Ø  Cover 3 – Never insure when you have a hand of 3-16, always insure Blackjacks, and use the correct index for 17-21 (medium cover).

Ø  Cover 4 – Always insure BJ, increase index to +5 (+10 for FELT) for all other hands. That is, generally do not take insurance when you do not have Blackjack even if the odds are a bit in your favor, but take it if the odds are significantly in your favor (light cover).

Ø  No Cover – Insure when the count is equal to or above the index only (normal counter).

Ø  Max – Keep an Insurance Side Count (maximum advantage but difficult, very few people keep a side-count for insurance).

Let us start at the top. The top of the cyan colored area gives us the SCOREs using an insurance side count. This is a side count used specifically for the insurance bet and is as good as you can get without hole-carding. This is not advised — it is only displayed to provide a reference point to the best possible insurance play.

The top of the pink area represents the SCOREs assuming normal use of the insurance index. This is the correct, no cover, method of play. So, the cyan area is the gain in using a side count.

The top of the yellow area depicts always insuring BJ and increasing the index to +5 for other hands. This adds some cover and yet costs very little. This method of cover looks like a normal player except when the count is so high you have to insure.

The top of the blue area displays our results if we never insure hands of 3-16, always insure Blackjacks and use the correct index for 17-21. This looks more like a normal player, but we can see that all of the yellow area is lost by adding this additional cover.

The top of the green area displays results for no insurance (the Basic Strategy play) and the red area is for insuring all BJs and nothing else (the most common play). The last two methods are extremely close in performance — so close you may not be able to make out the green area.

Obviously the farther we deviate from the correct play, the more costly to our bottom line. The chart dramatically shows the importance of playing insurance correctly, or at least reasonably close to correctly.

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger