Deviation Trainer
Updated
A hand and a true count come up. You decide whether the count is high enough to leave basic strategy. That is the whole drill, and it is the part of counting that people learn last and apply wrongest.
- Drills the standard Illustrious 18 — the same set the calculator uses.
- Insurance is included, because it is worth more than the rest combined.
- Learn basic strategy and an accurate count first.
- A deviation applied at the wrong count is worse than no deviation.
The drill
How to use it',
Answer as you would at a table: quickly, and without working it out from first principles. If you have to think about it for more than a second, you do not know it yet — and at a real table you will not have the second.
Get insurance right before you worry about anything else. At a true count of +3 it stops being a bad bet and becomes a good one, and it is worth more than every other deviation combined because it is a whole extra wager rather than a small shift in one decision.
A warning worth repeating
Deviations are the last thing to learn, not the first. They amplify whatever your count is doing — so an inaccurate count plus deviations loses more than an inaccurate count alone.
The order that works: basic strategy until it is automatic, then an accurate count, then insurance, then the rest. Why index numbers are softer than they look is worth reading before you rely on them.
Keep reading
By Martin Kosek · every number on this site is computed by us, not copied.
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