Quote Originally Posted by DSchles View Post
But you don't say what the player is supposed to do everywhere else in the shoe except the middle. What's the point?

Don
In my estimation if you had to choose one index to apply to any penetration it would be the half shoe index. Can that be improved upon? Yes, but one may be getting oneself into overkill mode. For example in a deeply dealt game there may be a HiLo index for doubling hard 15 or 16. This is because in a deeply dealt game there can be count subsets where all of the 7,8,9 cards are eliminated. However, the chance of ever running into this situation and actually recognizing it in real time is more than remote. In a game with very shallow penetration there may be no indices at all because not enough cards can be dealt to even get to a running count requiring a basic strategy deviation. In that case the half shoe index would serve in arriving at the right decision anyway.

I believe the suggestion you made of adapting a single index to the shuffle point of the game you are playing would be marginally better but may or may not be worth the extra effort.

k_c