Counting for insurance only

In Bob Dancer's book Million dollar something, he talks about how his girlfriend counted cards just for the insurance. I think she just counted the 10s and aces. What would that entail exactly in, say, a double deck game?

Quote: debitncredit

In Bob Dancer's book Million dollar something, he talks about how his girlfriend counted cards just for the insurance. I think she just counted the 10s and aces. What would that entail exactly in, say, a double deck game?

Not enough to overcome the house edge, if that's what you're asking. Insurance is about 50% of the value in the index plays known as the Illustrious 18. these index plays supplement a counting system (popularly Hi/Low) with strategy deviations based on the count. If you're already burning that much time counting (learning, practicing, deploying) why wouldn't you bet more when you have a known advantage? The only thing I could think of would be bankroll limitations or a non-willingness to take advantage of a good situation.

Lastly, if you're just purely going to count for insurance, you should choose a counting system that has a very high Insurance Correlation, such as Hi-Opt II, or even the Tens Count. Hi-Opt II would probably be better for single/double deck games, regular counting, as well. Though, nothing will compare to the universal/ease of Hi/Low (in my opinion).

Teliot has an article on counting the insurance bet on his AP Heat site. No, you cannot overcome the house edge. However since insurance is simply a bet on a ten in the hole it depends only on the proportion of tens in the deck. Therefore it is possible to count the insurance bet perfectly. Count +1 for non-tens and -2 for tens. Insurance has an advantage when the count exceeds 4x the number of decks.

I don't count, but I often thought it may be fun to count insurance only to reduce the house edge a little. I have thrown in some chips on insurance a few times when I had a general sense that I had seen very few tens in the past few rounds.

Quote: Romes

Not enough to overcome the house edge, if that's what you're asking. Insurance is about 50% of the value in the index plays known as the Illustrious 18. these index plays supplement a counting system (popularly Hi/Low) with strategy deviations based on the count. If you're already burning that much time counting (learning, practicing, deploying) why wouldn't you bet more when you have a known advantage? The only thing I could think of would be bankroll limitations or a non-willingness to take advantage of a good situation.

Lastly, if you're just purely going to count for insurance, you should choose a counting system that has a very high Insurance Correlation, such as Hi-Opt II, or even the Tens Count. Hi-Opt II would probably be better for single/double deck games, regular counting, as well. Though, nothing will compare to the universal/ease of Hi/Low (in my opinion).

There's a price to be paid for "universal ease" in terms of accuracy. Insurance betting using Hi-Lo is going to be less accurate than others but even a level 2 count such as RPC does not have perfect insurance correlation, so to remedy this you can have perfect insurance betting with a separate insurance count. The insurance count and RC/TC can be two very different numbers! You go with TC+3 to take insurance (It's actually more like +3.1 if you look close and want to get technical about it) but depending upon the count you are using this estimation of TC may differ. Would Hi-Lo ASC make a difference since Aces raise TC but lower IC? Some, there's still those (7,8,9) all missing in action though, a variable that can send the insurance count all over the place due to the linear nature of the insurance bet. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know though.

The problem with that is having to do 2 separate counts simultaneously, of which I know of one or two people that can do this but that's well, one or two people on the entire planet. It's simply beyond what most people can do or are going to want to do. This is why it was mentioned on one post about having the girlfriend at the table doing the separate insurance count, a very sensible way to tackle it... now THAT's "universal ease" if I ever heard of such a thing! I employ perfect insurance betting but it's not from doing a separate count and merely a formula derived from my running count.