Wong's book is a great source of info. My favorite book for someone
just starting out & learning to count is "Knock-Out" Blackjack by
Olaf Vancura & Ken Fuchs. It is loaded with good general and
specific info. The "K-O" card-counting system is among the easier
sytems to learn/master & one of its greater strengths is that it can
be learned and implemented in increments.Hope this helps,
There are lots of card-counting systems out there; the simple plus-minus is very easy to master and gets 99% of the accuracy of most of the more complex ones, while simpler ones may fall away from absolute accuracy by a significant amount more.
Wong's book doesn't have any count simpler than plus-minus, but none is necessary; it does have more advanced count systems, which I personally found too difficult to master and still attend to all the other matters necessary while playing, including avoiding distractions without looking like you're concentrating too hard.
Counting is the easy part - I can teach most people to count cards in ten minutes, whether single deck or shoe (a great myth is that shoes are harder to count - the truth about shoes is that they offer fewer opportunities where the player has an edge, thus requiring a greater bet spread for the same advantage, and if you lose count, you need to wait longer to start over).
What takes some time at the start is learning basic strategy perfectly - preferably with the small variations that occur depending on whether one is playing a shoe or single-deck, and what the game's rules are regarding splitting, doubling down after splitting, whether the dealer must hit or stand on soft 17, whether insurance is offered, whether surrender is offered, and so on.
In many ways, it's like learning VP strategy with fine points for your particular game, not only such as WHAT game it is, but variations in pay table, penalty cards, changes with progressives, and so on.
And after that, the trickiest part is money management and weathering the high variance; I don't know the mathematical figure, but I always figured my hourly expectation at one or two of my "unit" bets per hour, plus or minus twenty of those units.
I've had a run where I lost one hundred betting units in four hours, and where I won one hundred betting units in four hours. These are huge swings for just a few hours, and although it's unlikely to have such big swings back to back, the cards don't remember how your last hour went, so like VP, a string of losses does not imply that you are "due" for a win.
Wong's book is good because it addresses not only the mechanics of play and card counting, but talks about casino conduct, disguises, money management, risk of ruin, and other factors that must be understood to play successfully.
In the end, playing without errors (made by mistake, or because you can't avoid playing "hunches") and without giving too much advantage away when you vary your play for "cover" is the biggest trick, besides avoiding detection itself. I have heard that some casinos now have systems either in place or soon to be in place where the eye in the sky can read all the cards and track the count and every player's playing style by computer, along with RFID chips that make tracking betting patterns absolutely perfectly a no-brainer (well, a machine-brainer), as well as making it hard to disguise winnings by slipping chips off the table undetected. If the computerized observation is in place, it shouldn't take more than ten minutes for the machine to detect a card counter with 99% confidence, I would think.
Of course, VP is theoretically even better suited for detection of expert play, since it's already 100% computerized; the machines would only need the software to track the correctness of one's plays according to a variety of strategy tables, in order to determine if one is a novice, a skilled player but not enough to overcome the casino edge, or a source of likely losses for the house -- but I don't think they've done that yet --- don't know why not.
Incidentally, there are theoretically non-counting skills such as shuffle tracking; I have no idea if there is any way to "prove" that someone has learned such a skill and can predictably and consistently use it to create any additional advantage, but there are a lot of believers. There are similarly believers in controlling dice rolls, and I also don't know if that has been evaluated to see if those who think they can do this are just lucky, or are really able to demonstrate such control. You might pick up that I'm suspicious about these "skill sets".
--BG
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