Knockout Blackjack Book
- Knock-Out Blackjack by Olaf Vancura and Ken Fuchs This book presents the Knock-Out count. It is a unbalanced counting system in which no running count to true count conversion is required. I respect the system and know many legitimate counters use it.
- Knock-Out Blackjack by Ken Fuchs and Olaf Vancura. Knock-Out Blackjack is sub-titled “The Easiest Card Counting System Ever Devised”. We think this is a little bit of a misnomer, as the Ace Five count is arguably a lot easier. But in terms of a practical system that you can actually use to get an edge.
- Knock-Out Blackjack now in it’s third edition is a card-counting system that eliminates the mountain of mental arithmetic necessary to win at blackjack. The scientifically devised unbalanced K-O count can be used profitably anywhere blackjack is played: Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Mississippi, riverboat casinos, Native American casinos, the.
- Following the publication of the first edition of KnockOut Blackjack, we received several inquiries for information about applying K-O in the 4-deck game. It is included here. The key count for 4 decks is +11 above the IRC. The pivot point is +16 above the IRC. Take insurance, as always, at the count which is one below the pivot point.
Knock-Out Blackjack - Excerpts
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Here's four years and 14 blackjack books' worth of advice:1) Yes, you can beat blackjack by learning how to count-even against six-deck shoes.2) The biggest reason players lose after learning how to count is they are making counting mistakes and don't know it.3) Knock-Out Blackjack is the one level-1 system that virtually takes the mistake factor out of counting.That's the biggest reason it's.
A book by Olaf Vancura and Ken Fuchs
Excerpts from Chapters 1 and 5. ©1996, Olaf Vancura.
Note: This book was updated in 1998.
Thorp's book eventually created a sensation, riding a wave of popularity to the NewYork Times Bestseller List. And why not? For, as Bryce Carlson says in Blackjackfor Blood1 'Here was a book, written by a respectedmathematician from a prominent university, that contained the secret formula for makingfree money -- or so some thought.'
Blackjack's popularity soared. Major magazines ran articles describing how the gamecould be beaten. Consider the accolades in the following excerpt from Life:'Thorp does not cheat. But Thorp cannot lose. Humans have been betting on games ofchance since the dawn of history, but Thorp must be considered the greatest system playerof all time.'
Not surprisingly, casinos first reacted with anxiety. Comments Carlson, 'If theman in the street was overreacting a bit--it was nothing compared to the hysteria thatseized the casino industry. Suddenly, they had nightmares of thousands of trained countersswooping down on them like swarms of merciless locusts, devouring every hundred dollarbill in sight.' This frame of mind led many casinos to change the rules of the gameto make it harder for players to win.
This situation did not last long, as Lance Humble and Carl Cooper comment, in TheWorld's Greatest Blackjack Book2, 'Too many playersrefused to play blackjack with these unfavorable rules, and the win volumes dropped offdramatically.'
To bring back players, casinos were soon forced to capitulate and reinstate the oldrules. After some tense days, the casinos began to relax when they realized that thoughmany people thought they could beat the game, few actually could. Remark Humble andCooper, 'The casinos soon realized that they had nothing to fear. The publicity thatThorp's book provided turned out to be a boon.' Why? 'The players kept losing atexactly the same rate as before, only now there were more of them.'
Blackjack's popularity continues in high stride still today. Apparently the lure ofplaying a game that is capable of being beaten is sufficient for most people, who somehowbelieve that Dame fortune will smile on them despite their inadequacies in play.
But these people seem to miss the point. It is not enough merely to show up to a gamethat can be beaten. One needs to play accordingly. It's similar to a college midterm examwhere you want to get an A grade. To show up and take the exam is necessary, but obviouslynot sufficient for the A. You must not only show up; you must do the preparatory workbeforehand.
Rather than put in the work, practice, and patience (!) to learn to play well, Carlsonargues, 'This is not what the people were looking for. They preferred instead tocontinue in their old, uninformed ways.' Humble and Cooper opine that most people whobought Thorp's book simply did not take the time to master card-counting.
Knockout Blackjack Book Pdf
Of course, it didn't help when supposed 'experts' burst on the scene withmisinformation. The game of blackjack had, in one form or another, been around for about acentury. And during this time it had been played very poorly by players. Suddenly, whenthe diligent work of an esteemed scientist became public, out of the gaming industrywoodwork came self-proclaimed card-counting experts, ready to profess that everyone elseknew nothing!
It's amazing how that seems to work, isn't it? This is reminiscent of the developmentsin the first part of this century shortly after Albert Einstein published his generaltheory of relativity. The great scientist Arthur Eddington was in West Africa observing aneclipse in an attempt to perform a test of Einstein's ideas. Queried a reporter toEddington, 'It is said that the general theory is so complicated that there are butthree men in the world who can understand it.' Eddington replied, 'Who's thethird?'
Unfortunately, some in the casino industry apparently didn't understand the conceptsand thus misrepresented the ideas. John Scarne boldly wrote, 'You can't remember allthe exposed cards dealt to a full table of players.' While the statement may be truefor most people, it is quite irrelevant and thus misleading. The Thorp system didn'trequire anyone to remember all the exposed cards. Quite the contrary, Thorp recognizedthat this was beyond the means of mere mortals and designed a system accessible todiligent everyday folks.
Furthermore, Wilson comments that writers associated with casino management may'purposely give some bum steers.' Scarne wrote of card-counting as'chicanery' and that 'an expert job of card casing requires unusual naturalability.' Sentiments such as these, from purported gaming 'experts' withties to the gaming industry, seemed intended only to unfairly dampen the impact of Thorp'sfindings.
But even Thorp, who knew that his book would release the genie from the bottle, did notrealize the future impact of his work. The fact that a respected scientist had shown thatblackjack could, in principle, be beaten was enough to move casinos to action. Thorpwrote, 'Eventually, when the strategy we outline becomes general practice, casinosmay change the game or discontinue it.'
Clearly it is true that the game has changed markedly. In the 1960s, casinos typicallydealt from a single deck dealt through to the end. Whenever the pack was exhausted, oftenmid-hand, the dealer would reshuffle the discards and continue dealing. The burn card wasshown to all players. Today, typically 1/4 of the pack is cut off and these cards arenever brought into play until perhaps the next shuffle. In fact, it is a cardinal sin fora dealer to now run out of cards; in some casinos this is cause for immediate dismissal.
But Thorp greatly underestimated his influence over the industry. He surmised,'This (change) will happen gradually, over a period of years, and even then, it willnot take place in all of the many and diverse places where blackjack is played.'
| Three Sides of the Same Coin |
|---|
| The old adage that there are two sides to every story certainly applies to recaps ofthe ensuing events after the publication of Beat the Dealer. Below is a sampling ofspin (or perhaps revisionist history) provided by the feuding sides in the casino/cardcounter battle (underlined emphasis courtesy of your authors). The card counter's side:Carlson writes, in Blackjack for Blood, 'Their paranoia out of control, theLas Vegas casinos snapped! On April Fool's Day 1964, the casinos on the Las Vegas Stripchanged the rules of blackjack. The first (and only) time the rules of a major casino gamehad ever been significantly altered. And the changes were drastic. Doubling down wasrestricted to two-card totals of 11 only, and a pair of Aces could no longer be split. Theeffect on the average player was disastrous, and play at the tables all but vanished. The casino's side: A 'suave PR man,' in a Newsweek article dated April13, 1964, indicates that the operators eliminated the 'fringe benefits' of thegame, namely 'the right to double most bets and to split hands of two Aces.' A third side to the story? Thorp's nonchalant reply (in the same Newsweekarticle) to all the hoopla: 'Instead of five hours, now I'll have to play seven tomake the same money.' |
The most popular counts today are, perhaps surprisingly, variations of the originalpoint-count systems. For all the improvements and simplifications that have occurred inthe last 35 years, card-counting still remains relatively inaccessible to most of us. It'ssimply too much to do, what with all the bells clanging, dealers talking, cocktailwaitresses jiggling, pit bosses staring, eyes-in-the-sky watching, players chatting, andmoney changing hands.
So have we exhausted the possibilities? Has blackjack been milked for all it's worth?Thankfully no. Is there anything left for the rest of us? The answer is yes!
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the need for simplicity is why the Knock-Outmethod was conceived. We believe the Knock-Out system is, to date, the easiestprofessional-level card-counting system. It is the system capable of making better playersout of almost all of us. The ease of play makes card-counting a 'fun' event foreven the casual player. And the simplicity does not come at the expense of performance.The K-O system is a top caliber tool at your disposal. Let's get ready for round 2.
Ease of Use
The unbalanced nature of the Knock-Out count (which eliminates the need for remainingdeck estimation and a true count conversion), the natural level-1 card values, the lack ofany side counts, the innovation of a reduced and rounded matrix (which eases the effort tomemorize and apply the strategy matrix), and the ability for you, as a player, to customtailor the Preferred system, makes the K-O system unique. To date, no other system hasall, or even three, of these attributes.
The following table compares the most popular systems today in terms of ease of use.The three comparison parameters left of the solid bar (type, level, and whether or not aside count is employed) are intrinsic properties for each particular system and aretherefore fixed3.
The comparison parameter to the right of the bar (whether or not a rounded matrixexists) is included for the present-day version of these systems. In principle, any systemdeveloper so inclined could develop a rounded matrix for a system, hence this is not anintrinsic property of the system per se. But of course this requires effort, whereas theK-O system has already been designed with ease of use in mind.
| System Comparison: Ease of Use | ||||
| System | Type | Level | Side count? | Round matrix? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| K-O | U | 1 | N | Y |
| Red 7 | U | 1+* | N | N |
| UZ II | U | 2 | N | N |
| Hi-Opt I | B | 1 | Y | N |
| High-Low | B | 1 | N | N |
| Omega II | B | 2 | Y | N |
| *Red 7 requires the player to keep track of colors on 7-valued cards. | ||||
Performance
We've demonstrated that the K-O system is easy to apply. But how well does it perform?Below we give comparison tables to demonstrate the power of the K-O system.
We note that our rounding of the K-O matrix comes at the expense of expectation. In the'Reduced' comparisons which follow, we will always be adopting the top 16 playsof the K-O Preferred system. Thus, we are comparing the Knock-Out rounded matrices to theunrounded top 16 matrix plays of the other systems, in effect giving the other systems thebenefit of a slight edge.
Let's first consider a 2-deck game with the benchmark rules. We choose the 2-deck gameto study in detail because it is a compromise between single-deck and multiple-deck games.To remind you, our benchmark 2-decker included the dealer standing on soft 17 (S17),doubling down on any first two cards (DOA), no doubling after splitting (noDAS), and nosurrender. We have fixed the penetration at 75%4.
Below is a table which summarizes the 2-deck results. Each entry in the following tableis based on a simulation of at least several hundred million hands. As before, perfectplay was assumed; no betting or playing errors were introduced. To be fair to each system,we have placed the different systems on the same scale in a modified proportional bettingfashion, as described in the last chapter. Note that by doing so, we force each system tohave nearly the same chance of ruin5.
We have adopted the benchmark of the last chapter; each entry was calculated based on aspread of 1 to 5 units. As before, intermediate values rise linearly with the player'sexpectation, with a constant of proportionality (ramp) of 3, such that the minimum wageris 1 unit, and the maximum wager of 5 units is made at an expectation of +1.67%6.
| Simulation Results: 2-deck game (7) (DOA, noDAS, S17, 75% pen; Spread 1 to 5 w/ ramp of 3) | |||
| Expectation | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| System | Core | Reduced | Full |
| Knock-Out | 0.86 | 1.14 | 1.23 |
| Red 7 | 0.82 | 1.08 | 1.12 |
| UZ II | 0.85 | 1.16 | N/A |
| Hi-Opt I | 0.80 | 1.09 | 1.19 |
| High-Low | 0.81 | 1.08 | 1.17 |
| Omega II | 0.85 | 1.15 | 1.28 |
In constructing this table and those that follow, we have sought toplace the systems on an even playing field. As such, each system's variation (of Core,Reduced, or Full) has approximately the same number of strategic plays to memorize thatpotentially deviate from the basic strategy:
The 'Core' column, for each system, assumes that the only strategy deviationfrom basic strategy is the insurance wager.
The 'Reduced' column includes only the 16 most significant matrix entrieswhen comparing to the basic strategy. For the unbalanced systems (which behave verysimilarly strategically), we have adopted the 16 positions which exist in the Preferredform of the Knock-Out system (of course each system has different numerical values asappropriate for the 16 matrix positions). For the Knock-Out 6- and 8-deck simulations,only 14 plays are used (the C value is omitted). For the balanced systems, we have adoptedDon Schlesinger's 'Sweet 16' set of 16 plays which are the most rewarding tomemorize.
The 'Full' column includes the 40 or so most significant matrix entries forall systems (much less than 40 entries for the K-O and unbalanced systems in the case of 6and 8 decks; see Appendix III).
Knockout Blackjack Book
As you can see, the systems' expectations are all bunched together fairly tightly. Nosystem's performance stands out as superior over all the rest.
Note in particular that K-O compares admirably with all other systems. Indeed, the twomost popular systems in use today, the Hi-Opt I and the High-Low, are both edged slightlyby the Knock-Out system. This is despite the fact that the Knock-Out system is vastlysimpler to employ.
Footnotes
Knockout Blackjack Book
1 Bryce Carlson, Blackjack for Blood,1994, CompuStar Press.
2 Lance Humble & Carl Cooper, The World's GreatestBlackjack Book, 1980, Doubleday.
3 The side count, in principle, can be discontinued by aplayer. Since side counts require so much effort to implement, some may argue that aproper comparison between systems thus should be made without any such extra counts.Qualitatively, the elimination of side counts (for those systems which employ them) comesat considerable expense in expectation. In our comparison, eliminating all side countswould serve to enhance the relative performance of K-O and other singular-count systems.
4 See Appendix IV for a discussion of the effect on K-O ofvarying penetration.
5 See Appendix V for confirmation of this statement.
6 As mentioned in the last chapter, varying the rampingfactor has little effect on the relative performance of the systems.
7 Sources for all comparisons in this chapter-- Red 7: Coreadapted from Arnold Snyder's Blackbelt in Blackjack; Reduced and Full plays for 1and 2 decks adapted from Arnold Snyder's 'The Big Tilt' article in BlackjackForum, March, 1994; Reduced and Full plays for 6 and 8 decks based on applicableextrapolations from K-O. Unbalanced Zen II: All versions adapted from George C's TheUnbalanced Zen II. Hi-Opt I: Core and Full adapted from Lance Humble and Carl Cooper'sThe World's Greatest Blackjack Book; Reduced plays are Humble and Cooper's matrixentries for Don Schlesinger's 'Illustrious 18' less the two splitting Tensplays, hereinafter referred to as the 'Sweet 16.' High-Low: Core and Fulladapted from Stanford Wong's Professional Blackjack; Reduced plays are Wong'smatrix entries for Schlesinger's 'Sweet 16.' Omega II: Core and Full adaptedfrom Bryce Carlson's Blackjack for Blood; Reduced plays are Carlson's matrixentries for Schlesinger's 'Sweet 16.'
LastUpdate 04/05/05