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The Red Seven


Presentation

The Red Seven system is described in Arnold Snyder's book " Blackbelt in Blackjack " and on The Easy Red 7 Card Counting System page.

This is a level 1 count, unbalanced, without conversion to True Count at the base.
Its particularity is to count differently the 7 reds (+1) and the 7 blacks (0).

It presents, in the eyes of many, several defects:
  1. Without conversion to True Count, it does not allow to evaluate the advantage of the player with precision.
  2. The distinction between the 7 reds and 7 blacks seems to add a difficulty to the KO that counts all 7 to +1
  3. The ramp proposed by Arnold Snyder, including in the latest version of 2005, is too slow to be effective.
  4. The indices generated by CVIndex, the CData index generator, are aberrant due to an unpatched bug, including in version 5.0.145
Point 3 is immediately set using the optimized ramp provided by CVIndex
Point 4 is bypassed using an average value of 0.5 for all 7
Point 2 is a matter of habit but may be problematic for some.
The problem raised by point 1 is common to all counts without conversion like the KO

The Red Seven does not seem to present major difficulties but no benefits on the KO
But ...

The transition to True Count

The Hi-Lo completely ignores the 7 and the KO gives it +1, like the other low cards.
But the EOR (Effect Of Removal) 7 is 2 times less important. To give it +0.5 would be logical, but would turn the system into a level 2 count that is more difficult to grasp.
The trick of counting only the 7 reds (or blacks if you prefer) keeps level 1 without significant loss of performance as the simulations show.

More importantly, the Pivot is at IRC + 2N if N is the number of games.
For example for 6 games and the IRC traditionally at -12, the pivot is at 0 (-12 + 2x6)

It's important to differentiate between a unbalanced count and a count without conversion to True Count.
ALL accounts can be used in True Count.
Balanced accounts like HiLo are only easier to convert to True Count (and actually work very poorly without conversion)
I refer to EZ-TKO for further explanation and conversion formulas.

The Pivot is the Running Count for which the True Count and therefore the advantage is known and constant throughout the game.
Below the Pivot, the player, who knows only the "average" True Count corresponding to his Running Count, underestimates the advantage at the beginning of the shoe and overestimate it at the end.

In the case of the KO, it is a True Count of +4, that is, in the majority of games (Early Surrender apart) where the player's advantage increases to about + 1.5%

In the case of Red Seven it's +2, about 0.5% advantage.
There are no under-evaluation or over-evaluation below the pivot.
And most importantly, converting to True Count is much simpler.

Use the True Count Converter to determine the True Count based on the advance in the shoe and the Runing Count.
For the KO ... it's chaos.

But for Red Seven the start of ramp will be 0 regardless of the depth in the shoe.
TC of +3 will be at 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 ...
TC of +4 will be at 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2

Performances

A comparison, among others, of  the performances of KO, Red Seven and Red Seven with conversion to True Count.
Everyone can decide whether the game is worth the effort.