Another week had passed since our first team meeting. The day job kept me busy, but I still found time to practice my card counting skills.

Now, to any serious card counter, learning basic strategy and how to count cards are fundamental building blocks to your career. If you are unable to master either of these basics, then you have no shot at becoming a card counter. So practice, practice practice until perfect.

And that's what I did. From our first team meeting, I realised that learning to count cards was not going to happen overnight. I needed more training. I studied my basic strategy over and over, testing myself constantly. I find the best way to do this is to get a pen and a blank piece of paper and recreate the basic strategy chart, line by line, rationalising to myself why each play makes sense. Do this enough times and it becomes second nature. I find this method better than dealing yourself cards as you will discover that most of the time you are dealt with obvious hands, like a 20 against a 6. It's the rarer hands that are harder to learn, and that you will also see less often during play. Knowing the correct plays of all hands is vital, no matter how rarely they come up. Counting only gives you slim advantages over the house and you can't afford to give up any of that advantage.

I also did some card counting drills. The same drills as last time. Dealing cards in two's and counting down a deck.

Team Meeting Two
Our second team meeting took place in the same public venue. We selected a booth this time for a little more privacy and ran through a few drills just to test where our skills were at. I was happy to see that my ability to count on pressure had dramatically improved and that I was playing basic strategy nearly perfectly. I still stumbled on some plays, mainly involving when to split, but the improvement was obvious. Zola too had made significant advances in his basic strategy, but was still falling behind in his ability to count.

Having determined that our skills were getting there, we discussed various team play strategies that we should utilise. Now, according to the instructional DVD that we were using, one player (the counter) would sit and bet minimum at a table, whilst a second player (the big player) would sit on the sidelines and be signaled into the game when the count was good and bet big.

This however, is where we came across our first problem with Andy Bloch's DVD.
In order to play a winning game, you had to make sure that the winnings of the big player more than make up for the losings of the counter. The counter is playing a game which will lose him 0.5% of his bankroll every hand, where as the Big Player (who plays only true count of +3 or greater), will be winning at least 1% of his bet every hand. But what percentage of hand played have a true count of +3 or greater?

In the instructional DVD, the team had access to hundreds of thousands of dollars, playing with betting units anyhwere from $100 to $800. They conveniently don't let you know what minimum bet that the counter is using is. Is the table minimum $10 or $100?

Obviously with such big bankrolls, they don't have to worry about table minimums. Our bankroll however, was much smaller. Nearer $2 - 3,000. This meant our minimum bet was rougly $3. Below table minimum! If we used Andy Bloch's Team play method, would it still work for us?

It was apparent more research was necessary on the subject. I said I would work out some numbers at home to see what our betting strategy should be.

End of Team Meeting Two