Cover Playing — SCOREs by Penetration

How do cover plays affect SCOREs?

Purposely making playing errors is another method of cover. If you can make yourself look like a lousy player, you are likely to receive less unwelcome attention. This chart displays the effect of making various playing errors taken from Ian Andersen's book Burning the Tables in Las Vegas as follows:

1 – Always Stand on 16
2 – Always Double on 11, 10 and 9v2
3 – Always Stand on 12v3, A7 v 9, T, A

Here we see the SCOREs in a six-deck game for all penetrations from 26 to 130 cards behind the cut card. The top line displays the SCOREs assuming a full set of indexes. The cyan area represents the loss resulting from the use of rule #1 above (always stand on 16). The blue area is the additional loss caused by the #2 cover rules and the green area is the loss by also using the #3 rules. Therefore the red area displays SCOREs using all three rules. Note: the losses from rule #2 would have been a bit lower with fewer indexes in use.

What about single-deck?

This chart is the same except for single-deck. As is usually the case, everything is magnified in single-deck. Single-deck is substantially more sensitive to incorrect plays.

Sim details

• Six decks, S17, DAS, LS, Heads-Up, Hi-Lo, truncate, max indexes, half-deck resolution, penetrations from 26-130 cards cutoff by the card
• Single-deck, H17, 1 player, Hi-Lo, truncate, max indexes, quarter-deck resolution, penetrations from 13-26 cards cutoff by the card
• Five billion rounds each for six decks, three billion for single-deck, all sims use optimal betting, full Kelly