Modern Blackjack Principles

[Norm]

The general principles behind the construction of Modern Blackjack are:

• Use charts wherever possible to nail home points.
• Avoid repeating information that exists in dozens of other books.
• Explain the options available to the player and let him/her choose among them.
• On advanced topics, attempt to add new information of value to players, but not of particular value to casinos.
• Warn the player of the pitfalls and avoid ridiculous claims of riches.
• This is not a "math" book. Although there was heavy use of math in the development of the book, and illustration of the principles, I provide references to the math instead of including the formulae or derivations.
• Try to keep the main body of text reasonably short (I failed on that one) by moving much of the information out of the text and on to separate web pages.

Some of the unique features:

• Detailed description of casino play.
• Explanation of unusual rules (well over 100 variations).
• The first explanation of actual Basic Strategy rule advantages. Existing Blackjack books ignore the cut-card effect for historical and practicality reasons.
• The first explanation of actual counting rule advantages in print. Other books look at Basic Strategy.
• Two counting systems, including what I believe to be truly the easiest real card counting system.
• The first summary study of the rule sets that actually exist in today’s casinos from a database of 8,500 Blackjack tables.
• Detailed descriptions throughout on the use of software to improve each skill level.
• Detailed description of casino “heat.”
• Comprehensive study of the cost of cover (camouflaging your play). (Much of this I have placed on the web in the past.)
• A comprehensive comparison of different counting systems, including descriptions and a unique method of comparison, I call SuperSCORE, that plots 39,000 sim results in one chart.
• Discussion of true-counted KO including tables not previously published
• Shuffle-tracking information, not before in print.
• Hole-carding tables, including partial information and cost of cover.
• Spanish 21 hole-carding
• Next-carding tables
• The only source of “counting by inference” info I know of.
• Studies on team play not available elsewhere.
• A companion website including additional tables, sims, software, enlarged charts, etc.

In creating this book, I looked at several pieces of eBook software and was disappointed. I invented the web-book concept used here as I wanted people to have the ability to link to pages. At the bottom of each page, a link to that page can be found. Now when a posts says “It is on page 328,” the post can actually link to that page.