Blackjack and Card Counting

Of course, another tactic that people think of when it comes to blackjack strategy is counting cards. This basically means keeping track of which cards have already been played and trying kbo77 to determine whether the next hand will give the probable advantage to the dealer or to the player.

Card counting has become rather intertwined with the idea of blackjack as a game. You have major pop culture phenomena like Bringing Down the House, Rain Man, and The Gambler to probably thank for that. And while card counting is not an illegal practice, plenty of casinos frown upon it and try to prevent players from doing it too much. They may even have in-house rules that would have security eject obvious card counters from their establishments.

History of Card Counting
How did card counting even begin? First, we got the paper “The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack” published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association back in 1956. Roger Baldwin posited that you could apply mathematics to blackjack, and by using probabilities and calculators you could gain a major edge in the game.

In 1963, Edward Thorp published the book Beat the Dealer. In this runaway hit, Thorp expanded on and refined Baldwin’s ideas while also introducing new strategies — namely, “first card counting techniques” and the “ten count system.”

Thorp’s book made the popularity of blackjack explode as readers wanted to try his methods themselves. Of course, casinos also had to stay ahead of his strategies to keep their profits. They started instituting their own strategies like using multiple decks and shuffling machines, while also shuffling the cards more frequently.

How Card Counting Works
While there are various systems for how to go about it, card counting generally involves assigning a value to every card that’s been dealt.

Cards valued 2 through 6 = +1
Cards valued 7-9 = 0
Cards valued at 10 and aces: -1

With each card dealt, you add 1, subtract 1, or add zero based on each visible card’s value and keep a running count.

Here’s one sample hand. The dealer has a face-up 6 and then reveals a 9, you have a jack and a 10, and the other player has a 2 and an ace. Here’s how you’d total up everything:

Face-up 6 (+1) and 9 (0) = +1
Jack (-1) and 10 (-1) = -2
2 (+1) and ace (-1) = 0
So the count for that hand would be 1 – 2 +0 = -1.

Let’s say that the next hand had the dealer show an 8 and eventually reveals a 10, while you had a king and a 5 and the other player got a 7 and 2:

Face-up 8 (0) and 10 (-1) = -1
King (-1) and 5 (+1) = 0
7 (0) and 2 (+1) = +1

Now the count for this hand would be -1 + 0 + 1 = 0. So far, the running count evens out to -1, but that will shift with every new hand dealt.

You do this for every round until the dealer shuffles the cards again. If the running count goes positive, then the advantage starts shifting to the players. But if the running count goes negative, then the advantage shifts to the dealer. Basically, if the running count is high, then that means that the upcoming cards are more likely to be high-value cards. A low running count means that a lot of high-value cards have already been dealt, so the upcoming cards are more likely to have lower values.

This type of point-assigning means that a standard 52-card deck will always end up totaling 0 after all of the cards are dealt out. Of course, plenty of casinos use multiple decks at a time to make card counting a little more challenging. To work with that, you need to be able to translate your running count into a “true count,” or count per deck.