Do we spend more time in positive or negative counts?

This is not a particularly useful page — but the question comes up now and again and the answer is more complex than might be supposed. It feels as though the true count spends more time in negative territory than positive territory. Is this true? First, if you floor counts, this is clearly true as you always integerize the count downward. But suppose you truncate, which would round positive counts down and negative counts up? And suppose you calculate the remaining cards in the shoe exactly and do not use a cut-card, removing effects of estimation and the cut-card effect (discussed earlier)?

The below chart is like the earlier True Count Frequencies chart, except that it has been folded in half to better compare the positive and negative counts. The red line shows the positive true counts for counts with magnitudes of 1 through 7, and the green line shows the negative counts for the same magnitudes.

What we see in this chart is a greater number of -1 than +1 counts. More on the next page.

www.qfit.com/book/z804Chart.gif

 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger