Card Counting in chemin de fer is a method to increase your odds of winning. If you’re great at it, you can basically take the odds and put them in your favor. This works because card counters elevate their bets when a deck rich in cards which are advantageous to the player comes around. As a general rule of thumb, a deck rich in 10’s is far better for the player, because the croupier will bust extra generally, and the player will hit a black jack far more often.
Most card counters maintain track of the ratio of high cards, or 10’s, by counting them as a one or a – one, and then provides the opposite one or – one to the minimal cards in the deck. Some techniques use a balanced count where the variety of low cards may be the same as the amount of ten’s.
But the most interesting card to me, mathematically, is the five. There have been card counting techniques back in the day that required doing nothing a lot more than counting the number of fives that had left the deck, and when the five’s had been gone, the gambler had a big advantage and would raise his bets.
A very good basic technique player is obtaining a 99.5 per cent payback percentage from the gambling establishment. Every single five that’s come out of the deck adds point six seven per cent to the gambler’s anticipated return. (In an individual deck game, anyway.) That means that, all things being equal, having one 5 gone from the deck offers a player a little benefit over the casino.
Having 2 or three five’s gone from the deck will basically give the gambler a fairly substantial edge more than the casino, and this is when a card counter will generally increase his wager. The issue with counting five’s and nothing else is that a deck lower in 5’s occurs fairly rarely, so gaining a massive benefit and making a profit from that situation only comes on rare instances.
Any card between 2 and eight that comes out of the deck boosts the gambler’s expectation. And all nine’s. ten’s, and aces improve the casino’s expectation. Except 8’s and 9’s have incredibly tiny effects on the outcome. (An 8 only adds 0.01 percent to the player’s expectation, so it is generally not even counted. A nine only has point one five per cent affect in the other direction, so it is not counted either.)
Understanding the effects the reduced and high cards have on your anticipated return on a wager would be the first step in learning to count cards and play chemin de fer as a winner.