you simply again must assign an anticipated +3 RC to the first 1.5 decks that you didn't see come out, leaving a +8 RC for the 4 decks that remain to be dealt -- all due to the +11 RC in the half deck that you observed!
So backcounting after the shoe has begun basically just puts those dealt cards behind the cut card, thereby decreasing penetration.
Whether to backcount a shoe already in progress depends largely upon how many players are at that table. If 1 deck has already been dealt at a 2 handed table, should it go positive after another deck, you'll get in 10 rounds playing two spots at a time before the cut card pops out. If it were a 5 handed table and you backcounted right off the top, and then it went positive after one deck, you'll get in 9 rounds on that shoe playing 2 at a time.
I think an offsetting factor to that would be that counting right off the top will give you more sharply abnormal counts late in the shoe due to effectively deeper penetration. Someone check me out on this -- I'm tired of writing.