Number of Decks and Rules Variation

By far, the most dramatic effect on the win rate of a card counter is the number of decks played.  I always thought the difference was minor.  Every Blackjack book in the world probably contains a list of the advantage when playing one, two, four, six and eight decks like the one below:

Single Deck        -0.2%                                                        
Single Deck 6:5  -1.4%
Two Decks         -0.4%                                                         
Four Decks        -0.5%                                                       
Six Decks          -0.6%                                                             
Eight Decks       -0.7%
                                                 
These percentages fluctuate because casino rules effect them and rules vary from casino to casino, an even within a casino, from table to table

These percentages don’t look insurmountable.  A good card counting system will still yield a healthy one per cent, even in a six deck game, right?  Wrong!  I thought the differences would be about a half per cent between single deck and six deck games.   I compared about five different systems using Casino Verite’ software.  I thought the reader might want to see how some of the more common counting systems compared in a multi-billion hand simulation.  I obtained the data below.

The rules were:
Double on any 2 cards.
No Surrender.
$5 Unit.
1-6 Unit Spread.
Illustrious 18 Indices.
Dealer Hits Soft 17.
Head up with the Dealer.
Single deck had 50% Penetration.
Six deck had 75% penetration.


        Single Deck
System                    Player Advantage    Win Rate/Hour
Wong 94 Basic Hi-Lo        1.176%              $12.07
Adv. Omega II                  1.187%              $14.77
Complete Zen                  1.236%              $15.47
Hi Opt II                          1.208%              $14.77
Wong Halves                   1.216%               $12.73


I next ran the simulations against six decks, using the same rules, but with 75% penetration.  Below is the data I obtained.



        Six Deck
System                    Player Advantage    Win Rate/Hour
Wong 94 Basic Hi-Lo        0.150%              $1.23
Adv. Omega II                  0.235%              $2.53
Complete Zen                  0.275%              $2.97
Hi Opt II                          0.252%              $2.63
Wong Halves                   0.176%               $1.47

The win rate is in dollars per hour.  I could not believe the difference in the results.  The win rate for the Hi-Lo was almost ten times more when playing single deck.  Even the complete Zen, which was the best performer of the group, only yielded 25% of the single deck rate.  I speculate that you could do better when using the simplest of counting systems but playing single deck Blackjack than playing six deck with the best system of them all.