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Clifton Davis with world class blackjack tape number seven. Okay, let's talk about betting. Recognize that all blackjack methods, regardless of whether we're talking about card counting, progressive betting, uh advantage betting, NBJ, first base method, world-class play, all betting methods have the same objective. It's to be betting more on the hands that we win than we're betting on the hands that we lose. Likewise, all blackjack methods use the same basis to accomplish this. All blackjack methods understand that tens, that high cards and particularly tens, are player favorable. And low cards and particularly fives and aces are dealer favorable. So, what we're trying to do is to bet high when there is a preponderance of high cards, and to bet low when there is a preponderance of low cards. The reason that high cards are player favorable is in the rules of the game. The dealer must hit to 17 or better. She can break on high cards, she cannot break on low cards. This gives the player a distinct advantage when there is a preponderance of high cards. So the whole objective then of betting is to determine when are we going to have a round with a preponderance of high cards. We need to know this before the round so that we can bet accordingly. The card counter makes the determination of when there will be a preponderance of tens by simply counting the tens played. Knowing how many tens will be in the whole deck, he knows when there's more than the average number of tens left in the cards to be played. This is one way to do it. We call it a shotgun approach because it doesn't tell you where those tens are likely to be. And to bet effectively, you need to have a much better idea of where those tens are going to be. Both NBJ and world-class blackjack use the predictability of cards caused by their non-random condition to determine where the tens are likely to be. We know for an absolute fact that this is a far better approach to betting. Our goal for you in world-class blackjack is to perfect that method even beyond NBJ. One of our main goals is to simplify the method so that anyone can do it, and so that anyone can do it in the heat of the game. We need a nice, simple, easy to follow method, and that is precisely what we've come up with. Understand this. We all know by now that it is extremely important to vary our card play according to the game that we are playing. However, it is even more important to bet to vary our betting method according to the game that we are playing. Let me give you an analogy. Let's say that you're in a game where you're only winning one hand out of ten. It is still possible to win that game if we know which hand out of the ten we're going to win ahead of time. All we would have to do is bet more than ten times our base bet on the hand that we're going to win. It would be possible to win that game, but it is extremely difficult to pick one hand out of ten that we're going to win. So it's pretty easy to see then that the more hands we win, the easier it's going to be to locate winning hands. Therefore, after table selection, if we call that the first prong of our playing strategy, our overall playing strategy, after table selection, we talked about card play and we talked about the importance of getting your hands-one ratio up there. One of the reasons, the major reason to get your hands-one ratio up there, is to improve your betting potential. For instance, it's a heck of a lot easier to predetermine winning hands when you're winning six out of ten than it is to predetermine winning hands when you're winning one out of ten. I would like for you to dwell on the importance of having all three systems go. Your table selection, your card play, and your betting, because they all supplement and augment one another. The first thing we're going to do in world-class blackjack is to simplify the game types. Remember that in NBJ there were six game types that we identified, and we even knew that those six did not cover all possible games. The game types in world-class blackjack were first reduced to only three game types, and they do cover every game played in the casino. They go like this. Type one, games that seldom have more than one low tens ratio round in a row. Type 2, games that seldom have more than two low tens ratio rounds in a row. And type 3, games with three or more low tens ratio rounds in a row. Now note how we correlated the game type number with the low rounds. Type 1 is one low ratio round in a row. Type 2 is two low ratio rounds in a row. Type 3 is three or more low ratio rounds in a row. Nothing could be simpler than that. The next thing we need to know is how to identify a low tens ratio round. We made that as simple as possible. We said that a low round is a round with 25% tens or less. We picked 25% because it's a very easy number to identify. If less than a quarter of the cards you see are tens, it's a low ratio. It's as simple as that. Next, for the purist, we identified neutral tens ratio rounds. And we simply said that neutral rounds are rounds with 25% to 50% tens. In other words, a quarter to a half of the cards that you see are tens. Then we went on to identify high tens ratio rounds, and we said high tens ratio rounds are rounds where half or more of the cards that you see are tens. Now you have an option. If you want, you can simply make the distinction between low rounds and high rounds. And the way to do that is to say that low rounds are less than 25% tens, and high rounds are 25% or more tens. You can forget neutral rounds altogether if you want to keep things nice and simple. I like to identify neutral rounds for one reason. The more neutral rounds there are in the game, the closer that game is going to play to basic strategy. So I identify them to give me an idea in my card play of how close to play to basic strategy. You can do that if you want, or you can just ignore neutral rounds altogether and just go with low rounds and high rounds. Less than 25%, more than 25%. It's your option. There's not a great deal of advantage or difference in identifying the neutral rounds if you choose to say that just complicates things a little too much for me. Just forget neutral rounds altogether if you wish. All of that is fine for determining your game type between type 1, type 2, and type 3. However, don't oversimplify it. The reason that we are interested in those rounds is that is when the dealer is most likely to break in rounds that have a 50% tens ratio. The more 50% tens ratio rounds there are in the game we're playing, the more the dealer will break and the better that game will be. And the reason is if the high rounds are almost all tens, you're going to simply push with two card 20s with the dealer wasting your favorable tens. We don't like to see games that are that clumped. We love it when we see lots of 50% tens ratio rounds, and they're very easy to identify at a glance. You just look at the cards. Are they half tens? If they're half tens, you're looking at a 50% tens ratio round. A very good indicator that you're in a good game. The more of these rounds we see, the more opportunity we have to go for the juggler in that game. That's one of the things we're trying to do in world-class blackjack is point out go-for-the-juggler opportunities. And we want you to understand these opportunities so that you know when you're in one and you can take advantage of it. One good go-for-the-juggler game makes up for a heck of a lot of other mischief. The next thing we need to keep things simple is a way to differentiate between low rounds and high rounds and to do it quickly and effectively. The method that we used in world class or in NBJ was too complicated for many players. Some of you were able to do that with no trouble at all. Some of you have still some of you still don't know what game type you're in. So we need a very simple method of differentiating between high rounds and low rounds. In world-class blackjack, we use a method that we're calling paint on the table. You just look at the paint and the table. Fortunately, when the playing card designers designed the cards several centuries ago, I guess, they made the face cards uh in color and they made the tins two-digit cards. Therefore, they tend to stick out like a sore thumb. We call this paint because it's colorful. All we do is look at the paint on the table with a little bit of home practice, just looking, sort of sitting back and looking at the paint on the table, looking at all the cards at once. The paint on the table can tell you with a little bit of practice whether there are more or less than 25% tens. This does not have to be done with extreme precision, okay? The reason is because neutral rounds are not that bad. They're not particularly player favorable, they're not particularly dealer favorable, they are neutral. So it is okay to call the neutral rounds high ratio rounds. What we're really trying to identify is the low ratio rounds, low rounds that are definitely low ratio, and that's why we draw the line at 25% instead of 30.8%, which is the actual tens ratio in a shoe of cards. If you personally prefer a more mechanized way of doing this, I invite you to look at the method on page 111 of your manual called Using the Come Out TINS Ratio. A few of you will probably prefer this more mechanized method, but most of us I think can adequately identify low ratio versus high ratio rounds by simply looking at the paint on the table. Once we are effectively able to identify low rounds from high rounds, getting the game signature is a very simple process. The game signature tells us what game type we're in. The example that I use is to put a white chip in the pile for low ratio rounds and a red chip for high ratio rounds. Then at the end of say 14 rounds or whatever number of rounds there are in the shoe, you are looking at a colored graphic signature of the game that you're playing. That signature gives you a very good indication of how to bet that game. Now, of course, we also talked about offsetting a chip for dealer break hands, and we can do all of this with the same pile. Now we're looking at a little pile of chips that can tell us wonders of information about that game. It tells us the dealer-break ratio, it tells us the signature, it tells us if the dealer is breaking with the high rounds or the low rounds. It gives us all kinds of information about the game. And fortunately, after every shoe, the dealer gives us the time to examine this signature and make our decisions for the next shoe about how we're going to play that shoe. We can simply ponder the signature of the game and make our determinations about how best to play that shoe. When we look at our signature pile and we see that we are seldom or never getting more than one ratio round in a one low ratio round in a row, we want to favor straight negative progression betting. What we're saying when we favor negative progression betting is that the tens are so well distributed throughout the entire shoe that we can't mechanically foretell when we're going to have a high ratio round. However, we know that low ratio rounds are almost always going to be followed by high ratio rounds. Therefore, a negative progression is the way to go because it pretty much guarantees, it guarantees that we will hit a high ratio round with our high bets. In a game type 2, we know that tens now are a little bit more clustered than they were in a game type 1 because we're seeing two low ratio rounds in a row quite frequently. So what we do is use mixed progressive betting and we prefer the 134 and the 234. We try to match the 134 to areas of low ratio rounds and the 234 to areas of high ratio rounds. This provides some improvement over a straight negative progression like we use in game type 1s. However, you're going to find that in most casinos today, game type 3 outnumbers game type 1 and 2 put together. This has only become true in recent years. Back when I played full-time blackjack, it was almost all game type 1 and 2. And it was a real sad day when a straight 146 progress negative progression did not beat the casino. It almost always did. Unfortunately, we can't look at it that way today because most games today, the majority of games today, are game type. 3. This is nothing to be overly concerned about. In Game Type 3, we use advantage betting, and we like advantage betting. I'll tell you why. It's a heck of a lot easier to get to a goal for the juggler situation, to get into it, to get it started, to get the bets out there when you're betting advantage betting than when you're betting negative progressions. Because it's so simple to merely increase your spread in a goal for the juggler situation than to increase an entire progression. One area where low stakes games have an advantage over high-stakes games is low-stakes games almost always give you more spread than high-stakes games. Therefore, the really the lower the stakes you're playing, the more you would like to be playing advantage betting. And this works out well with the fact that the lower the stakes you're playing, the more likely you are to be in a type 3 game. In a nickel game with a $500 max bet, you can actually go to a spread of a hundred to one. In a $100 game with a $2,500 max limit, such as the Taj Mahal game, your max spread afforded is $25 to 1. The problem with all of that, as we mentioned before, is finding a low-stakes game that hasn't been crowded up to six or seven players or hasn't become so overclumped that you're seeing very few 50% tens ratio rounds. You're going to see these 50% tens ratio rounds more frequently in higher stakes games than you are in the lower stakes games. Let's go back for a moment before we get off of progression betting altogether and take it a look at one other improvement you can make to progression betting. You want to pay attention when you're betting progressions to which bet you're winning the most often. The first bet, the second bet, or the third bet. Now, what you want to do is put emphasis on the bet that you're winning the most often. For instance, let's say that you're playing a 1-3-4, but you notice that you're winning the one bet far more often than you're winning the three-bet. You simply want to switch to a 2-3-4 progression. This puts more emphasis on the first bet, the one that you're winning. You're going to find these type 1 and type 2 games when you play particularly odd hours, like for instance, playing very early in the morning, and times when the casinos are just very uncrowded. That's when you can find these situations. The reason we used to find so many type 1 and 2 games back in the uh in the late 80s was that was before the casinos got the idea to close down tables to crowd them up. They used to keep dealers at every table. And therefore there was a preponderance of three and four player games, and negative progressions uh were very likely to work in these games. This is also why, even today, you will probably see more type 1 and 2 games in Las Vegas than you will in the other casino cities. It's simply because Las Vegas goes through these periods during the year where they just plainly aren't very crowded. But as gambling gets more and more popular, we've noticed even Las Vegas is beginning to crowd up. And also the larger casinos in Las Vegas have learned now to shut down tables to force the six and seven player games. So type one and two games are becoming quite rare everywhere, yet they are still an excellent game to play when we can find them. But since type three games are are more plentiful than the other types, for the purpose of these tapes, let's really concentrate on the type 3 games and advantage betting. There are two ways to identify an upcoming high ratio round in advantage betting. Number one, we can look at our signature pile. We will know what is the most low ratio rounds we're getting in a row in this game. Let's say for instance that it's three, then we know anytime we've seen three low ratio rounds in that game that a high ratio round is very likely coming up right now, and we're going to bet accordingly. So our signature pile does give us valuable information in advantage betting. But there's another method that is probably even more effective. All we need to do in advantage betting is watch the cards. Anytime we have a low ratio around, a low ratio round that ends in high cards, we can be fairly sure that the next round is going to be high ratio. What I like to do is look at the last three cards dealt in a low ratio round. If the last card is high, I'm going to give it, let's say, the first level of credibility that a high ratio round is coming up. If two out of three of the last three cards are high, I'm going to give it the second level of credibility that a high ratio round is coming up. And if three out of three of the final cards in a low ratio round are high, I'm going to give it the highest level of credibility that a high ratio round is coming up. The next thing we want to do is to have an idea of how many high ratio rounds there are in a row in the game we're playing for advantage betting. Our signature pile tells us that. That tells us how to bet with advantage betting. After a high ratio round, we want to go back and bet low because we know that a low ratio round is coming up. However, suppose in the game we're playing that the high ratio rounds are coming out two at a time. In other words, our sine wave, as it were, is long drawn out clumps. High ratio rounds are coming out two at a time usually. In this case, a high the first high ratio round signals that a second high ratio round is very likely to come out and we want to bet accordingly. Occasionally you get in those games where the high ratio rounds come out three and even four at a time. You may get in a game, for instance, where half the shoe is low ratio and the other half of the shoe is high ratio. We simply advantage bet accordingly. Those are nice games to play from the standpoint of when we get into the high ratio rounds, we can just continuously bet high until the low cards start to come out. From that standpoint, they are easy to bet. ABS or advantage betting, I believe, is taking over negative progression in the world of blackjack. We like this because ABS, advantage betting is so easy to do. It's so easy in most games, in most games, to follow the tens ratio and simply bet accordingly. That's really all advantage betting is betting high with high tens ratio, betting low with low tens ratio. Let's talk for a moment about the super bet. The superbet is simply when we get into a situation where it's easy to predict a winning hand. This can come up in progression betting, but it's far more likely to come up in advantage betting. We may notice, for instance, that anytime the low ratio around turns high right at the end, we are virtually always winning the next bet. Anytime we're winning the bet, say more than 60% of the time, we're going to look for the super bet. The super bet simply says, hey, you're winning this particular hand, you ought to be betting more money on it. How much more you want to bet is strictly up to you. But it's simply taking advantage of the opportunities presented to us in the game that we're playing. Now, let's talk about going for the juggler and why it's so easy in advantage betting. In advantage betting, what you want to see is you want to see yourself winning the majority of your high bets. You're going to find situations where the game is allowing you to win a few more high bets than you're losing. This is not a good time to go for the juggler. You're in a struggling game. You're going to see the opposite end of the spectrum where you're winning a high preponderance of your high bets. There's occasions when you're winning virtually all of your high bets. This is when you go for the juggler. When you are winning a high percentage of your high bets, say more than 60%. Heck, you'll find some games where you're winning more than 90%. It's your duty, it's your obligation in situations like this to go for the juggler. They come up, but they don't come up that often. You can't sit there and think about it after the fact and say I missed another one. When you are winning your high bets, you've got to go for the juggler. You've got to increase your spread. How quickly you want to do it is up to you. Just remember, always do it on their money. Never do it on your money. Now, let me give you one idea of how you can do this. Harvey G is one of the best goal for the juggler players I've ever seen. When Harvey G finds himself in a situation where he's winning his high bets, he doesn't fool around. Harvey likes to play a base spread of six to one. He likes to play the black chips. So on high ratio hands, he's playing $600. And in the low ratio, he's playing $100. When he's winning most of his high bets, what Harvey will do is he'll go, he'll play an up as you win progression on his high bets only. You know, there may be low bets in between these high bets, but he plays them on his high bets only. And what Harvey bets is the first bet of six, then he'll go to eight, then he'll go to ten. As long as he keeps sweating, he'll go to 15, and then he'll go to 20 chips on his high bet. And then he hangs out at the 20 chips until he loses a high bet. Anytime he loses one of those along the way, he will go back to the sixth bet and start all over again. It's very easy to see with this type of betting style how Harvey can easily take down $15,000 or $20,000 in a game of blackjack when the conditions present themselves. Page 126 of your manual is an important page. It is a list of goal for the juggler opportunities. How you can determine when you have goal for the juggler opportunities. I think that this page is something that's well worth studying several times. I want to go back here and reiterate the importance of 50% tens ratio rounds in the game and how they coincide and create go-for-the-juggler opportunities. 50% tens ratio rounds, our treatment of them, is one of the major differences, if not the major difference, between NBJ and world-class play. We recognize that 50% tens ratio is where the dealer is most likely to break. She's at her most vulnerable in 50% tens ratio rounds. When we see a lot of these rounds in the game, we are definitely in a go-for-the-juggler situation. Since the dealer is most likely to break in the 50% tens ratio rounds, our job is to avoid breaking in front of her. That's why you'll see in the try-point strategy that in 50% and more tens ratio rounds, we tend to stand on our stiff hands. We tend to play safe because again, the worst thing you can do in blackjack is to break ahead of the dealer. This gives us even more advantage, considerably more advantage, in the 50% tens ratio rounds. It is also that together with identifying dealer breaks, is how in world-class blackjack we have been able to increase our hands one percentage to as high as 57 and even up to 60%. Watch for 50% 10's density rounds. They are God's gift to the world-class blackjack player. I don't think that anyone else in the game recognizes their huge significance. Okay, now you have a good idea of how to select your game, you have a good idea of how to play your cards, and you have a good idea of how to bet. None of that is going to do you any good, however, unless you protect your winnings. We do that with the WCB Advancing Stop Loss System. Now the advancing stop loss system is a very difficult thing to explain in words, but it's a very easy thing to do, and it's a very easy thing to demonstrate graphically. What I'd like you to do is refer to page 131 in your manual, illustration number 15, and make darn sure that you understand how this advancing stop loss system works. The advancing stop loss system is designed to get you out of the game before the game turns bad, but at the same time allow you a little bit of backslide in the games to avoid getting you out of games that are just seeing a little bit of momentary trouble. The illustration on 131 is set up for progression betting. For advantage betting, you do it precisely the same way, except that the number of chips in your pile for the advantage betting system should equal three times your high bet. Other than that, it's the same system. Also, in advantage betting or in first base for that matter, uh ignore the stop loss system as far as your low bets are concerned. Just use the stop loss system uh for your high bets. I know it sounds like a last minute afterthought on this tape, but I can assure you that having a proper stop loss system is extremely important to your winning activity and your ratio of games won. You don't want to play blackjack without a stop loss system. I can't count how many times I've seen players take down huge wins only to stay in the game too long and ruin the whole day because they didn't know enough to get out of the game at the right time. It's one of the most important things we do. There's table selection, there's card play, there's betting, and there's knowing when to get out of the game. Okay, that should do it for tape number seven.

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For further information or questions, you may contact Mr. Davis by phone. His number is 518-587-9219. In addition to these WCD tapes you're listening to, NBJ also has a broad spectrum of other products. These include E. Clips and Davis's quarterly newsletter as well as other products in the public. Also available for a wide variety of gaming supplies at discount prices. For further information on gaming supplies, please contact Keith Smith at 717-533-7992 or Bill Ray at 717-7909729. This ends side A of Tape 4. Please turn the table over for side B's topic and title.