blackjack

Blackjack For Blood: The Card-Counters' Bible, and Complete Winning Guide
$19.95
This is the best written book on learning blackjack. And it has lots of great material in it. I highly recommend buying it.

However, the book is centered on Carlson's Omega II system, which is simply not a good choice for a first blackjack system. Unlike the most-common system, the Hi-Lo, cards have 5 possible values (-2,-1,0,1,2), instead of 3 (-1,0,1). The Omega II counts 12 of the 13 ranks of cards, whereas many simpler counts only count between 8 and 11. Most daunting of all, to be an effective count for the purposes of betting (as opposed to playing your cards), you really need to keep a separate count going of aces. This is hard to do, especially in shoe games.

The Omega II system was designed to make crazy money on single- and double-deck blackjack. To the extent that casinos even permit that to happen anymore, it's one of the two very best systems for that. But for the modern game, which is almost all shoes, you'll want something else.

I still think one should buy this book, since it really does open up the reader to how to think about the game. But one should also buy, say, Stanford Wong's Professional Blackjack, and just learn the Hi-Lo. If, a year down the road, you're the kind of player who just won't be satisfied unless he's playing the very best, then you can go back to Blackjack for Blood and retrain.

Blackjack: Play Like The Pros
$14.95
I have had this book now for 2 days and am almost done reading it. It is extremely well written and you just want to keep going from chapter to chapter. The book unlocks the secrets of black jack and the truth behind card counting to become an advantage player. I live 4 miles from a casino and cannot wait to try out some of these techniques........yes there is obviously a bunch of practice needed, but it seems well worth the effort. No freebies people.

Professional Deluxe Card Shoe 6-Deck
$19.99
This is pretty simple and works well. It looks exactly as nice as in the picture: just a bunch of plastic, but it's sturdy and does the job well.

Beating Blackjack with Andy Bloch
$14.98
A top notch DVD. Andy Bloch is great at explaining and teaching in this video. The DVD takes you through Basic Strategy, card counting, betting and MIT style team play to make some real money. Today a number of casinos immediately put used cards back in a shuffling machine. These cards get mixed directly back into the shoe after a hand. Andy Bloch's betting strategy assumes that after every hand the used cards get put in a discard tray so you know how many cards have been delt. If the casino reshuffles the cards into the shoe at the end of every hand then Andy Bloch's betting strategy is pretty much useless and will not work. Overall the whole production is nicely put together and presented. Beating BlackJack is a fine addition to anyone's gambling library.