Team Money Management

A critical aspect of successful team play is the development of a proper betting schedule and the adjustment of that schedule as you win or lose; something I loosely call money management. I define it that way because in this article I’m not going to talk about cash management – the movement of $$$ within the team before, during and after playing sessions, although it’s an important part of any team’s strategy.

How much to bet and when is, of course, a concern to any Blackjack player but to the card counter it’s why we do what we do. Any sound counting system will identify the advantage (or lack thereof) you have on the next hand and that in turn can tell you how much to bet. Exactly how much that bet will be depends upon several things: Like how big your bankroll is, what the table’s minimum and maximum bet limits are, and how many $$$ you can put out there without attracting too much attention from the "pit critters." A minimum bet attracts little or no attention, whereas a table maximum bet probably will. While camouflage may be important in many playing situations, I’m going to present only the mathematics of team betting without regard as to whether or not your team will be able to actually place the bets, but it’s something you need to think about as we go through this.

The money management principles for a team fall into two main categories: Those where each team member plays at a separate table (the "traditional" method) and those where team members sometimes play together at the same table (the "big player" method). I’ll cover the math for a traditional team this time and the math for a big player team in next month issue of BJI.

As I mentioned in my first article on this topic ( Blackjack Insider, July 2007), the most appealing concept of team play is the fact that each member of the team may bet as though the entire team bankroll was his or her own personal bankroll. In other words, if five players, who each have a $1,000 bankroll, team up then each of the five may bet as though s/he had a $5,000 bankroll and the "risk of ruin" (total loss of the bankroll) would remain the same.

Now understand, this doesn’t mean your team can go out there and...

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