Important! To get around the scrutiny this bet spread will cause in many casinos, I recommended not playing for more than one hour per shift, per casino.

I feel comfortable with a bankroll of $50,000, which would mean that our player should have about $8000 available for a four-hour playing session. Because this is designed for a full-time player, who basically has no means of replacing his $$$ through a job or something like that, the risk of ruin (losing it all) must be very low - preferably less than 1%. With a top bet on one hand being $400 (I'll also show a bet schedule for two hands), a $50,000 bankroll has a risk of ruin of 0.68%. In other words, there's less than a one in a hundred chance of you losing everything because of "variation" alone. For those of you who have a means of replenishing your bankroll, a total of $30,000 will give you a 7% risk of ruin factor. The bet schedule for playing only one hand at a time looks like this:

You can see that the bet schedule is "$100 times the True Count" other than when it's lower than 1. I like it because it's aggressive and easy to remember. In the game described above, a player will have a long-term edge of 1.26% and the average bet will be $113.00. This works out to be an expected value of 0.0126 x $113.00 = $1.43 per hand. From here on out, the math is simple; play 60 hands per hour and you'll make an average of $85.80 per hour. Okay, it's not $100 per hour, but at a $50 minimum bet table, it's probably fair to say that it'll seldom be full, so there should be no problem in getting at least 75 hands per hour. At that rate, the expected income would be $107+ per hour. Because such a high-minimum table will seldom be full, the wise player will spread to two hands whenever appropriate. Of course, that's done only when the count is favorable AND when it doesn't threaten your "longevity" in the casino. But a lot of high-stakes gamblers (as opposed to advantage players like us) often play two hands to "change the flow of the cards" and other nonsense, so why not look like a gambler from time-to-time?

Here's the betting schedule I recommend for that:

Important! At TC2, you’re betting $150 on each of two hands, $250 on each of two at TC3 and at TC 4 or more, $350 per hand for a total of $700.

With this bet schedule, you'd only go to two hands when the True Count is 2 or more, so there's no change from the schedule for one hand only at lower counts. I like this because it gives you the flexibility to play two hands if, say, someone leaves the table just as the count goes up or if the "pit critter" all of a sudden isn't watching you and so forth. This bet schedule ultimately gets more $$$ on the table, yet the top bet is only $350 (on each of two hands), so it's at least modestly deceiving to casual observers (like the pitboss). By using this schedule, the player's long-term edge is upped a bit to 1.60% and the average bet is $144.00 per round of play. This works out to be an expectation of 0.016 x $144.00 = $2.30 per hand. It does, however, raise the risk of ruin to over 1.5%, so bear that in mind. Also, there is nothing to be gained by playing two hands when alone with the dealer unless the table's maximum bet is less than $400, but this is a technique to use when other players are at the table so you can "eat" the good cards. As I mentioned earlier, the real problem with all of this is avoiding the old heave-ho. Playing Blackjack like this is going to attract attention in all but the biggest casinos, mainly because you're almost always playing with $100 chips. The "pit critters" watch the black chips very closely and pay even more attention to consistent winners. While nobody wins all the time, this approach will, on average, see you winning about 70% of all your sessions. But if it were easy, everybody would be doing it