Do You Want the Golden Touch at Blackjack? Part One

The casinos have structured their games in order to get an edge on each and every one of them. You will note that the casinos of America make billions of dollars, while the gamblers of America make far, far less. In fact, most gamblers are losers. That's a sad but true fact nevertheless. If a large percentage of gamblers know how to win, there would be no casinos.

However, in the past many casino owners had no idea of why certain games gave them the edge or how it was, exactly, that they won money at these games. Blackjack is a prime example.

For years blackjack was offered in the saloons and casinos of America and the players did what they usually do - they lost at the game. The casinos did not know the math behind the game of blackjack or that players were losing because they were actually playing quite poorly (just as poorly as they still play today). In the mid-1950s, a little known paper was published that analyzed the mathematically best way to play each player hand.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Edward Thorp realized that the game of blackjack could be beaten if a player knew which type of cards remained in the deck. He developed a concept called "card counting," and went into the casinos and won money.

The first reaction of Las Vegas casino executives was fear. They immediately changed the rules of the game and how many decks were used. The problem was that 99.999 etc. percent of the players were still playing abominably and were still losing. But many of these losers got annoyed with the change in their favorite game and stopped playing. The casinos lost money.

The casinos finally loosened the rules to get back their players, although they did continue to offer multiple-deck games, and the rest is history. Thousands of would-be card counters descended on the casinos and most of them joined the other players as losers. The casinos made a fortune on the game and blackjack soon displaced craps as the number one table game in the casinos.

Card counting, while it sounds simple enough (i.e., keep track of the relationship of low and high cards), was much too hard for the average casino player. Indeed, while people flocked to play blackjack in the casinos thinking they had a very good chance to win, in truth the casinos were taking them for all they were worth. Blackjack was a cash cow.

The typical card counting procedure is just too complicated for the average player. "It's too much work," states John Schiffman, a former hi-lo card counter. "The game is not fun when you are working that hard."

In the hi-lo card counting system, which is the most popular system around, the players must add 1 when every low card comes out of the deck, and subtract 1 when every high card comes out of the deck. When the round is over, the players must divide or multiply the number of decks remaining or fraction of a deck remaining to be played into the count they have to get what is called a true count. Then the player must figure out what that true count means in terms of an edge over the casino or the casino's edge over the player and bet accordingly.

That's a lot of hard work. It is also why in the forty years since Thorp developed card counting, very few players have actually become any good at it. The effort to achieve the skill can be daunting. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of blackjack books on the market (mine included), very few players ever achieve an edge over the game. Of the five million blackjack players currently in America, maybe a couple of thousand can actually beat the game.

Getting the edge was just too hard. Until now, that is.

Five years ago, a brilliant young mathematician and engineer named Dan Pronovost, analyzed the math of the game of blackjack and discovered something that would allow players to get the edge at the game without all the work of traditional card counting. There was a mathematical principle that just about all experts knew about the game but no expert had figured this principle could be used to turn the tables on the casinos without all the effort of a traditional counting system.

Dan Pronovost and gaming author Henry Tamburin worked for a couple of years together perfecting what is now called "Speed Count." They created a new basic strategy that works with Speed Count to increase the players' edge over the game.

States Dr. Tamburin, "Even a 12-year old can learn how to beat the game of blackjack with Speed Count and our new optimum basic strategy. If you already know basic strategy, you will be able to learn Speed Count in just two days of instruction and have the edge over the game of blackjack when you play."

Pronovost and Tamburin did not want to write a book or articles about their new discovery because "too many people would learn it and that might change the game of blackjack forever. This is so much easier than anything that has come before that it could really cripple the casinos," states Tamburin.

Instead, Dr. Tamburin, Dan Pronovost, Dom "Dominator" LoRiggio and I have created a course that teaches this new method of getting a verifiable mathematical edge over the casinos. "You can get between 70 and 96 percent of the edge of hi-lo without any of the hard work," states Pronovost. "This is the perfect technique for those who want to play with an edge but have found traditional card counting much too cumbersome and difficult."

For more information, check our web site at www.goldentouchblackjack.com.