SPEAKER_03 0:09

This is the NPJ weekend class uh held in Las Vegas, February one and two. Julie Patterson here as the editor, E. Clifton Davis as the teacher. This is tape two, side one.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Some of the people, when they first start playing, they've read so many books that say to get out after three losses that they get out when they lose a progression. This is probably the worst way that you could play cards. The whole idea of the 1-4-6 is to give you enough chips to be able to afford to lose a progression every now and then. Okay, now what you need to do to just to stay even in those games is avoid uh you can afford to lose three in a row once out of every 12 hands. You can afford to lose three in a row once out of e uh once out of every 12 hands. That will break even. You even win a few chips with that on that deal. But that's what the one, four, six gives you. Now, if you're playing a one, three, four, you'll find that instead of it being uh once out of every 12 hands, it's gonna be like once out of every 14 hands. Uh one, two, four, it's gonna be once every sixteen hands and so forth. Okay, so uh at a thousand dollars an hour, we're talking three progression losses in that hour. Now every now and then you're gonna lose four. Also every now and then you're gonna win two piles uh in one shoe. So they'll they'll tend to cancel out a little bit. If you're winning at less than the thousand dollars an hour rate, or the one pile per shoe rate, you needn't worry about that all the way down to you're losing one progression per shoe. When you're losing one progression per shoe, you should get out of the game because you're in a break-even situation. One progression per shoe or more, you should get out of the game. Anything anything less than one progression, you're you're losing less than one progression per shoe, you're going to make money. You're going to make money in that game. The average, I'm saying, is to lose three progressions an hour. The average in a type one game is to lose three progressions an hour. Now sometimes, as especially if you're watching the characters very closely, you can improve on that. What I like to do is is I'll stall my progression when I see that I'm going into a low-card clump every now and then, and actually uh not lose that many progressions. My record is nine hours without losing a single progression, and and that's the way that I I did that. I stalled off my progression when I saw myself going into a low-card clump. Now unfortunately that day was playing for nickel ships. I kicked myself all the way home for that, but that's the way the ball bounces. But you'll find sometimes that uh you'll you'll sit in the game for uh an hour, an hour and a half, and not lose any any progressions at all. That does not mean that as soon as you lose the progression, you jump out of the game. The system is designed to accommodate losing progressions. Okay, that's not when you jump out of the game. You're supposed to lose progressions. It's going to happen, yes.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Question. When you say into an expected low round, you I think you said held held back on your progression. That means you don't play it at all, or you play like a lesser progression, like a 1-2-3 rather than a 1-4-6.

SPEAKER_02 3:50

A back off. Usually I'll back off to a 1-3-4.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_06 4:00

How do you anticipate the low round? You see uh low hit cards or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

Okay, when we get into when we get into uh world-class play, and I do mention this in the manual, I talk in the manual about the situation where you have a a clump busting round and you have clump building rounds. Usually your signal to do that was in the prior shoe. Was in the prior shoe. If you have a situation in the prior shoe where you know a whole bunch of low cards are going to come out together and in the shoe, assuming that the shuffle doesn't break it up and it usually doesn't, you can anticipate that low card, that low clump coming up. And you can hold off and around. The reverse of that is when there is a very good situation produced in the prior shoe, and you know that that's coming up. Sometimes I will increase my bet from 146 to 246 or 234 during that very good section that I know is coming up. But the advanced warning on those sections, that's when we're getting into world-class play, which is the manual that I'll write this coming summer. But that's how to what world-class play is all about is how to detect things in the game ahead of time to tell you what to do, how to play the game you're playing in, how to change from NBJ according to what is happening in the game that you're playing in. Okay, it's not something that I would want beginners to uh attempt and their first uh trips out to the casino. Okay, it takes a little what once you're once you have MBJ under your belt, that's the time to to be thinking about those types of tricks. Yes.

SPEAKER_07 5:59

Question. Your graphic illustrations are very helpful. Going back to the first base.

SPEAKER_02 6:07

First base.

SPEAKER_07 6:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 6:08

And I even mentioned, by the way, that all those negative progressions we were talking about third base.

SPEAKER_07 6:14

Now going to first base, we're talking about dealing with two piles of chips. We're dealing with the low bet, high bet. Could you present essentially the equivalent movable stop loss at first base? Okay, let's talk about first base.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

Uh and you you don't have to play two different colors when you play first base. It just as it works out, it's very convenient to play two colors if you're going to play a five to one spread. You can play nickel chips at a nickel table. You can play nickel chips and green chips. That's a five to one spread. One chip each is a five to one spread. At a $10 table, you can play two reds versus uh two two greens, and you're still at five to one. Now, when I wrote that portion of the manual, recognized that the rule of the day in Las Vegas was uh they weren't allowing more than four to one spreads or five to one spreads. They were getting very upset with people that would play more than five to one spread. Atlantic City, they didn't care. They'll let you play any spread you want as long as it's within the table min-max. But in Vegas back then, they wouldn't let you do it. However, now that they had so many shoe games in Vegas, we've been getting away with 10 to 1, and in some cases, 20 to 1 spread. So that may throw out just a little bit the necessity of going to two colors. But the two-color uh deal is still very, very convenient because there happens to be a 5-1 spread between a red chip and a green chip. So in that system, we said to buy 12 chips of each. Buy in, instead of buying in at your normal 12 chips, buy it at 12 green chips, and buy in at five at 12 red chips. That way you can keep track of it's him to have a red pen here. If your red pile is winning, you know that you're in a good game because you are winning hands uh where you're going to be short in tens if you're winning if you're winning with red chips. So we like to see that happen, to win with red chips. But it's not essential at all to win with your red hand. You think of your your red chips as sacrifice chips, okay? What you're doing is you're sacrificing red chips to gain green chips, which is a pretty darn good trade-off. Anybody, anytime somebody wants to trade you a green ship for a red chip, take them up on the deal. That's exactly what you're doing here. Okay? Now, let's look at the stop loss. How do we play the stop loss when we have multiple color chips? What I do to play the stop loss is I just ignore the red chips altogether. I'm not going to get out of the game because I'm losing red chips. The fact is I got into the game expecting to lose red chips and trade them for green chips, win green chips. So I play the stop loss just as I do at third base, except I play it on the green pile only, and totally ignore the stop loss as far as the red pile is concerned. Okay? Does that answer your question? Okay. Any other questions? See now when I'm ready to break, you're right in the middle of the tape.

SPEAKER_05 10:03

Some of us in the Midwest got uh conditions similar to uh uh the East Coast, and we're playing mostly four-deck games, mostly always seven players, so you're probably only getting thirty-six rounds out of a shoe. That's about that's about it.

SPEAKER_04 10:21

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_05 10:22

Now, I've heard you mention before that you know each shoe would test the water a little bit, one or two games, or one or two rounds. Then you would go into your progression, but don't go into the last two hands either. So you're so limited in between there as to going up in a progression, you're almost ending up if it could happen that you're at the four or the six or something right there in the last hand almost. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:48

Yeah, that's uh that's a very good question. What what he's saying is if you're playing a one-four-six, is it takes three rounds to play a one-four-six. If you're up in the Midwest where they have four deck, seven player games, uh, you can't you can't fit very many progressions in uh before you run out of uh before you run out of cards. One of the things that you need to do, regardless of how many decks there are in the game, is watch where the cutoff card is, because you don't want to get caught in the middle of a progression when the shoe ends. If that happens, you've lost your torque advantage on those hands. So when you see the cutoff card coming up, and the cutoff card's going to come up within the next three rounds, and that just takes a little bit of getting used to, or within the next two rounds rather, uh, you don't want to go to your your four-bet when you when you lose your one bet. You just cut the progression off. What I'll often do is go to a two-bet if I've lost the one bet, if I see that the cut card is coming up. Now, what happens up in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the four-deck game, seven-player games, is that cut card is coming up very, very quickly. Uh so you may be tempted to do what I call playing around the horn, continue the progression from one shoe into the next shoe. Uh I only do that in a home run game. I'll do it once in a while in a home run game, but you have no idea of how the next shoe is going to start. You can't assume that just because this shoe is going well, that the next one is going to start off strong. So I always, except possibly in a home run game, I always start off each new shoe with with the one bet. Up in Minnesota, where where the progression is going to, where the shoe is going to end very, very quickly, I still recommend that you do the same thing. Start off, you have to s it's uh only a slight disadvantage, but you're going to get caught in the middle of progression more often than we are with six decks or or or eight decks. So you're going to get less progressions in than we get in with uh four decks or six decks, but that's just the name of the four-deck game. Now, of course, if you go to the zero proximity betting in the four-deck game, which I'm recommending for the four-deck game up there, uh, you can use advantage bedding so you don't have to worry about getting cut off in the middle of progression or not being able to get your progressions in. Question. Wait, one moment, question.

SPEAKER_00 13:35

This may be changing the subject a little bit, but I because because because we're getting into uh seeing more double deck and single deck games, I want to know if you're ever going to be able to address that. The casinos obviously are looking for all sorts of answers to those of us who are doing this kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

Yeah. Uh yeah, there are a lot of single deck and double deck games in uh in uh in progress right now. Uh and some of them are severely clumped. Uh I was mentioning yesterday that I found one game down here in the last trip where there were 10 tens in a row in a single deck game. That's 10 tens out of 16 in the deck. Now, I mean, that's a lot of clumping. Uh and some of these single deck games, and we do have uh certain people working specifically on single deck and double deck, are highly clumped and are therefore uh subject to uh to are sensitive to NBJ. Uh we need more study. I don't like to uh go out and put ideas into your head until we've had a chance to thoroughly test them out. And we do need more study on single deck and double deck, but we are getting very good evidence that these games are often clumped, and therefore uh you can get some advantage out of NBJ, especially for the people who uh are not who are not card counters. We did yesterday, we talked about, for those of you that weren't here yesterday, we did talk about zero proximity for four-deck uh blackjack, and there are many games, and we've told you now how to, if you missed it, it'll be in the newsletter. But there are many games, uh, if you missed it, in fact, it is in the newsletter in the second uh issue. Um there are many games, four-deck games, where uh zero proximity betting would be the better way to play those four-deck games and identify what ones they are uh than than straight NBJ.

SPEAKER_03 15:38

Let me make a comment on the uh the single deck uh game. Uh those of you here yesterday heard Mike Reed uh who is a local player uh playing uh single deck uh blackjack with NBJ. Uh very successful at it in his own. Um and basically what he does is look very curiously for the tables in the game. And when he finds one, uh he's into it as long as the club is readable, as long as the uh the card is readable, as long as we can read the whole card, but maybe five minutes, or maybe seven minutes, and maybe one, and it's good, and it's gone looking for another game, so it's a no whether or not we can go into a game and play as uh Alex is talking about and play through, you know, six, seven, eight decks, ten, twelve decks, or not we have that to uh we have that to confirm. So we're we're looking, those of you that are local, uh we're looking for uh uh input on the uh handheld game. We're looking for for uh uh input. John? Oh, Carl.

SPEAKER_06 16:53

If I may bring you back to the subject you want to get rid of, uh I'm playing first ball. I have my green chips. I've just run out of my red chips. Is there any difference whether I just buy some more red chips or should I go to red and black? If I'm winning with you know, the the reds have allowed me to win the greens. Should I use the greens for then the uh the preliminary and go to black either way? Well, uh I'm I'm not sure where black came out. Okay, now after I've run out of the red, I would look at it and say, well, I'll take some of my green chips and buy some more reds and use them as the the runner.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

Yeah, every now and then the dealer's going to pay you in green, anyways, and it's like maybe maybe you play red and you double down, you know, and the the dealer ends up playing you and paying you in green. What I do is I throw that that green chip into the red pile because that's how I got that, you know. So I'll just convert that into red chips. On the other hand, the game may be very going very well in the green chips and very poorly in the red chips, okay? But that's really what you want. So when that's happening, I'll take green chips out of the green pile and buy reds with them for the red pile. Yeah, but the one thing doesn't have anything to do with the other. If I'm doing very well and oh, if I'm doing very well in the entire game to make the transition to increase the bet, green black, yes. In fact, or red-black. Red all the way to black. When the big when the big wins were one, the $15,000 and $20,000 ones, wins were won. Let me tell you how Harvey did it. And I I love to watch Harvey play. Harvey doesn't fool around with uh small small bets at all. Harvey starts off with a one to six bread black chips. The uh one to six bread black chips. Every time he wins the six bet, he increases the black bet, the high bet by two chips. Okay, so he's gotten all the way up to twenty to one doing that. Two thousand dollars uh versus a hundred dollars. It's a twenty-to-one spread.

SPEAKER_05 19:03

What is that, first or third?

SPEAKER_02 19:05

These are all at first base, this is we're strictly talking first base. Yeah, now I recommend by the way, now that we know that they aren't bothering us and these high spreads, they and by we we got away with them in the Bahamas, we get away with them here, we got away with them in Atlantic City. Is that is that you you do that if you're winning at first base, just increase your spread, but increase it by one chip at a time. If you're starting off with a with you know six chips, then maybe you can go uh two chips at a time, but just increase them one chip at a time. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

One more question about the first base stop loss. In fact, I this question relates to something that I think I heard correctly on the tape from the first class. Um do I remember correctly that that your green chip stack of 12 chips, you are only risking four four high bets in the stop loss, or now is it that full stack of twelve? Can you lose six? Uh no wait, can you lose twelve green chips before you are hitting your stop loss?

SPEAKER_02 20:13

Yes. Will you yes you can, but remember that you're going to toss the water in this game just like any other game. You're not going to go in with a pile of twelve in a first base game and lose the entire pile of twelve. If in a first-base game, you shouldn't lose any more than three or four chips, because in first base, the system either works or it doesn't work. There's nothing in the middle. It either works very well or it doesn't work at all. Okay? So you just go in and flat bat. Or you just go in and watch the game without betting at all. I do that frequently. I'll sit down and I'll take first base, tell the dealer, I'll start next shoe, and I just watch the game. Because now the guy's sitting to your left, he's the first base player, isn't he? So you just watch that and see if you would have won or if you would have lost during that shoe. So by the time you get into it, you pretty much know whether you're going to win or lose. You're going to play aspect of the game. The way I look at it is there's three distinct uh learning centers or or sections of blackjack that you need to learn. One is table selection, which includes casino selection and so forth. Well, go into casino selection last thing before you leave, if somebody reminds me, so that you have that information before you go out to uh to play tonight. But let's talk uh I said there's there's three things. One is card play, one is betting, and one is table selection. And basically the other two are no good without the third one, no matter which way you split those, no matter which way you look at them. You need all three uh r to be a a really good player. Now I know that the people From Minnesota are a little bit angry with me because I said that you have to have table selection, and they have no virtually no table selection up in Minnesota. But there is some table selection, and there is some casino selection up in Minnesota. Fortunately, for the Nevada play or for the uh Las Vegas players and the Atlantic City players, when we don't like what we see in a casino, we can go to the casino next door. Well, they can up in Minnesota too, except that the casino next door is 170 miles away. So it's a little bit of a problem up there. But let's just talk about uh card play for a moment. And there is a point I want to get across to you in card play. Recognize that when I wrote the manual, I'm writing to put yourself in my shoes for a moment. I'm writing to people that play in Las Vegas, I'm writing to people that play in the Bahamas, people that play in AC, people that play in Minnesota, Wisconsin. And those four, those five, however many there was, those four or five games are vastly different from one another. So when I wrote the variable strategy chart, what I tried to do was take average conditions, and really that's not the best way to do it. The best way to do it would have been to write a variable strategy chart for each of those playing centers, but even that doesn't cover the whole waterfront. What I would like you to accept is that when we play blackjack, the way we play our cards really depends on what's going on in the game that we're playing. Variable strategy is just average condition, the average play. Okay? In some games, you need to you need to think of your card play as a sliding function. In some games, you need to slide your card play toward dealer strategy. Dealer strategy is merely playing according to dealer rules, hitting every hand to 17 or more. Now, when we talk about NBJ dealer strategy, the only thing that we're doing differently from the way the dealer plays is that we make a decision on 16. We don't have to hit a 16, and the dealer does. And when we and even 15s. And I say, Well, how many hands did the dealer win? And they'll say, Well, the dealer won 70% of the hands. And I say, Well, if the dealer won 70% of the hands, why weren't you playing dealer strategy? And they say, Oh yeah, I should have been playing dealer strategy. Yeah. If the dealer is winning far more hands than you are, switch to dealer strategy. I mean, that's how the dealer is beating you. If the dealer is beating you, playing dealer strategy, switch to dealer strategy. Okay? Now, when is that going to happen? Generally speaking, recognize that card clumping and certain types of card clumping more than other, particularly the type of card clumping that is coming out in these games with these V6 and V8 shuffles. Card clumping favors the dealer. It favors dealer strategy. I shouldn't say it favors the dealer, it favors dealer strategy. The reason I can't say it favors the dealer is because it isn't the person that it's favoring, it's the way that person is playing their cards that it's favoring. There's nothing to stop you from playing dealer strategy. If the game is favoring dealer strategy, it's favoring dealer strategy, and that's what you should be playing. The reason we don't play it all the time is because recognize that in dealer strategy, when you both break, it's not a push. The dealer wins. When you both break, the dealer wins. That's the disadvantage. Now to overcome that disadvantage in dealer strategy, you have your choices in 15 and 16, and the dealer doesn't. And you can double down and you can split and you can do all of the things that the rules allow you to do and the dealer can't. You get paid one and a half in blackjack, and the dealer doesn't. And that's often more than sufficient to overcome the fact that if you both break, the dealer wins. Okay? You have that fact against you, but on the other side, you've got all kinds of rules that favor you when you play dealer strategy or when you play any other strategy. So dealer strategy is an often is often a viable way to play the cards if the cards are significantly clumped. Recognize that there is always a way to win that game. The problem is you may not find that way fast enough, but there's always a way to win the game. If you could Monday morning quarterback it, you know, and go back and say, well, I should have played these hands this way, and I should have bet more here and less there. You can always figure out a way to win the game. The problem is to figure out a way to win the game before the fact rather than after the fact. But when we think of card play, what we really want to do to make use of our freedom of choice, we have freedom of choice, the dealer doesn't. What we really want to do is select an area between what we call safe strategy. Safe strategy is just simply never taking a hit that can break you. You'll see some people play in the casinos that way. They just never take a hit that'll break them. Most of those players lose, or those players lose most of the time. But all the way from safe strategy, all the way to dealer strategy, we want to slide between those two areas to play the cards in the optimum way. Now, in today's game, it's usually much closer to dealer strategy than it is to safe strategy that will be the optimum way to play your cards. And sometimes it's all the way to dealer strategy. Now, the other day I got a letter from uh Keith Smith, who's on one of our teams and plays with us a lot, who had been uh playing one of the casinos up in Atlantic City. He's got this thing with this casino, he's trying to beat that casino no matter what, won't play anywhere else, just got a mental thing with this casino, and he wrote back and he said, Well, of course I was playing dealer strategy, so I didn't insure, and I didn't double down. So I call him up, I says, you know, Keith, I think you're taking this dealer strategy stuff a little too far. You know, you can still double down. Yeah, but the dealer can't double down. I'm playing dealer strategy. No, Keith, Keith, geez. You could when you still double down, you still split when it's opportunistic to do so, when it's to your advantage to do so. So, you know, don't take this dealer strategy. You know, next thing you know, he's going to be wearing a dealer shirt and dealer clothes, dealer uniform, who knows. But when you have, when you understand this sliding strategy, and it's exactly why we call it variable strategy. We're not really calling it variable strategy because you vary according to whether highs and lows are running. That's true, we do that. But what I had in mind when I named it variable strategy is we're varying our strategy according to the game we're playing in. We're sliding closer or further away from dealer strategy to achieve the optimum card play results. Now, even in a shoe, you may want to slide back and forth. When low cards are running, when you're getting predominantly lows, you're getting a lot of low tens ratio hands, that's when you should be sliding to dealer strategy. That's where the dealer has the advantage. So you're sliding to dealer strategy to eat up her advantage. And in the mixed portions of the shoe, where there are a lot of tens, you want to slide further away from dealer strategy. Those are some of the things that you can pick up in in home practice. That's, you know, there's things you can pick up in home practice, there's things that you can't. Home practice isn't really real. There's no table selection in home practice, for instance. You can't practice table selection in home practice. But you can practice this sliding strategy or this variable strategy. Okay. So how do you know if you're playing the optimum strategy? Okay, I'm going to tell you exactly how to do that. You won't understand it until you've slept on it a couple of nights. Because it's a little tricky. You won't understand what the one thing has to do with the other. However, I would be willing to bet money. Of course, that's why we're all here.

SPEAKER_04 32:15

But I would be willing.

SPEAKER_02 32:17

I would be willing to bet money that if you checked, you would find that you are losing more hands by standing with less than 17 than you are losing by breaking. Okay? I'm going to bet that you are losing more hands, each of you are losing more hands by standing with less than 17 than you are losing by breaking. Okay? In fact, if you are a basic strategy player, I will bet all that I own that you will lose more hands by standing with less than 17 than you'll lose by breaking. That is the major flaw of basic strategy. Okay. Now why is that true? Well, it's true because the cards are clumped. What difference does it make? Because if you are losing more hands by breaking, or by standing with 17, with less than 17, then you're losing by breaking, you are not winning the maximum number of hands that you could win. To win the maximum number of hands that you can possibly win, you want to be losing the same number of hands by standing with less than 17, then you are losing by breaking. If you aren't, you're not hitting enough. Okay? And I don't think there's a player in this room that hits enough. Okay? Because that is the big difference between basic strategy and street play versus NBJ. The NBJ player hits far more often than the basic strategy player or the street player. Okay, now think about that. You're gonna lose so many hands and again because the dealer simply beats you out. You got 19, the dealer got twenty. Okay? I'm not talking about those hands, but there's two other ways to lose the hands. You can have less than 17, and the dealer makes her hand. In other words, she doesn't break. She makes her hand. Any time that you stand with less than 17, you are betting that the dealer is going to break. Okay, now a basic strategy is set up for the dealer to break one out of 3.5 hands. Dealer doesn't break one out of 3.5 hands. In fact, the dealer never broke that much. There will be games where she does, but on average, she doesn't break that much. And in clump games, it's going to be far less. You may see the dealer breaking one out of four, one out of five, one out of six, one out of seven, one out of eight. You'll see the dealer go through an entire shoe, 14 hands without breaking. Sometimes you see the dealer go two shoes without breaking, particularly if you're playing an eight-deck game. Okay? Now, if you are losing more hands by standing with in any game, in any game, in any shoe where you lost more hands by standing with 17 than you lost by breaking, you didn't win as many hands as you could have won in that shoe had you played your cards the optimum way. Playing your cards the optimum way, you want those two types of losses to come out equal. See, there's nothing wrong with breaking. Some people avoid breaking at all cost. If you're not breaking, I mean people come, they they say to me, Oh, geez, I'm playing beautiful, I never broke. No. You're not playing beautiful if you never broke, you're playing stupid if you never broke. Okay? Because you never gave yourself a chance to win if you never broke. Breaking is giving yourself a chance to win. Recognize that the dealer's average hand is above 19. Her average hand is better than 19. Used to be 19, now it's 19 point something for the dealer's average hand. So any time that you are standing with less than 17, you're betting the dealer will break. If the dealer is breaking in that game one out of five hands, okay, your chances of losing that hand are 80% when you stand with less than 17. Now standing less than 17 doesn't look so good, does it? When you recognize that your chances of losing the hand are 80%. But that's exactly what they are if the dealer's only breaking one out of five. And in about the average games you play, that's what you'll find that the dealer's breaking one out of five. Sometimes in an awful lot of games, you'll wish the dealer was breaking one out of five. Yes? Mike?

SPEAKER_06 37:16

Who's that? Who's got the mic?

SPEAKER_07 37:19

He's got the mic. The guy asking the question has it, Joe. Okay. Uh yeah, you see that when you play the uh Boris thing, because you call up the statistics and you think you're playing real well, and you look at your average, and you're average and you're winning, you're winning, you're winning, and your average is 17.56, and consistently the dealer's at 19.25, 19.85, and yeah, what you're saying just holds up. It doesn't matter which game, the dealer is always a point to a point and a quarter higher. Right.

SPEAKER_02 37:49

Another way of saying it, if the if the dealer's average hand is 19.1, you don't want your average hand to be 18.2. You're in a losing situation. You want to be at 19.1 also. Okay. Now, how do you do that practically? Well, if you practice that way at home, it'll give you a feel for it. If you keep track of how many hands you lost where you stood with less than 17, and you keep track of how many hands you lost by breaking, okay, let's call them A and B. Uh the first time you do it, I guarantee you, you know, it's I mean, maybe not over the course of one shoe, but say over the course of a hundred shoes, I guarantee you that you're fine that that you are losing more by standing with less than 17 than you are by breaking. Therefore, you're losing more hands than you need to look to lose, and you've got to hit your cards more. Now, many, many times, many, many times, people have told me that they're playing NBJ, and I watch them play and find out they aren't playing NBJ at all. In fact, their card play is much closer to basic strategy than it is to variable strategy.

SPEAKER_03 39:18

This is a key point, and we will continue this discussion on the other side of this tape. Please fast forward to the end, in preparation for playing side two.