J-Stat posted about Scarne yesterday at GF, as well, Mickey. I withheld any comments about the system itself because I didn't want to get into a fight with Jstat about something that is not applicable in today's blackjack games, and only spoke about the part where he purchased extra chips to aid in his counting of blackjack.
The counting system he described for blackjack, like a lot of other advanced and what I call specialty counts, including what Moses was proposing and a proponent of, where only applicable on those long-gone single deck games, dealt very deep. Being that those games were not in AC when I started and now are gone from everywhere except Reno and a few small towns in Vegas where you can't get any real money or spread down, I just saw no reason to read all that much or form an opinion, so I will go with my general opinion that was the basis for a decade of arguments with Moses. I am sure the math works and probably stronger than anything I am doing counting, but those games are gone. What good is something that works with no games to apply it to. And if you try to apply that to 6 deck games it doesn't translate or work. For 6 deck games, it really is about simplicity. Trying to go beyond that you get into very diminishing return and more errors.
As per the math itself, I am sure it is above my head. I am not smart with math beyond fairly simple concepts. I got into blackjack when I did because you could win using simple math concepts that I understood.
But based on what Jstat wrote at GF and I replied to, the "method" Scarne used to keep track of all the moving parts was buying 40 some extra chips so he could have 4 stacks with different amounts of chips and rotating chips to represent the different counts and moving parts. Using gaming chips is actually illegal under the device law. And I would think what was described about the 4 stacks would be fairly obvious. I find that absolutely ridiculous that using casino chips is a device, but it has been proven and accepted (I guess) as such.
As for poker, I don't play. Never played a single hand, so I can't even begin to comprehend the complicated math Scarne discussed. It is just above my head.
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