We said at the beginning of our guide that we will be discussing two styles of successful blackjack play – basic strategy, employed by recreational players who play the game for the experience, and card counters, whose main goal is to profit by beating the house.
Thus, successful card counting is the peak a player can reach. When asked what they think of card counting, many people, particularly those who know little of card games, depict an illegal activity used to cheat the casino.
Granted, casinos hate card counters and ban them from their premises. However, this has nothing to do with the legality or illegality of card counting, rather the fact that card counters have an edge in blackjack and beat the house at its own game.
And because card counting is perfectly legal, casinos have no other way to protect themselves except to ban card counters they have detected. They wouldn’t want to adopt harsh game rules that would outright discourage card counters from playing because that would drive away the normal players as well.
Card counting is nothing more than keeping track of the cards played and adjusting the player’s betting and playing strategy in accordance to the deck’s remaining cards. This is a strategy used to determine whether the hand is likely to give the player a probable advantage, or a disadvantage. Unlike roulette or craps where each round has no impact on future decisions, each hand in blackjack depletes the deck and until cards are shuffled, keeping a card count provides the player with a mathematical edge over the casino.
Card counting is based on statistical evidence that high cards, especially Aces and 10-valued cards, benefit the player more than the dealer, while low cards, particularly 4s through 6s, increase the house’s inherent edge. This is because a high count of still available 10-valued cards increase the player’s chance to hit a blackjack, which is usually payed out at the preferential 3:2 ratio, and players also stand a better chance of winning a doubled-down hand.
Meanwhile, low cards benefit the house because the dealer has to hit stiff hands (hard hands valued at 12 through 16). The greater the number of low-valued cards, the higher the dealer’s chance is to win the hand, and the lower the probability of drawing a 10-valued card and busting.
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Cheating? No.
Card counters do not cheat in any way, they merely adopt to the changing conditions based on information available to all other players.
If you think of it, blackjack card counters don’t do anything different compared to poker players, for example. Poker players calculate their odds based on the hand they have and then recalculate them once the rest of the cards are dealt on the table. The change in probability to win is then factored into their decision-making. Regardless of whether they decide to raise the bet, fold or just check, they do it on the base of information that is available to everyone else (of course excluding their own cards).
And since card counting in blackjack is not tied to any form of cheating, the casino has its hands legally tied. So they ban suspected card counter from playing at their tables and enforce the view that these people are cheaters engaged with illegal activities.
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Another common misconception is that card counting is only for mathematicians and people with memory close to photographic. Just like the previous statement, these two are also false. All the mathematic knowledge you would need is to be able to add, subtract and divide small numbers. Memory requirements are also minimal as for the most common card counting system you would need to remember only one product of mathematical operations.
Card counting does, however, require determination and a lot of experience to master all the skills needed to be able to successfully count cards in a crowded and noisy casino under the nose of dealers, pit bosses and so on.
What card counting is all about
We know what card counting achieves from the previous section of the guide – it allows skilled players to play blackjack with positive win expectations against the house. We haven’t mentioned, however, how it does that.
We’ve said that basic strategy players do flat betting and employing proper basic strategy allows them to play at the smallest possible disadvantage to the house, say somewhere near -0.5%. Basic strategy is basically the best way to play a hand off the top, i.e. at the start of the deck. However, maximizing results after that is entirely in the realm of the card counter.
Whereas the basic strategy player is pretty much stuck with the mathematically calculated basic strategy plays (which we listed in tables in the first section of our guide), card counting tips the scales in favor of the player by enabling him to customize his game. Specifically, card counting allows the player to:
– modify basic strategy based on the count
– adjust the bet size according to the count
Thus, card counting requires knowing basic strategy inside and out. If you’ve missed that part, we suggest you go back at the start of the guide and go through our basic strategy section.
Knowing basic strategy and being able to adjust it, however, is not the most valuable benefit of card counting – being able to adjust the size of your bets is. Although counters can be profitable with flat betting, this is generally true only for the most player-friendly deeply penetrated single-deck games. Casinos know that, and exactly for that reason it is highly unlikely that you will find such a table.
Thus, being able to size your bets according to the advantage you know you have is the single most important feature of card counting. Like we explained earlier, a deck “rich” in tens and Aces statistically favors the player, which means he will increase his bets, and when the deck consists of more low cards (2s through 6s), the card counter will bet less or probably abstain from playing.
To be more specific, we will present the value of discarding a certain card for the player in the table below. The data assumes we are dealing with a single deck. Thus, a higher-deck game would see that effect diluted proportionally to the deck count, but that goes both ways and affects the dealer and player alike.
| Discarding Cards in Single-Deck Games | |
|---|---|
| Card out of play | Player expectations |
| 2 | +0.38% |
| 3 | +0.44% |
| 4 | +0.55% |
| 5 | +0.69% |
| 6 | +0.46% |
| 7 | +0.28% |
| 8 | 0.00% |
| 9 | -0.18% |
| 10 | -0.51% |
| Ace | -0.61% |
As evident by the table, removing a 5 from play brings the greatest benefit to the player. Next come 4s, 6s, 3s, 2s, 4s and 7s, while 8s are irrelevant. On the other hand, discarding an Ace lowers players’ expectations the most, followed by 10-valued cards and 9s. And as we’ve explained earlier, the reason is simple – the fewer the 10s and Aces are, the lower the player’s chance for a blackjack becomes. And the 3:2 blackjack payoff is what makes the game a nearly even one.
