For those of you who remember, I started out card counting with my buddy Zola. But so far our training was done separately, apart from watching some instructional DVD"s together.

I learned Basic Strategy and the Hi-Lo counting system on my own in a couple of days, but we waited a week for our first team meeting. I had 'tested' the system and was pretty confident that it all worked and made sense. I was ready to start perfecting my skills and get into the casinos.

We met in a public place to start our training; not busy so that we'd get disturbed.
Not surprisngly, however, Zola had made little progress on his side, having spent only the hour before the meeting learning basic strategy. I'd been kind of expecting this, so wasn't too dissappointed, after all we both have full time jobs too.

He went on about wanting to be cautious, and wanting to test the system before we started. He wasn't yet convinced that counting cards worked. I reassured him that we wouldn't do anything until we were convinced that it worked. I told him to go buy some cards and test it for himself at home until he was convinced. I was, there definitely was something to this card counting stuff.

So instead we spent the meeting running through some drills, testing basic strategy, practicing counting cards.

Now, training yourself in the comfort of your home is one thing, but doing it with someone else there is a whole different matter. Basic strategy was all of a sudden not so obvious. I started to question if I was making the right moves, counting cards with someone else counting along as well, but getting different counts, was challenging, and on top of all that, having people walking by and wondering what the hell you were doing made it a little more difficult.

While we may not have achieved much out of team meeting numero uno, we did learn that a lot more serious studying and training was required if we wanted to take this any further.