The Illustrious 18 - Card Counting Deviations for Blackjack

[00:01] the illustrious 18 is for card counters why it's important as well as why I first off guys welcome back to the channel this is A1 Blackjack and I'm steak sauce in the description of this video and in the pinned comment you will

[00:14] find this sheet with all these links feel free to follow along with me or you can go there after this video and check it out before I show you the illustrious 18 what is it what does that even mean well the last piece that you need to

[00:27] perfect card counting is to learn deviations a deviation is when you make a betting decision or in this case a playing decision that is different than what basic strategy normally tells you what to do so by this point if you're

[00:41] watching this video it is expected that you have learned basic strategy and can perfectly play every combination of hands possible in blackjack if not I have my free drill here in the printouts that you can find here as well so feel

[00:55] free to print those out fill them in or you can practice with my online drill all right but the next step after learning basic strategy is to keep the in the past and there's hundreds of videos out there because this is the

[01:09] why we call it card counting because that's when you have to keep the count how to keep the count you then Implement a bet spread and you have to be able to the fall of the count and then finally

[01:23] video is that when the account gets high enough or sometimes low enough we sometimes Devi at from this plan of basic strategy we do this to maximize our profits certain hands for example are so likely to win that we might want

[01:39] to double down instead of standing or hitting other times we might want to split to get twice as much money out on the felt again to get more money out there and occasionally we might also want to curb our bets a little bit by

[01:53] maybe standing instead of hitting to avoid busting and losing our money to play these are called deviations all right and the illustrious 18 are considered to be the most

[02:07] 18 are considered to be the most profitable of these deviations now I quote unquote profitable deviations and I'll explain what I mean by that in a second but first off every illustrious 18 chart that I have ever looked at has

[02:20] been a bit tough to interpret so I wanted to make a foolproof chart with these explanations that's very obvious to understand what to do and when and how to deviate for example this is the charts that I've made this is the

[02:34] original illustrious 18 these are all 18 playing decisions and below that if you look here I have some explanations for what it's talking about for example if I look at this row the second row from up here this says 16 verse 10 HIT stand and

[02:51] here this says 16 verse 10 HIT stand and then at 0 plus what is that talking about well if we go down to the explanation it says says that when we have a 16 versus the dealers 10 we would normally hit that's what basic strategy

[03:05] normally hit that's what basic strategy tells us to do however the deviation is we're supposed to stand when we have a positive running count all right so in positive running count we're going to stand against the dealers 10 with our 16

[03:22] instead of hitting like basic strategy normally would tell us to do right let's check out maybe one row one more row this row right here number four again if you look up here it says your hand dealers card basic strategy deviation in

[03:35] we have a pair of tens um against a dealer's five it says that normally during basic strategy we should stand but the deviation is to

[03:47] split at the true Count of plus five right and that's exactly what this explanation tells us down here so again I wanted to make um kind of a foolproof chart that explains all these deviations if you don't like this then you can try

[04:02] this one all right here it is kind of written out as you might see a big um chart with every single plane decision that's possible in blackjack and the ones that are highlighted that are not just a white cell these are the

[04:16] illustrious 18 along with of course taking insurance at a true plus three all right now I mentioned earlier that these 18 are the most profitable and

[04:28] technically that is true so if you deviate at these times these are the most profitable however if you look at kind of some different deviation charts illustrious 18 that they have more than just those 18 deviations you may have

[04:43] noticed that some of the 18 themselves aren't even on there for example Blackjack apprenticeship probably the most well-known Blackjack site um it's a site that I completely trust and and would agree with everything they say

[04:58] they don't even have A2 versus A6 listed on there for their expanded deviations will tell you that you should never split tens so down here at the bottom it

[05:10] says that we should split our 10 versus a dealers five at a true plus five and our 10 versus a dealers six at a true plus4 okay depending on what you want in kind of your own personal strategy if you want to improve your longevity at

[05:23] casino if you split 10 it's kind of a Telltale sign that you are a card counter and so you may or may not want to do that strategy depending on which casino you're at and whether it's one uh that you want to kind of keep playing in

[05:36] or not all right now I said earlier that these 18 were the most profitable in fact I want to show you kind of an article from a website here and that is from Blackjack review all right so on Blackjack review it kind of gives you

[05:49] the A through Z everything Blackjack and underneath I it has the illustrious 18 all right so this was originally coin this term was coin coined by Donald slesinger and here those 18 are again these um 18 most profitable decisions

[06:06] along you can see it says that the big three which is to take insurance the 16 versus a 10 and the 15 versus a 10 those account for nearly account for nearly 60% of all deviations if you were to

[06:21] play all over 100 of them um while you were at the casino right those three alone count for over 60% or nearly 60% the top 12 account for

[06:33] nearly 90% okay so that said you probably don't need to know all of them but you might want to know you know a few because they are the most profitable thing that you can do and it's been said that if you uh

[06:47] can do and it's been said that if you uh were to make kind of like let's say $4 million over your career as a card counter all right that's not impossible definitely could happen 1 million so one quarter of that 4 million 1 million of

[07:01] that of those earnings would be from playing deviations okay so should you know this yes you absolutely should know these now does it take some time yes it does it does take time to learn those

[07:15] however only the first few are probably going to be the most profitable so do you need to know all of them no not necessarily um now that said I want to show you another chart here and if you go back to kind of that original pinned

[07:29] comment that you see down below of this video there is a couple charts that I have it says the deviation charge for hit 17 games and stand 17 games let's click on one of those and you'll notice that there are more than 18 playing

[07:44] that there are more than 18 playing deviations here there's actually 29 and they're not kind of in the normal order of most profitable to least profitable but I put these in the order that I think are easiest to memorize so that as

[07:57] you kind of group these together you will have the best chance of learning them and memorize them um in order to kind of take those to the casino and make more profits the longer that you play all right for example these first

[08:10] four here we have 16 ver9 16 ver10 16 ver8 16 ver8 excuse me in 15 versus a 10 all of these I group together because they're very similar um spots on the

[08:22] chart and they're all supposed to be hitting for basic strategy but the deviation says we're supposed to stand at these true counts all right similarly if I go down there's a bunch of soft totals you'll remember that um in the

[08:36] lustrious 18 itself really the soft totals were pretty much empty okay there wasn't anything to learn in there for those most profitable 18 but if I go back to my chart here and you can know like the

[08:52] my chart here and you can know like the uh the splits for 10 versus 6 5 and four the Ace 9 versus 6 Ace 9 versus 5 and Ace 9 versus 4 those are the same um same spots right this was at true Count of four five and six respectively and so

[09:07] there's a few on here that are pretty easy to remember and easy to know all right so these are the 29 that I would suggest that you know now if you

[09:19] are kind of a pro and you want more than this um here in the next couple of weeks I'm going to drop a patreon which is going to have an expanded deviation chart um besides the two that I showed you here there's also going to be

[09:31] several more drills that I plan to put on there and so if you found this video interesting or if you like the sound of that please subscribe to this channel so with all those things coming up and until next time remember this is A1

[09:46] until next time remember this is A1 blackjack