Revere 14 Count System

The Revere 14 card counting system is one of the two most famous level IV (level 4) count systems out there. It was developed by Lawrence Revere between 1971 and 1974 and was widely used by many of the early blackjack players and expert card counters. This is an extremely complex strategy with a very complicated index. The level 4 means that you are using indices that range between plus and minus 4 (-4,-3,-2,-1,0,+1,+2,+3,+4). There would be nine numbers here to keep track of but the -4 and -1 are not in use with this system.

When learning how to do the Revere 14 count, know that this system should only be used by the most advanced players. As a matter of fact, many of the expert players no longer use this system because there are much simpler level 1 systems out there that are just as effective, which were discovered after this 1971 to 1974 time period. In fact, this system is nearly obsolete but is still used by just a few people.

The indexes are shown below. Basically these are the count numbers that are assigned to each card value. When the cards are dealt out to all the players and to the dealer, the goal is to add and subtract these count numbers according to the cards on the table. These get added to your running count which is mentally being calculated in your head.

The Revere 14 count system is also balanced, meaning that you start your count off at 0 when a deck is freshly shuffled. Then you count the cards normally through the deck and when all the cards have been dealt, your final count should also be zero. This is a great way for new players to know if they have kept an accurate count through an entire shoe of cards. The only problem is when you are actually playing a real game, you need to do conversions between the running count and true count. This simple calculation is just dividing the running count by the total number of decks in the game.

The name of this counting system get the "14" in it because all the positive numbers add to 14 and the negative numbers add up to -14. You can easily see this by adding all the (+) numbers in the chart above or all of the (-) ones. As a final remark, you may be surprised to know that even the simple level I and most other systems can beat the 14 count in betting and insurance correlation as well as playing efficiency. There is really no practical reason to use this one!