This innocent question from Henry Tamburin in December 2002 led me to design Speed Count, a new blackjack card counting system unlike anything previously available.

This article is an introduction to Speed Count, a brief story of its development and why it’s the easiest proven method for average players to use to get a positive edge in blackjack. Speed Count has been a complete secret until now, so this article is your chance to finally learn about it! Enjoy!

But the books say card counting is easy, isn’t it? Just track the count: add and subtract some numbers as the cards come out, and this single count metric is all you need to win, and the computer simulations prove it! Bet more when the count is high and you have the advantage, and bet less otherwise. Now go forth and multiply… your bankroll! What could be easier?

I get the question above from a lot novices (usually at parties when non-gamblers ask me what I do for living). The easy answer is that while the concept of card counting is incredibly simple, mastering the method is surprisingly difficult. And it's precisely because of this fact that many players who dabble in card counting end up losers at the tables. They think they are card counting like a pro ("It's so simple!"), when in reality their error rates are high enough to wipe out their edge and put a smile on the pit bosses’ faces.

From years of experience teaching students, Henry and I knew exactly what the 'hard part' of card counting was: adding and subtracting the card count values accurately as the dealer dealt a medium to fast paced blackjack game. All effective card counting systems to date required both addition and subtraction, and it was stopping average players dead in their tracks even with simple level one systems (just adding and subtracting one). The Knock-Out card counting system by Vancura and Fuchs improved the challenge of mastering card counting by eliminating true count calculations (and having to deal with negative integers), but it turned out this was one of the easiest skills to teach! Converting the run count to true count meant dividing by the number of decks remaining, which is something you have plenty of time to do: before a bet, and occasionally before a play decision. Asking the dealer to stop dealing so you can add up the run count is not an option.

No, the hard part was the constant up and down of the count as the dealer whipped out the cards across the felt. Errors creep in, and before you knew it average Joes are betting on 'instinct' of what the count was. Thinking that you are tracking the count, and knowing the exact count are two different things.

This is the average number of cards dealt per hand of blackjack, when you include all hands played (player and dealer). I had always been surprised how constant this number was… it varies little across different games. More decks, less decks, DAS, noDAS, S17/H17: it didn't really matter.

So what, you may ask? Time for another number:

This is the ratio of 'little' cards dealt out on average… the 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 cards (there are 20 of them per deck of 52 cards, which equates to the ratio of 5/13). Now… multiply the two numbers:

Still don't get it? Ask yourself this: how many 'little' cards should come out on average per hand of blackjack played? 1.038… a little over one little card per hand played!

And herein lies the secret 'trick' of Speed Count: you can eliminate 'on the fly' subtraction, the killer skill of traditional card counting systems, by instead tracking (ie. adding) only the little cards played per hand.

So how does Speed Count work in practice? Add one to the count every time a little card is dealt (to a player or dealer hand). At the end of the round, when you have plenty of time to think before you place your next bet, you subtract one for each hand dealt (don't forget the split hands too). As the count gets higher, there are more non-little cards remaining, and this equates to a positive player edge (more on this later). That's it!

Unlike High-Low, Speed Count is an unbalanced count system similar in mathematical properties to other unbalanced count systems (like Knock-Out). This means that the counting metric does not directly reflect your edge in the game, and the count tends to 'drift' upwards as the cards are played out. The latter property is essential in successful unbalanced count systems, and ideally the final average resting count (given an average penetration) should be close to the bet pivot. The bet pivot should be the count at which you have an edge, and good unbalanced counts should show a nice linear relationship to count and edge. The following graph shows this relationship very nicely with Speed Count.

If you count the high cards (instead of the low cards), the edge does not drift in the right direction, nor do you get the nice correlation of edge to count. Even if you invert the count meaning, and treat low counts as higher edge (as would be expected if counting the tens and aces), things do not work out well. The main reason is that when there are many tens and aces, the average number of counted cards per hand is no longer as high as 2.7, and the 'trick' we depend on to make Speed Count work begins to fail. Ultimately, the correlation between the low cards and average number of cards per hand is stronger when counting 2 to 6, instead of 10s and aces, since high valued hands (from 17 to 21, for example) will tend to have very few cards (and the reverse is less true with low cards).

I tried other wrinkles and twists, but in the end what worked best was simply tracking the little cards played per hand, with no exceptions. Card counting system developers look for two important characteristics when developing new methods: a nice linear correlation to count and increasing edge as shown above, and a histogram of counts centered on or near the bet pivot:

As shown above, we see that most hands occur at a count of 30 (the initial run count for a two deck game in Speed Count), with a nice bell curve on both sides.

But from the start, I warned Henry and Frank that someone else was bound to stumble on this gem of an idea eventually. While it does take a lot of time to refine the concept and develop a proven system, the basic mathematical principle is not rocket science (remember, the concept of all card counting systems is very simple).

Will Speed Count change the world of blackjack (for better or worse)? I doubt it… my experience is that most people who gamble are gamblers. Card counting is boring, and takes away the excitement of uncontrolled betting which most regular gamblers seem to enjoy. As a mathematician, I get my kicks knowing that I'm playing with a positive edge, not from the groovy vibes of a wild gambling ride (ok, I do admit card counting and winning combined is no doubt the unbeatable combination). Casinos could probably have a bill board with the count and best play displayed, and people would still double that hard 12, or let winnings ride despite low counts, and otherwise play to gamble, instead of playing to win.

But for those astute players who want to play with a positive edge, there is finally a mathematically proven method that takes very little time to master compared to traditional counting systems yet allows the average player to finally play with a positive, rather than a negative expectation. Yes, you can make more money with less bankroll risk with a system like High-Low, but very few people will take the time to master it properly, if they can do so at all.

You can be a winner with Speed Count, the easiest way to beat the casino at blackjack!

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Speed Count is also available in our professional blackjack training software for Windows, Palm OS and Pocket PC: