Counting cards at Black Jack is a learned skill and frowned upon by
online casinos. In fact if they think you are doing this and winning they may
bar you from playing Black Jack in their facility. What is card
counting and why are the casinos leery of players who can count cards?
There is no way this could be considered cheating, but a player who is
good at this method is treated like a cheater.
The reason the player is feared who can do this with skill and
discipline is simple. It puts the odds in the player's favor. The house
edge in the game is destroyed when the deck is rich in face cards. The
odds for the rest of the shoe will remain with the player to win more
bets than the dealer due to the fact that he can wave off hitting a card
on a break hand. The dealer must hit any hand lower than soft 17(ace
and a six). A rich shoe in face cards means the dealer has a higher
chance of busting their hand.
There are several good books on this method of play, which are easily
found on the Internet or in any bookstore for gamblers. The idea is to
count the shoe down by keeping track of the cards as the dealer shows
them. You know how many face cards are in a six-deck shoe and how many
cards are under six not counting the aces. When the low cards are at
minimum and the high cards have a numerical advantage the shoe favors
the player. How out of line the shoe is in high versus low cards will
determine how much the shoe favors the player. When this situation is
present, the player raises the size of the bets. One of the ways the
card counters have defeated detection is to have another player on their
team actually make weird bets, but always increasing them when the shoe
is favorable. One team even used a team member with the alias of the
mad bomber to show up at an advantaged table, make a few bets and leave.
This team used this ploy for a long time before they got caught.
Card counting was terrific, when the casinos dealt a lot of single deck
games. The shoe dealing has made card counting much harder to do
effectively. If you are willing to take the time to learn this method
of play, be advised that if you are good at it you will be caught
eventually, but up until that time it is possible to win consistently.
