The Ace/Ten Front Count It Gives You the Edge and Heres Proof
Being the skeptics we are here at slot online, as we decided to test Mr. Renzey’s Ace/Ten Front Count method ourselves. There is no Blackjack simulation software that will mimic the Ace/Ten Front Count exactly as explained by Mr. Renzey, so we had to test it the hard way by hand. How We Tested the Ace/Ten Front Count To do the dealing, we used a simple computer program that deals from a six-deck shoe, with 70% penetration, using the following rules: Dealer stands on soft 17; double on any card; double after the split; no surrender; split Aces draws only one card. These are favorable rules for the player, but you should be able to find them in many places in Las Vegas, especially off the Strip. We dealt 100 shoes, using perfect Basic Strategy and betting as specified in the Ace/Ten Front Count method, and manually recorded the results (yes, this took many, many hours – whew!).
Here are our results.
- Total amount wagered: $39,920 (using $10 as the one unit bet)
- Number of shoes with an Ace/Ten front count of 40 or higher: 52 (52%)
- Number of shoes with and Ace/Ten front count of 37-39: 24 (24%)
- Number of shoes with and Ace/Ten front count of 36 and lower: 24 (24%) NOTE: This tracks almost exactly to the 50% / 25% / 25% that Mr. Renzey said would happen. We tip our hat to Mr. Renzey for his accuracy.
- Of the 24 shoes with an Ace/Ten count of 36 and less (we’ll call these the Ace/Ten shoes) and thus were favorable to play, heres how it broke out: * 5 shoes had a count of 36
* 11 shoes had a count of 35
* 1 shoe had a count of 3
* 1 shoe had a count of 33
* 4 shoes had a count of 32
* 2 shoes had a count of 31
Total dollars wagered with the 24 Ace/Ten shoes: $23,380. Did We Win With Using the Ace/Ten Front Count? What you really want to know is: did we win with the Ace/Ten front count? Is effective? The answer is .a resounding YES! For the 24 Ace/Ten shoes (shoes with a count of 36 or less), using the Ace/Ten front count rules exactly as outlined by Mr. Renzey, we won $505. This gives a positive return of 2.2% of the $23,380 wagered on these 24 shoes. However, we had to play 100 shoes to get these 24 Ace/Ten shoes. Consequently, we have to look at the total rate of return for all 100 shoes to get a true total rate of return.
We lost $148 on the other 76 shoes played, so the total rate of return was a positive .89% ($505 – $148 / $39,920). This is much better than the positive advantage of .25% predicted by Mr. Renzey. Isn’t it refreshing to find a system that works better than the author says? The likely explanation is that our results are from a statistically small sample (only 2,908 hands played). Running this out to millions of hands would, we suspect, yield results closer to the .25% predicted in Mr. Renzeys model. But who are we to argue with success? The bottom line here is that if you are a serious recreational player but dont want to devote hundreds of hours to learning card counting, then the Ace/Ten front count is for you. Gaining an edge over the casino just doesn’t get any easier than this.
How to Reduce the Volatility The Ace/Ten Front Count calls for bet increases to two units, four units or six units, based on the Ace/Ten count. This is how we bet on our test to get the $505 winnings. Stepping up the bets like this does increase the chance for a bigger win, but it also increases the chance for a bigger loss.
The shoes with our two biggest wins were $410 and $290, while the shoes with our biggest losses were $240 and $220 dollars. We then recalculated the results of all 24 Ace/Ten shoes using a flat bet of two units (in this case $20) regardless of the count. The result was a win of $455. The biggest two wins were $290 and $160, while the two biggest losses were $160 and $120. For conservative players or players who will only play a few shoes, the trade-off of a modest amount of winnings for less radical swings in results may be worth it. Youll have to make this decision for yourself.