Card Counting

Blackjack is one of the most interesting and exciting games you can play in the casino. If you learn to play optimal Blackjack strategy then the house edge diminishes and anyone who gambles understands how important it is to reduce this edge in any fashion. Once you are on a level playing field you have to start to create your own edge and this is where card counting comes in as a useful strategy.

If you have watched movies like 21 then you can be forgiven for believing that you need a brain like Albert Einstein to learn how to card count, but in reality it doesn’t need to be that difficult. Card counting is all about improving your guesswork. The more aces and tens that are present in the deck the more likely you are to win, so your ploy is to guess when this event is likely to happen. The best way to do this is to keep a simple scoring system for the cards you see coming out of the deck. For cards ranging in value between 2 and 6 give them a +1 count, aces and ten have a -1 count and all other cards are ignored.

You may worry about losing the count, so to help you it is easier to assign text messages to the count. So, for example, if your count hits +6 then you can label this count highly positive meaning the deck is top heavy with aces and tens so you should bet more. The reverse is true for a -6 count and you can call this highly negative. If you are playing with multiple decks then simply divide your count by the number of decks in the shoe to give you your true count.