Olaf Vancura and Ken
Fuchs
KO – K-O stands for Knock-Out Blackjack and also
Ken and Olaf, the designers of the K-O Count — a very easy, yet powerful,
unbalanced strategy optimized for betting. Becoming one of the most popular
card counting systems and probably the easiest of the legitimate, published
Blackjack strategies. Described in Olaf Vancura and Ken Fuchs’s book Knock-Out
Blackjack, Isochoric Publishing, 1996. Most experts initially had
difficulty accepting that this count could be as powerful as it is, given
its simplicity. (Some still cannot.) However, it is now generally accepted
to be on a par with Hi-Lo. For extra gain, some people true-count K-O.
Although, this substantially increases difficulty.
KO comes in three flavors: Rookie, which has no indexes,
Preferred, which has compromise indexes, and Full, which has accurate indexes.
Olaf Vancura is now working on the casino side. Ken Fuchs is
no longer active in Blackjack and sold his interest to Anthony Curtis. I
believe an earlier strategy with the same tag values, the “All Sevens Count,” was
independently introduced in The Book of British Blackjack by Dr.
Zadehkoochak in 1992. It is no longer in print.
Card Tag Values
|
Strategy
|
A
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
9
|
T
|
|
KO (all versions)
|
-1
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
0
|
0
|
-1
|
Specifics
|
Rookie
|
Preferred
|
Full
|
|
Strategy Type
|
Unbalanced
|
Unbalanced
|
Unbalanced
|
|
Level
|
I
|
I
|
I
|
|
Betting Correlation
|
.98
|
.98
|
.98
|
|
Playing Efficiency
|
-
|
.55
|
.55
|
|
Insurance Correlation
|
-
|
.78
|
.78
|
|
Ease of use
|
8.5
|
7.5
|
7
|
|
Ace-Reckoned
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Compromise Indexes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
No
|
|
Suit Aware
|
No
|
No
|
No
|
|