Wonging Technique

[Sonny]

How much less effective is it compared to starting at the begining of shoe?

That’s a good question. It will depend on how many decks have been played before you start watching. Take, for example, a casino full of 6D games with two decks cut off. That’s not very good penetration so you decide to backcount all night long. You stand between two tables and count them both at the same time. The shoe on your left is freshly shuffled and the one on your right has two decks already dealt out. Both shoes will start at zero (or your IRC for unbalanced counts). You will be able to count 66% of the fresh shoe so the chances of finding a good count are decent. On the other hand, the other shoe is already missing two decks and another two have been cut off behind the cut card. You will only be able to count 33% of that shoe, which severely reduces your chances of finding a good count.

Starting from a fresh shoe is always better, but this technique might give you a little extra action if no fresh shoes are immediately available. It also helps to eliminate the “downtime” between shuffles. If you’re backcounting but there aren’t any dealers about to shuffle, just find one that shuffled recently and count their table until another dealer finishes shuffling.

-Sonny-

 

[avs21]

That’s a good question. It will depend on how many decks have been played before you start watching. Take, for example, a casino full of 6D games with two decks cut off. That’s not very good penetration so you decide to backcount all night long. You stand between two tables and count them both at the same time. The shoe on your left is freshly shuffled and the one on your right has two decks already dealt out. Both shoes will start at zero (or your IRC for unbalanced counts). You will be able to count 66% of the fresh shoe so the chances of finding a good count are decent. On the other hand, the other shoe is already missing two decks and another two have been cut off behind the cut card. You will only be able to count 33% of that shoe, which severely reduces your chances of finding a good count.

Starting from a fresh shoe is always better, but this technique might give you a little extra action if no fresh shoes are immediately available. It also helps to eliminate the “downtime” between shuffles. If you’re backcounting but there aren’t any dealers about to shuffle, just find one that shuffled recently and count their table until another dealer finishes shuffling.

-Sonny-

When you backcount two tables. Do you stand behind first base or third base at the tables?

Thank you

 

[Sonny]

When you backcount two tables. Do you stand behind first base or third base at the tables?

Both! You'll be behind third base of the right-hand table and first base of the left-hand table. Actually, you'll probably be closer to the second or third seat depending on where the best view is. Usually I'll focus on one table but pretend to be disinterested and make quick glances at the other table (or pretend to look around for a friend). Counting a table full of cards shouldn’t take more than a few seconds so you just need to time your glances right.

-Sonny-

 

[hopson77]

Makes a little more sense now. If I'm getting it, the table that's in mid shoe would be just like counting a shoe with awful pen?

 

[Sonny]

Makes a little more sense now. If I'm getting it, the table that's in mid shoe would be just like counting a shoe with awful pen?

Exactly. Imagine if the dealer burned two decks before dealing the first hand. Even if they dealt out all the rest of the cards it would still only be 66% pen. In fact, the dealers at Fitzgerald's in Vegas do something similar at their DD games. They will put the cut card at 75% pen then burn 1/4 deck. It looks like they're giving 75% pen but they're only giving about 50%. Now that's sneaky!

-Sonny-

 

[ScottH]

Start at the IRC and see how things go. You're pretending that it is the top of the shoe even though some of it has already been dealt. Since you haven't counted any cards yet you would start at the IRC and wait for the rest of the shoe to heat up.

The cards in the discard tray technically aren't "discarded" until you’ve counted them. Since you haven’t seen them you should mentally put them back in the shoe. It doesn’t matter how many cards have been dealt, it only matters how many you have counted.

-Sonny-

I wonder if this method is as effective with KO, and other unbalanced systems.

With a balanced system you expect the count to remain at 0 through the whole deck, so you can come in the middle of the shoe, and you can assume the count is 0. But with an unbalanced count, you expect the count to improve, since there are more cards that are counted as "plus". So if you came into the middle of a shoe, you wouldn't still start from the IRC would you? I think you would have to make some correction for the number of decks dealt. The correction would depend on the system used.

 

[Automatic Monkey]

I wonder if this method is as effective with KO, and other unbalanced systems.

With a balanced system you expect the count to remain at 0 through the whole deck, so you can come in the middle of the shoe, and you can assume the count is 0. But with an unbalanced count, you expect the count to improve, since there are more cards that are counted as "plus". So if you came into the middle of a shoe, you wouldn't still start from the IRC would you? I think you would have to make some correction for the number of decks dealt. The correction would depend on the system used.

Sounds like what we just puzzled through in another thread about my idea of coming in in the middle of a shoe. It isn't very effective,and you have to pretend the cards already dealt are on the other side of the cut card. Still it might have some applications.

One of the reasons I got away from unbalanced counts for shoe play is that Wonging is such an important thing, using unbalanced actually ends up being more complicated. It's doable, but you have to do deck estimation and division anyway.

 

[sagefr0g]

Quote:
Originally Posted by ScottH View Post
I wonder if this method is as effective with KO, and other unbalanced systems.

With a balanced system you expect the count to remain at 0 through the whole deck, so you can come in the middle of the shoe, and you can assume the count is 0. But with an unbalanced count, you expect the count to improve, since there are more cards that are counted as "plus". So if you came into the middle of a shoe, you wouldn't still start from the IRC would you? I think you would have to make some correction for the number of decks dealt. The correction would depend on the system used.

Sounds like what we just puzzled through in another thread about my idea of coming in in the middle of a shoe. It isn't very effective,and you have to pretend the cards already dealt are on the other side of the cut card. Still it might have some applications.

One of the reasons I got away from unbalanced counts for shoe play is that Wonging is such an important thing, using unbalanced actually ends up being more complicated. It's doable, but you have to do deck estimation and division anyway.

i've wondered about that also. what Sonny says about starting at the IRC makes sense it's just that what if say most of the red 7's or the specially weighted cards have already come out. seems as if that could skew the results. i dunno ......

best regards,
mr fr0g

 

[sagefr0g]

Sounds like what we just puzzled through in another thread about my idea of coming in in the middle of a shoe. It isn't very effective,and you have to pretend the cards already dealt are on the other side of the cut card. Still it might have some applications.

was thinking about this ploy some more.
lets say it's a six deck game. s17 das nra lsr and for ease of argument pen 83%
say we jump in at one deck left to actually be dealt and we don't know the count. using hi/lo the procedure would be to compute the TC using a divisor of six and we start the RC at zero. i believe this would be the conventional tact one would be advised to take. i suppose the true count theorem would support this but i'm not sure (actually don't fully understand it's meaning).
but anyway this is supposed to be acceptable. so in a sense it is almost as if we have bought ourselves a single deck game. albeit we are in reality unsure if the running count is a legit zero. none the less this is how we treat it.
if the game was truly a single deck playing just basic strategy would afford us a small edge. but in truth we are dealing with uncertainty here when we jump in this six deck game with one deck left to be dealt. none the less it would seem to be an advantage to take this gamble. if we could just obtain an RC=6 our likelyhood of having an advantage would be pretty high. it could turn out to be about as lively a game as a real single deck game.
one problem would be if the table was crowded one wouldn't get much mileage out of this. so perhaps jumping in at two decks left to be dealt could help in cases where the table has more players.
i should imagine the variance would be higher than normal using such a approach so perhaps it would be wise to tone the bet ramp down a bit.

best regards,
mr fr0g

 

[jetace]

Not knowing the true count at that point seems like it would completely throw that theory off. What if in the extreme case the running count was (-50) making your true count (-10). If you started a new RC in your scenario and began betting a little higher when your RC was +6, you'd be betting on a -4 TC.

Is there something I'm missing?

 

[sagefr0g]

Not knowing the true count at that point seems like it would completely throw that theory off. What if in the extreme case the running count was (-50) making your true count (-10). If you started a new RC in your scenario and began betting a little higher when your RC was +6, you'd be betting on a -4 TC.

Is there something I'm missing?

good point. such a case as you outline could definately occur in the scenerio we've been discussing. it's a gamble and more of a gamble than we take when we up our bets and we have started out a fresh shoe and an advantageous true count presents. there is a bright side to the whole story however. in the long run the true count frequency distributions are pretty near even. that means that in the long run we should encounter a nearly equal number of situations like the case you outline and the reverse case where it is a spectacular positive count. this should hold true through out the entire spectrum of true count frequency distributions. so things would tend to even out in the long run. the problem i think would be that taking your case where the RC = -50 (in reality) well in this case the likelyhood that a bunch of low cards would come pouring out of the pack would be high. that would be inducing us to bet up into a bad situation and conversly in the reverse case where the RC = +50 (in reality) the likelyhood would be that a bunch of high cards would come pouring out of the pack. that would not be inducing us to bet high in a good situation. so our tendency in these situations would be to bet opposite to what we should. that would translate into a long term disadvantage mainly as the result of miss-informed betting. clearly our betting strategy needs to be modified if we are to be jumping into partially dealt shoes. using Wong's frequency distributions i figure we should find that we end up jumping into an actual true count of -zero, zero and +zero about 44.1% of the time in the long run. so approximately 44 percent of the time our normal way of betting would be in line. i should think that the -1 and +1 true counts would not be so much of a problem in the skewing of our bet patterns (after all we don't normally bet higher for a tc=1. those -1 and +1 trues weigh in at 23.26% of the time in the long run. so about 67 percent of the time we should still be in pretty good shape as far as how we bet. that leaves 33% of the time that our betting could end up back asswards . about half of those bets would be in the positive range so at least we'd be winning a higher percentage of them even if they aren't optimal bets. that leaves us 15% of the time that we are messing up our bets big time. not to bad but i think we would want to bet differently overall for the jump in with out knowing the count tactic than we would for the start fresh from the new shoe and wong in technique. how we would change our bet scheme i'm not sure but it would be by decreasing our bet levels taking into consideration that around 15% of the time we'd tend to be overbetting.
heh, heh well i'm pretty much going on here just thinking about this out loud. dunno if i'm even close to looking at this accurately.

best regards,
mr fr0g

 

[jetace]

That is a really interesting situation you bring up. I wonder if someone could create a sim that included all the possible TC's at a given point in the deck, with wong's frequencies applied. It would be a lot of work, but the results would be quite interesting.