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Now let me uh tell you about a decision that I had to make here with these tapes. Uh on the WCB Early Bird Special at $500, I had promised you a bonus tape uh on the first base system. Well, I went back and I I listened to that bonus tape. What it was, it was a tape uh of a little first base rendition that I do uh at seminars uh that we do a couple times a month that are promotional seminars. So it's a rendition of first base that's given to people that have that have never played NBJ or world-class blackjack before. And when I went back and listened to that tape, I found that it was too basic for uh a world-class caliber player. And another problem with it is it was uh made on just a uh a home type uh tape recorder instead of the more sophisticated equipment uh that I'm making these tapes on. And so rather than give you that tape, what I want to do here is make a whole new up-to-date tape on the first base system. I think it's better, I think you're getting your money's worth much better this way than uh than getting that little 20-minute uh tape. So, what I did is I've run all of these tapes out to the maximum to make a little more room to talk about this uh first base system. So let's get started. One thing I'd like to say right off the bat about the first base system is when I wrote the NBJ manual some three years ago, I downplayed the first base system in that manual for a couple of reasons. Um the first reason is I had uh not been playing the first base system for that many years where I had it as perfected as it is right now. That was one situation. The other situation is the games of that era did not lend themselves to the first base system as much as today's games do. What we've seen over the three years is a uh games that uh a huge increase in the percentage of games that are susceptible to the first base system. In fact, I probably now play the first base system uh more than any other position at the table simply because I find the conditions ripe for the first base system so frequently uh in today's casinos. I think that this was brought about by uh number one, an increase in players over the three years, so cards get more play, so they're much more, particularly in the six-deck games, they're much more likely to clump up uh enough to be sufficiently clumped for the first base system. I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is this study that was done on titer shuffles that the casinos have uh listened to, uh, this was a study done by a mathematician that related tighter shuffles, in other words, smaller picks, uh to the the table wins for the casino. And most of the casinos now have gone to tighter shuffles where they're are are taking uh uh single deck picks, a half a deck in each hand. Now we don't really know why, but when the casino started doing this, we started doing even better at first base. This this shuffle change lent itself to the first base system so that first base has become uh a much more suitable strategy for us today than it was three years ago. So I want you to pay particular attention to the first base system as we have it perfected today. We have made a lot of changes and a lot of perfections to the point where uh, what how else can I say it? We're just killing them uh using this first base system. Now, I first got wind of first base by watching a little Asian girl at the Sands Casino. Uh it was about three o'clock in the morning. This is quite a few years ago. This goes back uh five or six years, and uh I was playing third base in a fairly good game, and this girl uh came with a pocketbook full of green chips and sat down next to me and proceeded making her bets. And what she would do is every bet she would put up uh four green chips on her circle and hold her hand on the pile. It was it was three o'clock in the morning, and the dealer was tired, and the dealer wasn't paying a whole lot of attention to what was going on. Well, what would happen is as the dealer started dealing, this Asian girl would pull her hand back and she would either leave one chip in the circle or uh no chips in the circle or all four chips in the circle. And it seemed like when she left her bet up, she was winning a tremendous uh percentage of these hands. So, of course, I got very, very interested in just what it was she she was doing because whatever it was, it was working very well, and I didn't catch it that night. I had to give this a considerable amount of thought before I realized what she was doing. Well, what she was doing is when the dealer dealt the first card to the first player, uh that the Asian girl would pull her hand back at that exact instant, and if that card was a ten, she would leave the entire hundred dollar bet up, all four chips. If that card was a nine or an ace, I believe, she would leave one chip up, and if it was any other card, she would pull the whole bet back. Now, of course, this is cheating. Uh and the only reason that she wasn't being caught is because she is playing the third base end of the table. She's over by me, and when the dealer is dealing the first card to the first base player, he's he his eyes are at the other end of the table, so she could get away with it. Well, it worked extremely well, and after that, I began experimenting with the first base system. I used it primarily to play the Atlantic City Strip $50 games, and the way I would do it is I would use I would have a $50 bet for my low bet and a $75 bet for my high bet. And I would use it pretty much as a last resort system when I couldn't find any good uh third base games. However, I began winning a higher and higher percentage of these games as I caught on to this system more and more. And now we have developed the first base system into probably what is the highest percentage blackjack system in the world today. I don't know, or I've never even heard of anything that approaches the first base system in winning consistency. Okay, here's how we work it. We simply have a low bet and a high bet. Now these bets can be anything you want them to be, but recognize that the more spread you have between your low bet and your high bet, the more torque you have in the game, and the more the better you will do in a winning game, the more torque you have in the game. Okay, particularly when your wins are consistently or fairly consistently on your high bets rather than on your low bets. So we like to see players play the first base system with somewhere around a 3 to 1 or a 4 to 1 or a 5 to 1 spread. We've had players playing first base with as much as a uh 40 to 1 spread. Most casinos now will allow you to do this. Uh it's only the uh one and two deck Vegas games that uh you'll probably have any trouble with these spreads, and you wouldn't want to be playing first base in those games anyway. First base works best in six and eight deck games, but it has also been quite successful in four-deck games and occasionally even in two-deck games. I particularly like to play it in six-deck games. Six deck games tend to present the the best window for first base play. But it works the first base system works on the fact, it works off of the fact that in a clumped game, which all games are to some extent, in a clumped game, tens follow tens more often than they mathematically should. This works like a tell in the game, it's something that we can take advantage of. It's true that the more clumped the game is, the more tens will follow tens. Recognize that tens should follow tens mathematically 30.8% of the time. But as clumping increases in a deck in a shoe of cards, tens can follow tens as much as 40, 45, 50, and in some cases even higher than that. You will find that there is a possibility of overclumping, uh, particularly in eight-deck games or in six-deck games that have been played with seven players for for quite a while, where you will get the ten when uh you expect to get the ten, however, you will be pushing with two card 20s too often with the dealer to make the first base system effective. Uh on the other hand, you can get games that are not clumped enough for the the first base system to operate effectively. So we're going to talk about how you test the water in a moment. But first, let's get the system down pat. What we key off of is the final card or cards in the prior round. We like to see the prior round ending in a 10. When the prior round ends in a 10, recognize that the first base player gets the next card. Uh the first base player is the only player at the table to see the last card ahead of his first card before he bets. Everybody else sees this card, but they don't see it until after they bet. The first base player sees this cards, this card before he bets. That sort of wipes out the disadvantage of first base in that by American rules, we do not see the card ahead of our play decision when we sit at first base because it's always the dealer's whole card. That's a slight disadvantage of the first base position, but it's more than wiped out by this huge advantage. We see the last card out of the shoe before we make our bet. So, what we do is we watch to pick out the last card in every round. Now recognize that the last card can fall anywhere. It's not necessarily the dealer's hit card, the dealer may be Pat. It might even be your uh hit card at first base, it might be the third base player's uh hit card, it could be anywhere at the table. It could even be a breaking card that got picked up by the dealer and and uh went into the discard shoe. So, one thing you need to do is if you've never played first base before, is practice this just a little bit at home until you become comfortable with picking out the last card of the round. Whenever the last card in the round is a ten, we are going to bet high in the next round because tens follow tens more often than they mathematically should. You you notice when you're in a game playing cards, let's say that you're in a game playing cards and and for whatever reason you just put out your highest bet of the day. Let's say that you put out a $200 bet, and it's your highest bet of the day. All of a sudden you're paying strict attention to the game and the dealer starts dealing the cards. Let's say that you get a six on your first card. Well, immediately your heart would sink because you know either by mathematics or you know intuitively that a six is about the worst card you could get on a first card with a high bet out there. On the same token, by the same token, let's say that the dealer starts dealing against your high bet and you get a 10, immediately your adrenaline jumps up because when you get a 10 on the first card, you are used to winning the hand. Whether you give this a lot of thought, whether you know this, a lot of people just know it intuitively, but when you get a 10 on the first card, you are in that hand big time. If you check it out mathematically, you will find that when you receive a first card 10, your odds of winning the hand at that point, upon receiving that 10, your odds of winning that hand jump up to right around 70%. So the ideal situation in blackjack is to know when you are going to get a first card 10. We simply bet high when we're going to get a first card 10, and we bet low when we don't. Well, that's exactly what the first base information tells us. It doesn't mean that we are necessarily going to get a 10. What it means is that for our high bets, if we look at just all of our high bets, instead of getting 30.8% the mathematical amount of first card tens, we are going to get a much higher percentage of first card tens by following the first base strategy. This gives us a huge advantage over the casino in our high bet rounds. Now, where is a better place to have an advantage over the casino that's right where we want to have an advantage over the casino is in our high bet rounds. Even in a mediocre first base game, this advantage can totally wipe out the normal casino advantage over the player. However, when we are in the right clumping window, the advantage that this gives us is can be very, very considerable. It's easy to get a 10 or even a 15 or sometimes even more than that advantage over the casino playing the first base system. Now, one of the things that's neat about the first base system is in any game, it either works or it doesn't work. Either we're in the window of clumping that we need or we're not. And it's a fairly substantial window. And it's a that window exists more with type 3 games than it exists with types one and two games. So we know now that the preponderance of the games in a casino are type 3 games anyway, and this is exactly why the first base system works better and more often now than it used to work. Okay. Recognize that when we play the first base system, we are doing what the Asian girl was doing, but we are doing it in a total legal way. Okay, let's take a look at how this system works. All we're going to do is have a low bet and a high bet. When the last card in the prior round was not a 10, we're going to make the low bet. When the last card in the prior round was a 10, we are going to make the high bet. Now we still want to play our cards the NBJ way. We don't revert back to basic strategy or anything like that. Of course, we can't quite we can't do quite as well at first base because of that blind spot right before our hit decision. So our hands-one ratio at first base may suffer just a little bit, but that's not so bad because the first base system doesn't depend on your hands-one ratio. It depends on your high bets one ratio. As long as we are receiving sufficient first card tens to win more than 50% of our high bets, we have an advantage over the casino. Recognize that our normal ratio of first card tens is only 30.8%. So even a raise any ratio over 30.8% gives us an advantage over the casino. You don't necessarily need to be receiving 50 or 60% first card tens. However, the more first card tens we are receiving, the better off we are. You will find that when you're playing first base in the peak of the window at its optimum, you can be receiving as many as 55, 60, 65% first card tens. We've even had games where we were receiving as much as 90% first card tens on our high bets. Now you want to be a little careful here because you may be in a game that is so clumped that you're just going to push with the dealer on 20 too frequently. But 60% is not an uh unheard of number of first card tens to be receiving. Okay. How can we improve on the first base system from there? Lone tens are the enemy of the first base system. Lone tens can be frequent in a given game or they can be infrequent in a given game. How loan tens get created most often is when we have a situation where the dealer deals everybody out a stiff hand and then deals herself a 10 up, everybody has to hit against that stiff hand, and the dealer may run into a ten clump at that point in time breaking everybody with a 10. Well, their stiff hands are mostly composed of low cards, obviously. They break on the 10. That 10 goes into the discard shoe all by itself, and we create a mess of lone tens. So we want to avoid betting high on lone tins in the game. How do we do this? Well, the best way to do it, and this is a little bit new from anything you've heard before, the best way to do it is when the prior round ends in a 10 all by itself. In other words, a 10 preceded by low cards, preceded by low cards. In other words, it ends in what looks like a lone 10. We want to check and see if we receive the first card 10 in those occasions. In some games, you'll receive the first card 10 anyway, and in some games you you won't. As long as we're receiving more than 30%, let's say more than a third first card 10s on a single 10, it is okay to bet high on a single 10. However, you'll find that about half the time when it was a single 10, you will not be receiving a first card 10 as much as a third of the time. In those games, you want to treat a single 10 at the end of the prior round just as if it were a low card. Okay. We have found that by never betting high against a single low lone ten, uh we were giving too much away to the casino because in some games these lone tens are just as good as if there's two or three or four tens at the end of the round. So we never want to put ourselves in a position of betting low on winning hands if we can help it. Alright, so we test the water to find out whether single loan tins in our game are effective or if they aren't. Okay, let's look at another improvement. How do we look at nines? You will find that in most games, nines are almost as effective as tens as the last card in the prior round. But we want to make sure of this, so we want to test the water. Don't bet high against a final card nine the first time or two in the game. Watch what happens. If you are successful, if nines are a good ten indicator, then go ahead and bet nines in that game. The same holds true of eights. You'll find that eights are less often a good indicator, particularly uh lone eights and particularly lone nines for that matter. Uh if the final card was an eight, we definitely want to test the water in each game to see if eights are an effective 10 indicator. You'll find that about half the time they are and half the time they aren't. Do not bet high on eights unless you have already proven that eights are a good 10 indicator in the game that you are playing. Let's look at aces. You will find that a high ace, in other words, an ace preceded by high cards, is one of the best ten indicators in the game. So anytime the round ends in an ace that's preceded by high cards, uh you'll want to make your high bet. Low aces are seldom a good 10 indicator, except that in some games, low aces can be a good 10 indicator. So that's another card we want to test the water. We want to see what's going on with low aces. You'll find occasionally find a game where a low ace is a good 10 indicator, you can bat accordingly. Deuces. We can look at deuces virtually the same way as we look at aces. In other words, we can say there's such a thing as a high deuce and a low deuce. Deuces have a tendency in the game of blackjack to run with tens. You will very often find that deuces following tens are even a better ten indicator than tens are themselves. It's one of the things we want to check out in the game, but you will find that a final card deuce preceded by high cards is often your best indicator. It may even be good enough to indicate a super bet opportunity in the game you are playing. Watch for that. Watch for deuces preceded by high cards to be a super bet indicator in the game you're playing. Okay. Let's look at another nice situation we have in the first base system. We can combine the first base system with advantage betting. I tend to always do this when I play first base. What I do is I look at the last three cards in the prior round. I don't necessarily need to see a final card ten as long as two out of three of the last cards were high cards. If I see two out of three high cards in the last three cards, I generally go ahead and make the high bet as long as that has been proving effective in the specific game that I'm playing right now. The first base system, of course, is very, very similar to advantage betting. It is an advantage betting system. All the things that we do to qualify bets in the advantage betting system, we also want to do in the first base system. For instance, we want to know in the game we're playing what happens after a high ratio round. Is a high ratio round a good 10 indicator? Now you usually find that a high ratio round inning in a 10 or inning in a 102s or inning in a 10's is a good first 10 indicator. But are you getting the second 10? Many times if the whole round was high ratio, you'll find that in that particular game you're getting a stiff card with your 10. That would tell us in that game do not make a bet after a high ratio round. Only make your bet after low ratio rounds that end in high cards. On the other hand, you may find that in that particular game a high ratio round is a good indicator. Sometimes it is the best indicator. In that case, you you will want to go ahead and make your high bet after a high ratio round, but watch what happens when you get two high ratio rounds in a row. Is the second high ratio round a good indicator or is it not? You will find most often that a second high ratio round in a row is often not a good indicator for a high bet. But check it out. In other words, you first you have a low ratio round that ends in a 10, then you have a high ratio round that ends in a 10, then you have two high ratio rounds in a row that end in a 10. Check out which are your most effective rounds. You'll very often find out that you should not be making a high bet if you're looking for the third high ratio round in a row. This also gives you an idea of the importance of keeping the signature of the game. If you're keeping the signature of the game properly, you'll know how many high ratio rounds in a row are coming up in your game, and you'll know whether the second high ratio round is a good indicator for a third high ratio round or not. Another thing to look for is sequential cards at the end of the round, particularly six, seven, and eight, and seven, eight, and nine, or even eight, nine, and ten. Sequential cards at the end of the round that move up in sequence often present a super bet opportunity in the first base system. Like advantage betting, the first base system presents a wonderful opportunity to go for the juggler. Anytime we are winning a high percentage of our high bets, see that we're up in the 60% range or higher, we definitely must go for the juggler. First base games tend to last quite a while, and they present a wonderful go for the juggler situation if we're winning a high percentage of our of our high bets. And you will you will play in games where you're winning 70 or even 75% of your high bets if you play enough first base. And I'm hoping that you will. Okay, let's look at testing the water for the first base system. I'm going to tell you that it's absolutely imperative to test the water. I would say that on average, probably somewhere between a third and a half of the games overall in casinos today are highly susceptible to the first base system. It's kind of a moving target. It seems like a greater percentage of them are becoming susceptible all the time. But you're going to find this. You may find that on one day in one casino, all of the games are susceptible to the first base system. On another day in the same casino, none of the games are susceptible to the first base system. And it's very hard to know if the casino is generally in that window for that the first base system likes, or if it isn't. And it's and it's more difficult to tell whether the game is. So we must test the water. And there's no easy way to do this from the aisle. The best thing to do is to go ahead and take the empty first base seat. If you don't do it, somebody else probably will. Sit down, tell the dealer to go ahead and deal. Tell the dealer you'll start the next shoe. Watch the player next to you. Watch and see what would happen if he was playing the first base system. Would he be winning or would he not be winning? And you would like to see him winning two out of three or three out of three of the hands where you would be making your high bet. While you're doing this, you can also be gathering information about the game. Our nine's good, our eight's good, our deuces good, and so forth. You can be gathering information so it's not a complete waste of time. But if you're finding that it's just not working, there can be things that can go wrong. The first thing go wrong is maybe just not getting the first ten. Uh therefore uh it's not working. Or every time you get a 10, so does the dealer. There goes your advantage. If if the dealer gets a 10 right along with you, you don't have any advantage. Uh or you get the first 10, but you're getting a stiff card with it all the time. Or you're getting the 20, but so is a dealer hitting out and getting a 20 or 21. Uh, there's things that can go wrong. So we want to test and make sure that the first base that the game that that we've selected here is in fact susceptible to the first base system. There's not a whole lot of point in in playing games that are that are borderline or just not acceptable at all because there are many opportunities to play the first base system. So test the water. Now, when you get in the game, you're going to change the player number again. So when you get in the game, don't start right out with a three to one or four to one, five five to one spread. Start out slow, start out with like a two to one spread, or maybe no spread at all. Just watch and see if you would are if you're winning the right hands or if you're not. Um you may change the game negatively by changing the player number. You may even change it positively by changing the player number, but you need to know, you always need to test the water in when you're playing the first base system. Now, let's take a look. Can we only play it from first base? We've had situations where we played the first base system successfully from every single seat at the table. Uh if you can't get the first uh seat, uh try the second seat. The first base system is very often virtually as effective from the second seat as it is from the first seat. Sometimes it's even more effective, particularly if you're in a game that has a lot of zippers in it. Um so check it out. Keep your eye on the first base, you know, unless you're doing terrifically well wherever you're sitting. If the person moves out of first base, you might you you probably want to take that seat, but not necessarily. If you're doing quite well where you are, what is the point in in moving? Okay. So let's recap. Number one, test the water. Oh, and by the way, player number. Let's just talk about player number. I've I found that the fewer players in the game, the better the first base system works, all the way down to head to head, and that's a change from when I wrote the uh NBJ manual. What we what we like to see is we like to see games that were clumped up by a lot of players, but then dwindled down to fewer players. Some of the players got up and left, maybe uh maybe dinner time or whatever. They some of them got up and left. These tend to be the the most likely first base games, four or five player games, three, four, or five player games. But in general, the less players there are in the game, as long as it has been clumped up, the better off you are. This is simply because we need to get a good second card too to win the hand. And the less players there are in the game, the more likely we are to get a good second card because the fewer cards are dealt between our first card and our second card. Should you play seven player first base games? I've played them and they, you know, they have been good. You're not going to find as many good games with six and seven players as you will with four and five. However, hey, if it's a good game, a good game is a good game. Play it, give it a whirl. Sometimes a clumping is so long that uh the fact that there's seven players just doesn't seem to hurt you much. You're still getting the second card ten. When there's a lot of players in the game, you'll want to think twice about betting high on the second or the third high ratio round in a row. Uh okay, recap. Test the water. Get in, find out what's winning in that game you're playing right now. Watch the percentage of your high bets that are winning. If you're winning a good percentage of your high bet, say 60% or more, go for the juggler. It's your duty to go for the juggler in the first base system when the opportunity presents itself. Uh use a movable stop loss, the same one that we talked about for advantage betting. Your stop loss pile should be three times your high bet. When you move up your high bet, increase your stop loss pile accordingly. Keep the stop loss on your high bets only. Your low bets when you're playing first base are really sacrifice bets. We'd like to be winning them, but they're really sacrifice bets. Use your movable stop loss. Now, first base games, the worm can turn. Watch for the worm to turn. As soon as you start losing your high bets, or as soon as you start not getting your tens or not getting your second cards, it's the same as any other game. When it's starting to show negative signs, it's starting to show negative signs. You do not have to play all the way through your stop loss. However, first base games do tend to last a while, so give it a chance, you know. Don't get out just because you lost a couple of high bets in a row. You might that'd be a good reason to decrease your high bet. But stay at a few more hands and see if it's not going to turn right back around again. First base games often do that. Remember the Ineida game. It was good one hand, one shoe, bad the next, good one shoe, bad the next, and it kept on going that way, and it turned out to be a very good uh situation. Not the best, but a very good situation, nevertheless. Give first base a try. A lot of our full-time pros only play the first base system. It does have the highest advantage when it's playing well, it has the highest advantage that you can muster in a game of blackjack. Give it a whirl. I think you'll like it. It's awesome. Okay, I'd like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank you for joining in on our world-class blackjack program. I wish you all the luck in the world with it. If you have any questions whatsoever, don't hesitate to call me. I love to help you, and I want you to be the best player that you can be. This is E. Clifton Davis signing off. One final comment. I know some of you are gonna do terrifically well with world-class blackjack. Hey, when you do, don't forget about the Beth Ripple Memorial Scholarship Fund. I love you for it. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 43:30

For further information or questions, you may contact Mr. Davis.com. His number is 518-5879. Also available uh why the wide supplies are supposed to five. Oh no way.