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When a player manages to count all the cards dealt like this, the
odds will actually shift from being slightly in favour of the house
to being slightly in favour of the player. So you are probably asking
yourself at this point if this is too good to be true. Well, it is
and it isn't. Bear in mind that nine times out of ten, most blackjack
players at a casino table will be playing blindly, for fun, with no
real hope or expectancy of making money. That is the good news.
The
bad news is that a dealer is allowed by the rules to shuffle the deck
at any time, which will of course destroy your count. The dealer may
also be keeping an eye on the cards and he may have been instructed
to perform extra shuffles when the odds shift too strongly in favour
of the players. Dealers can also deal extra fast, making it harder
to perform an effective count, although there is a way around this
problem – only count every second card dealt. Don't forget that as
soon as you miss even one card, the effectiveness of the card counting
system completely disappears, so you have to stay sharp and on the
ball (you might want to consider refusing those free drinks). Also,
of course, it is not always easy to find an open card game in casinos,
but they are out there and if you hunt around on a busy night you will
find one.
Playing in a game where multiple decks are used complicates things
slightly but there is a solution. Follow the counting method I described
above but when your turn comes to bet have a quick look at the cards
left in the shoe. A pack of cards is about three-quarters of an inch
high, so by looking at the height you should be able to estimate how
many decks of cards are left in play. Take the number of decks and
multiply that with the score. For example if you have a score of 3
and there are 1.3 decks left in the shoe, your reassessed score will
be 4 and you should therefore bet three times your minimum, as outlined
above.
Obviously it takes some practice before you can use this system effectively.
Practice at home. Guess the height of cards in a shoe in inches, check
with the measuring tape. Get a friend to deal out cards quickly around
the table and practice keeping a count total. It shouldn't take too
long to master and once you have this under your belt, you will be
ready to hit the blackjack tables. Happy counting!
If you are interested in using more complicated counting systems,
there are about twenty other systems to choose from. If you are exceptionally
mathematically-minded, when you have mastered the simpler count already
described here, you might want to try your hand at one of these for
the small additional advantage it could give you at the table. Complex
systems are difficult to master within a casino environment, and it
can be very tempting to form a team to work a table, as instead of
one person having to do the counting, the calculating and the betting,
you could have someone for each role working with one hundred per cent
concentration. This cannot be recommended! All casinos watch players,
and take particular notice of anyone acting or betting unusually.
A
team that reacts consistently to certain events at the table will probably
be told to leave the casino. Remember that casinos can ask anyone to
leave the premises whenever they want. You might have heard the famous
story of the team of M.I.T. students who formed a card counting team,
allegedly netting themselves millions of dollars. They found it necessary
to resort to elaborate disguises and other ruses within the casinos
to avoid detection, but they were still "caught" soon enough!
Rumour has it that they were only able to make so much money by betting
large amounts in short periods of time as they knew they would be discovered
pretty quickly. Apparently they had to borrow lots of cash in order
to put the necessary big stakes down – remember that a perfect card
counter has a mathematical probability of winning 2% on bets over time,
so to win millions, they would have had to have bet billions!
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