Many novice card counters make the mistake of estimating their edge by only using the running count in live casino blackjack. This may work with counting systems like the KO for example where the count is unbalanced but it leads to horrible errors with balanced counts like the hi-lo where there has to be a true count conversion. To better explain what I mean then an example should be instructive. You have a running count of +8 with the hi-lo counting system…..now is this count sufficient enough to increase your bet? The answer is of course that we don’t know and any player who automatically increases their bet here is potentially making a big mistake. Not all running counts of +8 are the same because to better identify why this is the case then we first need to ascertain just what the running count actually does. The “running count” is the count that you have when you add and subtract the pluses and the minuses with the passing of each individual card. But this is only the first step of ascertaining if you should bet. The running count actually measures the ratio of high cards to low cards and that ratio can be massively different. Remember that the casino begins each shoe with a roughly 0.5% house edge and so the advantage needs to swing considerably just to put the player into a situation where they are playing even with the house. What you have to do is to take the running count and then divide that by the number of decks remaining to be dealt. So if the running count is +9 and three decks remain then nine divided by three gives us a true count of +3. The edge swings across to the player roughly by 0.5% for each true count point. This means that with the house starting with an edge of around 0.5% that the true count has to reach +1 for the player to be breaking even and +2 to have a 0.5% edge over the house. So if the first nine cards out of the shoe in a four deck game were all low cards which gave us a running count of +9 then we would still be dividing that figure by almost four because almost four decks would be left in the shoe and so the true count would be +2.25 which would give us an edge but not a big one. Carl “The Dean” Sampson plays poker at www.pokerstars.co.uk