My brain is completely fried after a 3 to 4 hour training session with Peterbilt and another AP who is in town for work from Dallas. It was really fun meeting up with other players and dealing a few shoes. I was even able to keep the count while dealing for a while, which is not easy when you are adding hand totals, checking their plays, taking their cards when they bust, hitting the dealer’s hand, and paying out wins.
Even with my short time training, I am already becoming very knowledgeable and reliable when it comes to giving accurate information. The others would often ask me for a true count value for a deviation, and I would help correct mistakes when they came up. (Not that they didn’t help me out a few times too.) Peter has played 100 hours, and the Dallas player has 30 under. Meanwhile, I am sitting at a measly 2 hours at best, but I am committed to becoming a perfect player before I put money on the line.
Each day, my training consists of about 1 to 2 hours of drills on my training software, a few hours of test outs free play, and dealing live cards to myself. Currently I’m averaging 5.4 hours per day. My goal has been a winning game and to get as close to perfect as I can before May 17th for a Blackjack event hosted by Blackjack Apprenticeship (the site that makes my software). I have been tracking my progress in a Google Sheets chart so I can visualize how far I have come.
There are already over 22 people signed up, with attendees coming from Arizona, California, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, and probably even farther. I am really excited to meet new people, do some live test outs, and build connections that will hopefully be mutually beneficial down the road.
Anyway, enough about that. Let’s get to the stats.
Time In:
Training suite is my training software through Blackjack Apprenticeship. They have drills and tests to improve my playing and telling me when I make mistakes. Overall I have 206 hours and 46 minutes in the software.
Basic Strategy:
Basic strategy is the first thing you learn when you start learning blackjack. This is something even non-counters use as it’s the mathematical best play for each possible hand. The hardest part of this is not making the correct decision anymore. The hardest part is trying to focus while getting through 931 two, three, and four card combinations. Especially after work my eyes glaze over and I just begin rapidly clicking. I never make these mistakes in my test outs, but I need to be able to do this perfectly even if I can barely keep my eyes open.
Running Count:
In this drill, the hands are dealt automatically, and the goal is to keep the correct running count as the cards come out faster than a real dealer would ever deal.
Deck Conversions:
This drill is all about taking the running count and dividing it by the remaining decks being played. For instance if the running count is 10 with 2 decks remaining, the true count is 5 (10/2). The true count is what you use to decide what to bet, so it’s pretty important to be accurate and efficient with this. For example with the true count is 0, I will bet $25. If the true counts is 5, I will bet $250.
Deviations:
Lastly, there are deviation drills, situations where you break from basic strategy based on the true count. For example, basic strategy says you do not double a 9 against a dealer 2. But if the true count is 1 or higher, you do double. These took a little getting used to at first, but I have them down pretty solid now.
I am proud of the progress I have made so far. Seeing the improvement trends on my spreadsheet really helps when it feels like I am not getting better day to day.
I just played about an hour of “Free Play” in the software, where I practice my actual betting spread and watch for mistakes. Here are the results:
This was an extremely good result for my standards. I am working even harder now to turn that 99 percent into 100 percent every time (Ignore the 03:16 timer, it resets after 60 minutes). I’ll have another update before May 17th when I go to test my skills with my peers.
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