The tag values approximate the value to the player of each card — actually, the negative of the value since we are counting cards that are no longer available. The count goes up when bad cards have been dealt. This is good because it means there are fewer bad cards in the remaining cards. The higher the count, the higher your advantage. The higher your advantage, the more you bet. This is the heart of card counting. One number, moving up and down, tells you when it makes sense to bet more. We are not guaranteed to win when the advantage increases. But, on average, we will win more chips than we lose.

The following chart provides the advantage at each count in a single-deck game. We can see that the advantage is against us at counts of zero and below, but then turns in our favor when the count reaches +1. That is when we will start increasing our bets in a single-deck game.

Note: This is not true in games where Blackjack pays 6:5. Additional charts and explanations can be found in the “How Blackjack Works” chapter.

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 © 2009 Norman Wattenberger