Card Counting

Annually, American casinos collectively win more than $2 billion from blackjack, with a typical blackjack table realizing some $250,000 in profits. Given these substantial losses by the wagering public, it is perhaps all the more amazing to learn that a skillful blackjack player can beat the casinos at their own game. With proper play, blackjack can, in almost all situations, quite legally be beaten. This is accomplished by a technique called “card counting.”

The idea behind card counting is simple: a player uses information about cards already played to determine the favorability of the remaining pack.

Specifically, high-value cards (8s, 9s, 10s, and especially aces benefit the player more than the dealer. Low-value cards (3s, 4s, 6s, and especially 5s) are better for the dealer. More high cards remaining to play increase the player’s chances of hitting a two-card 21, which pays a bonus (either 3to-2 or 6-to-5); conversely, more low cards help the dealer, who has to draw to 17, avoid busting with “stiff” hands (12-16).

Card counters don’t actually track specific cards. Rather, they assign a point value to high cards (plus one) and low cards (minus 1), with some cards valued at neutral or zero, depending on the count system used. Counters must add and subtract the card values almost instantaneously and with perfect accuracy to keep what’s called the “running count.” A high count is good for the player, a low count is bad.

If the effort involved in learning and implementing basic strategy eliminates 99 out of 100 blackjack players, card counting eliminated 99 out of 100 basic strategy players. Most counting systems involve converting the running count to the “true count,” which requires higher arithmetic based on the number of cards played; count-dependent variations on basic strategy, betting and insurance correlations, and side counts (especially with aces, but also with tens and other cards) render the different systems as complex as most typical human minds can handle.

Systems of varying difficulty include the Hi-Lo, Hi Opt 1 and 2, Omega I and II, Red 7s, and Zen. These are generally “balanced” counts, where at the end of a deck of cards, the running count equals zero. The “unbalanced” count, such as the Knock-Out (or KO) system, eliminates the true-count conversion, which greatly simplifies the whole process.

Anyone interested in pursuing card counting further can read Knock-Out Blackjack—The Easiest Card-Counting System Ever Invented, Burning the Tables in Las Vegas by Ian Anderson, and Blackjack for Blood by Bryce Carlson, along with any number of books on blackjack by Arnold Snyder, Stanford Wong, Lance Humble, Don Schlesinger, and many others.