Cymatic Trader Community

[Gavin]

Hi folks,

It is possible to make money by card-counting in Blackjack. In fact, a good friend of mine has spent years doing it in casinos in Las Vegas, where he lives.

Unfortunately card-counting doesn’t work at online casinos because they shuffle the deck constantly, so don't even try it.

Over recent years, land-based Casinos have made it more for difficult for card-counters to gain an advantage. Casinos now put more decks in the shoe (typically six decks per shoe in Vegas casinos) and also shuffle more often. The shoe is the term for the box holding the decks of cards, the cards are dealt from the shoe. The card-counting advantage becomes higher the more cards that have been dealt, referred to as 'penetration' of the deck/shoe. Shuffling cancels your edge. To be most effective, you need penetration deep into shoe.

Methods of card counting are actually incredibly easy to perform. A common technique simply invovles keeping a running total in your head, and simply adding 1 when low cards are dealt, or subtracting 1 when high cards are dealt. The size of the running total then enables you to judge whether the remaining cards in the deck are likely to be predominantly high value cards or low value cards. Then you can play your hands with that knowledge.

Plenty more details are given here on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting

Cheers,
Gavin

[ZoeLeah]

Card counting is NOT illegal under federal, state and local laws in the United States as long as players don't use any external card-counting device or people who assist them in counting cards. In their effort to identify card counters, casinos can ban players believed to be counters — sort of [link removed by moderator]

[pnr8uk]

I've card counted over the last few years, my practice was curtailed by Covid rather than the eye in the sky.

I did it more to know 'I could' rather than for vast profit, a small profit when leaving a Casino means a great night out.
I followed Arnold Snyder's red 7 counting, it gives you a tiny % extra edge.

Card counting is like trading in a way you aren't going to get rich quickly as in Rainman style but you can make decent profits if you are patience and act when things are in your favour.
I have had evenings at Casino's though when I've gone home having hit my loss limit despite knowing the count, the cards still have to land.

As to online counting, you can count online in the live casino tables (waiting to see the shoe loaded though is tough as you often get logged out for non betting),however it's just not worth your while and effort as there are so few hands played per hour.

Using basic strategy on the online video games is useful though and is worth a try.

Paul

[Gavin]

Well done Paul! Very interesting to hear that. I think I read that the Red 7 system gives you an edge over the casino of about 0.5%

Cheers,

Gavin

[pnr8uk]

The thing I learnt most from card counting though is it's the game you join which gives you the best edge and to look out for special offers and games to avoid.

[nikjas183]

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