In my earlier days of playing blackjack, I purchased an inexpensive discard tray from a casino supply house and stacked different decks of cards in the tray to get a feel of what two, three, four, etc. stack of cards looked like. With a little practice you'd be amazed at how quickly and accurately you can estimate the number of decks stacked in the tray. Now I m telling you advance level Blackjack Strategies.

What if you glance at the discard tray and estimate what appears to be about 2nd decks of cards. The table is using four decks of cards. In this situation, you first estimate the number of unplayed decks by subtracting 2nd from 4 (answer is 1st). You then divide the running count (+2) by the number of unplayed decks (1st or 312). When dealing with fractions, it's a lot easier to multiply by the inverse of the fraction than to divide by the fractions.

If dividing (or multiplying) by fractions is not your cup of tea, than just do the best job you can to estimate the number of decks in the discard tray to the nearest whole number. If you glance at the discard tray and estimate what appears to be 2nd decks, be conservative and round down to 2. By rounding down you'll be calculating a true count that will be slightly less than the actual true count.

Now let's discuss the situation of playing in a single or two deck hand held game. In two deck games, you'll need to estimate the number of decks in the discard tray to the nearest half deck and in single deck games, to the nearest third. Let's review these situations in more detail.

Single Deck

Some casinos use a discard tray in single deck games and others do not. If one isn't used, the discards are placed face up under the remaining cards by the dealer. I'll address both situations. Whenever multiple decks of cards are used, the true count is most always less than the running count. In the case of a single deck, the opposite occurs for the most part, namely, the true count will be higher than the running.

Before you play in single deck games, take a deck of cards and group them into piles of 17, 26 and 35 to get a feel for what that many cards stacked looks like. Remember you only have a few seconds to glance at the discard tray to determine how many fraction of a deck of cards are stacked. That one glance will give you the information you need to determine the multiplier for converting running count to true count.

An alternate technique can be used to determine the multiplier for running to true count conversion. This is in fact the way to do this conversion when the dealer places the discards under the remaining cards. This technique is based on learning a multiplier for each round of hands dealt in a single deck game.

As a general rule, on average 2.7 cards are played per hand. Therefore, if you play bead up with the dealer (just you and the dealer - no other players), 5.4 cards are used on average per round. Likewise, we can use this information to calculate how many cards would be used per round as a function of number of players. Based on this we can also compute a multiplier from running count to true count.

When playing single deck games, you should try to play head up as much as possible. Never play with more than two other players at the table. Therefore the following table lists the calculated number of hands dealt per round for one, two and three player games, and the calculated running count to true count multiplier.

In some cases, I've rounded the multiplier to avoid wild fractions (remember we need a method to estimate true count that is fairly accurate but just as important, easy to do at the tables).

To use this information, all you need do is memorize the corresponding multiplier for the number of rounds played and then use the multiplier to convert your running count to true count.