The Hi-Lo card tags

Hi-Lo gives every card one of three tags. 2 through 6 are +1, 7 through 9 are 0, and tens, faces, and aces are −1. Everything else in the Course is arithmetic and repetition on those three tags. Low cards leaving the shoe help you, because the dealer needs fives and sixes to turn a stiff 14 into a made 20, and without them the dealer busts more. High cards leaving hurt you. Tens and aces make your blackjacks, which pay 3:2 and are the biggest single payoff a count produces. They also make your doubles and bust the dealer. So the count rises when low cards leave, because the shoe got better, and falls when high cards leave, because the shoe got worse.

Hi-Lo ignores sevens, eights, and nines because they barely move the odds either way. They are zero, and you learn to look straight through them. The system is balanced. A full deck has twenty +1 cards, twelve zeros, and twenty −1 cards, since sixteen ten-values plus four aces is twenty. All 52 sum to zero. Count a full deck down. If you do not land on zero, you dropped a card somewhere.

You will know the tags ten seconds after reading them. The Lesson is about removing the translation step. Watch your own head while you train. If you are thinking 'king, face card, that's minus one,' you are translating. You are done when a king is −1 the way a red light is stop, and only repetition gets you there.

You are dealt K-5 and the dealer shows a 3. The king is −1, the five is +1, the 3 is +1, and you see +1 in one glance with no arithmetic you noticed. That is the target.