Revere Advanced Point Count

For those who thought the Revere 14 Count was complex and difficult to learn, the Revere Advanced Point Count may be even more complicated.

Revere's bio, as it is presented in his book, has him dealing blackjack at an early age in his home state of Iowa, sometime in the 1930's, then going to the University of Nebraska, and using some of the mathematical principles he learned there to become a demon at blackjack. He worked in the casino business, he said, working as a dealer and pit boss, and expresses in his first book, "Playing Blackjack as a Business," that he was the first author of any blackjack book to make a considerable living on both sides of the table.

In "Playing Blackjack as a Business," he presents a number of systems for the aspiring player to learn. Among them are the Revere Five Count, the Revere Ten Count, the Revere Plus-Minus and the Revere Point Count. They essentially take the reader from one step to another as far as power and difficulty are concerned.

In the book he also includes a come-on for his Revere Advanced Point Count, which was the most powerful blackjack system in the world, not only then, but from one perspective, even today (we'll get to that in a moment). Revere claimed that nobody except him had ever sold a "mail order system" that was accurate, and none of the system sellers had been successful in actually winning money from the casinos. This may or may not have been true, but Revere's claim is that he only started to sell his systems after he was barred from playing in all the Nevada casinos.

Revere says that it cost him over $25,000 to develop, and most of that came from computer programs that ran millions of hands to test the system.

The card tags for the Revere Advanced Point Count required that the player count 2 and 7 as +2, the 3, 4 and 6 as +3, and the 5 as +4. All ten-value cards (10, Jack, Queen, King) were counted as -3, while the Ace was counted as -1 and the 9 as -1. This is a pretty accurate reflection of what the card values are to the player. Revere stated that with his Advanced Point Count, the player could win with a flat bet, but that moving up to betting two units was an option, and would increase the player's advantage (Revere says the players advantage would go to 4.24%).

His blackjack systems sold for a couple of hundred bucks and included blackjack strategies for one and four-deck games. There are a lot of playing strategy charts, and this system emphasizes playing variations a great deal. At the same time, the system has a betting correlation of 1.00, which means it is perfect, or close to it, in identifying betting situations.

For that reason, the Revere APC holds up pretty well with some experts today. It most likely served as the basis for some of the other multi-level counts that have come since, and that constitutes a great deal of its historical significance.