The Practice of Counting by Groups
As you practice playing hands and counting cards, you undoubtedly will develop a comfortable technique of keeping the count and will discover certain shortcuts to avoid counting each card one by one.
Since the play in the casinos is usually very fast, it is essential to establish some habitual routine in counting, and it is helpful to count certain commonly recurring groups of cards as units.
There is the most expedient, as a rule, to count the cards not at the moment they are first seen but instead when they are gathered in by the dealer and the bets are settled.
Recall that in all single-deck games--- which is the only thing we are considering at this point. Tho hole cards are face down, and thus typically not seen.
When players draw cards, it is bet to ignore their up-cards temporarily unless they break.
In this case, they turn up their hole cards, incorporating them into the point total. When a player turns up a blackjack, you should not count it until the dealer pays it and retires it to the discards.
Some dealers pay blackjacks immediately, some wait until it would be the player's turn to draw, and others wait until the final showdown, after everyone has drawn.
Except for the broken hands and blackjacks that are paid early, you should delay the count until the dealer turns up his hole card and begins his draw, if any.
Then, you count the dealer's hand and each player's hand as the bets are settled.
This technique is the practice of counting by groups. For example, it is readily apparent that mental steps are saved if a hand of 10, 10 is simply recognized promptly as minus 4, thus avoiding the need mentally to subtract two from the preceding point total twice.
Similarly, seeing a 10, 5, Ace, 4 should not require the involved process of subtracting two from the total and adding one three times in separate steps; and 10 and three non-10s should be recognized as a unit amounting to plus 1.
For purpose of illustration, the common groupings follow--- others are possible but do not occur often.
For convenience, the following shows the practice of designating all non-10s (Ace, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9) in the examples by an x: 10, 10--- minus 4 (frequent); 10, x, 10--- minus 3 (frequent broken hand); 10, x, x, 10--- minus 2 (broken hand); 10, x--- minus 1 (very frequent); 10, x, x--- zero (very frequent); 10, x, x, x--- plus 1; 10, x, x, x, x--- plus 2; x, x--- plus 2 (frequent); x, x, x--- plus 3 (frequent); x, x, x, x--- plus 4; x, x, x, x, x--- plus 5.
With experience, you will begin sometimes to group two hands together, for purposes of counting--- or even more than two hands if not many cards are involved.
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