As a newcomer, I'm slowly but surely working my way down this board. Just came to a January thread on composition-dependant indices for 16v10.

I don't understand why anyone would care. I thought there was only composition dependant basic strategy, i.e., if you don't card count, you can slightly adjust your basic strategy to reflect the cards you see in your hand and the dealer's up card.

But if you're counting, your count takes all this into account, so you only need one index per hand, no? Whether I hold a 10-6 or a 9-7 or a 2-2-2-2-2-3-3 vs. dealer 10 shouldn't matter, should it? No matter what the composition of my hand, I'm keeping a count, so the composition of my hand is already reflected in the running/true count.

I saw the long thread, and no one ever addressed the "why" element, so I'm wondering if I have some fundamental misunderstanding of the value of composition-dependant indices. To me, they seem superfluous. If you're not counting, you can't apply any index because you don't know what the count is, and if you ARE counting, it seems to me that the count already properly reflects the composition of your hand.

So confused...!!!