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Someone asked me the other day about entering into a blackjack game in mid-shoe without knowing what the count was and how this affected your edge. Firstly what you have to remember is that if you enter a game in mid-shoe then what we are dealing with here is cards unseen.

So we don’t know if the count is plus or minus and in the absence of such information then we have to take a long term view of this and this means only one thing. The number of pluses that we cannot see will equal the number of minuses and so theoretically we can now treat the count as zero.

This is great for cover plays and especially in casinos with more than one table open. No card counter moves from table to table and bets sizable bets unless they are being signalled in by non counting team members. But let us say that you have a 20/1 bet spread of $5 to $200 and you enter mid-shoe. You could enter at say $20 and then downgrade the bets if your initial count is negative.

But also, going in at $20 allows you to double up and get to $100 very quickly and thus $200. Going from $20 to $40 to $80 to $160 looks like you are merely chasing losses or letting winnings ride. This can be achieved if the count goes immediately positive after entering.

However if the count goes negative then you can merely switch tables and enter mid-shoe again which makes you look less like a counter. So as long as you understand that entering mid-shoe makes no difference because cards unseen means that you can take the count to be zero then you will do fine entering mid-shoe.

Like bluffing, everyone in the gambling industry talks about card counting and how it can be the key to success in your gambling endeavors. Unfortunately,, for most players card counting is never an easy task to follow through with, especially if you’re not a mathematical super-genius and able to quickly process all possible combinations coming your way. Thankfully, a technique exists that allows players to easily keep track of basic card combinations: the Hi-Low technique.

Designed to be both quick and effective, the Hi-Low technique focuses on attributing each card dealt on the table a value of +1, 0 or -1 and then tracking the total value of all cards shown before a re-shuffle. If the value of the total number is then positive the player should increase their overall betting amount, whereas if it is negative, the overall bet should be lowered. In this way, the player can stay in the game at all times while reducing the risk to their bankroll and keeping a positive cash flow.

The division of the card values is fairly straight forward: all cads valued 10 or greater (Jack, Queen, King or Ace) are given a value of -1, all cards valued 7 through 9 are given a value of 0, while cards valued 2 through 6 are valued at +1. This means that while the total number counted is positive there is a higher chance of a high-value card being dealt (good for the player), while a negative number means lower cards are likely to be shown and therefore are good for the dealer.

While the technique is simple, practice is the key to success, so be sure to try it out at home before applying it in a casino. Additionally, try to be discreet while playing in live areas – after all, even though this technique isn’t officially illegal, it is still highly frowned upon by casinos and could land you in bad favor if caught, so be sure to not be too open about your approaches.

Someone asked me the other day how a player starts out down the road to be a card counter and how long that training actually takes. Well firstly the training does not take as long as you think but unfortunately there are many obstacles and problems in your way. Automated shuffling machines wipe out any chance of card counting but a self imposed training program could see you being good enough in about three months.

Firstly though you must learn basic strategy and you need to know this very well. Luckily it is simply a case of learning a few tables but most of the playing decisions are obvious anyway. You would never take a card on 19 vs 4 for instance so you know much of basic anyway and so learning the rest isn’t hard. Once you know these tables then you will be able to play against the house with the house only having a 0.5% edge against you.

A good book to learn basic from is Stanford Wong’s Professional Blackjack with clearly laid out charts and tables. Once basic strategy is fully learned then you need to learn a simple counting system and I advise the high/low at first. You will need to practice your counting speed and be so quick that fast dealers do not intimidate you. During this learning process then I would advise going to a casino and playing basic strategy and practicing counting in real conditions.

Remember that you don’t want to be staring at the cards, you need to be fast enough so that you can count with just the merest glance. Also this will allow the casino staff to get to know you and they may then not take you for a counter when you start to up your bets at a later stage. But you also need to spot good games as well and not doing so will be another serious obstacle to you making money.

I am going to be starting a new section shortly which will go into my experiences with my first blackjack team. But a few people have asked me down the years how I first got into blackjack. Well it sort of happened in stages and not all at once. I guess that the first stage was based on me working as a croupier and then as an Inspector for nearly nine years.

This gave me the interest in the game from the very outset. The second step came by chance when I accidentally picked up a book inside a library and that book was “Beat The Dealer” by Ed Thorp. It also helped me to identify and then befriend a card counter who was active inside the casino where I worked and we are still good friends to this very day.

But even then my interest would have remained at nothing more than merely theoretical had it not been for me leaving gaming in July 1998 and then accidentally meeting what would be my financial backer down in Bournemouth when I was on a financial consultant induction course. So my entire operation was basically based on fluke events and pure chance.

I think that this is how many people start out to be honest and this was also how I started out playing online poker. This was something that happened simply because the blackjack operation had reached its shelf life. But starting soon, I will be telling my own story which I will call “The Dean’s Blackjack Story“.

I really do think that it is a very interesting story in so much as that it highlights just how something can be achieved out of nothing with little more than knowledge and determination. So look out for that coming soon.

I had a casino trip last night and played several hours of blackjack while my partner and her friend enjoyed a meal and a few drinks at the bar. In between that we all grouped in the lounge area to watch the England vs Algeria game…….after that I needed some good luck.

Fortunately my card counting session in the six deck shoe game proved profitable. The dealers were cutting about a deck to a deck and a half from the back so penetration was good. The first two shoes were dull and nothing happened and I was planning on placing £50 maximum bets when the proper situations arose.

Into the third shoe and I had a massive true count and six consecutive maximum bets won for me making £300 in profit. I lost about £50 back as I was trying not to make my spread too wide. I then had a break for the England game and the entire pit area went quiet as more people were watching the game than playing in the pit.

After the game, I found that my counting was off which was probably due to the poor performance of our national football team and my mind was definitely more on the football than the blackjack. But my luck really turned on the final shoe that I played. My profit was already at £325 for the evening when another large true count arrived. On three consecutive hands, my £50 bet was the only blackjack on the table which made me feel a little awkward but that made £225 in the space of about three minutes.

The total win for the evening was £705 and my best casino trip for a long time and probably dating back to my team days. I think that just about made up for the football.

I had my first real casino trip in ages last night and it felt strangely good to be playing real casino blackjack again. Even though the game was a six deck game and the penetration was marginal, the excitement level was pretty high even though the game wasn’t serious. The only way that blackjack can ever be serious for me is if I were playing full-time again and seeing as that is basically impossible now then these little entertainment trips are all that they ever will be.

I did try to card count but I didn’t really see the point of it all. I only had around £500 on me so even if the deck went highly positive, I couldn’t really take much advantage as the money that I had on me was basically my bankroll.

Fluctuation is very high in blackjack so anything could have basically happened during the course of one session. So instead I was looking for dealer errors as usual and I managed to find myself on first base hoping to get a dealer who exposes cards. However after nearly three hours of having no luck whatsoever I decided to call it a night. The fact that I was £50 ahead was nothing but luck although I did offer some friendly advice for a guy who was playing table maximums who seemed to think that I was an expert on the game and keep asking my advice on what to do.

I hate giving advice on other peoples money but it seemed that everything that I told him to do came off. Once again pure luck but he won about £800 based on what I had told him to do. When he got up to leave the table, he tossed me a £25 chip which I tried to refuse but he was having non of it.

Maybe I ought to go into consulting work inside casinos and advise some big punters and make money that way without the risk

I have said this many times and I will keep on saying it, card counting is not only a very serious business but it is also very difficult to pull off. Certain people with certain personality types are definitely not suited to playing full-time blackjack or even part time blackjack for that matter.

The thing is that it does create somewhat of a nervous situation when you are ramping your bets. When you do this for the first time, you always get the feeling that everyone in the entire building knows what it is that you are doing.

This first time nervousness and paranoia should go away but with many people it doesn’t. The fact of the matter is that anyone who goes and does the bare minimum as a blackjack player will get caught. Or at the very least will have severe counter measures taken against them.

This usually involves the dealer dealing short shoes which decreases the number of hands dealt per shoe but it also decreases the number of profitable situations for the counter as well. The best and most profitable situations tend to arise at the end of the shoe so when the shoe is cut very shallow then the really profitable situations rarely arise and the game tends to be nothing more than a process for recycling money.

This is what many novice card counters do not understand, they learn the running count but do not do true count conversions. If the first ten cards out of a four deck shoe are low cards then the running count is +10. But this figure of +10 does not represent the same ratio of high cards to low cards as it would if the count was +10 with only one deck remaining.

If we use the high-low count to show what I mean, there are 208 cards in a four deck shoe. These are broken down into 80 low cards, 80 high cards and 48 middling cards that have a count of zero. So ignoring the middling cards we can see that there are now 80 high cards and aces and 70 low cards remaining for a ratio of one high card or ace to every low card at a rate of 1.14.

But with only one deck remaining if we took a standard distribution of 20 low cards, 20 high cards and 12 middling cards, taking away ten low cards gives us a ratio of high cards and aces to low cards which is 2.00 and not the 1.14 like before.

See what I mean now

I remember clearly the first time that I ever made a non conventional blackjack move. I was scouting a casino in the north of England and was playing table minimums. I did not have too much money on me as counting and playing was not on my agenda. I did not want to ruin my chances with the team before we even started.

So what happened during the course of the evening was a little amazing if not stupid. The dealer was a nice girl and the inspector was also a nice guy and we had been making polite conversation for about thirty minutes or so.

There were a couple of other players on the table apart from me and she pulled an ace to her own hand when she already had seventeen. The rules state that the card must then be the next card out of the shoe and on this instance, the card happened to be an ace.

Without any conscious thought, I reached into my pocket and took most of the money that I had and placed a maximum bet on the first box of £200. The hush and silence became deafening as the inspector and dealer exchanged glances with each other as if to say “can he do that”.

Well of course I can and I wasn’t breaking any rules, just taking advantage of a dealer mistake. It was a bad thing to do but this is money when all said and done and the edge for the player when you know that your first card is an ace is over 50%. I won the hand although not with a natural and the mood on the table changed.

But I knew that this wouldn’t get reported because what dealer or inspector would want their superiors to know that they were not doing their jobs properly?

That really was a defining day and I made that same move numerous times although not always with an ace as it was often with a ten value card.

See you soon

Carl
Play at one of the best casinos online

There is a special type of buzz when you enter a casino with the intention of taking money from them. Casinos at the end of the day are businesses and any business is concentrating on making money and not on losing it.

But at the end of the day they are providing entertainment. They don’t mind people winning money as long as winning money is all that they are doing. There is of course a world of difference between winning money and earning money. When you are earning money then you have a positive long term expectation.

You are no longer winning money by getting lucky like a normal punter but slowly extracting money from the casino. It is possible that some card counters could be allowed to ply their trade if the casino was gaining in some other way.

For instance I once knew of a gaming manager who allowed a winning small-stakes counter to ply his trade simply because he didn’t want to risk upsetting the big hitting roulette players that he came in with who were his friends.

It is when you know that the casino don’t know what you are doing that creates the biggest buzz. This is something that a lifetime of online poker cannot replicate. This constant cat and mouse game is in itself quite a thrill.

Alas of course, it is very difficult to make blackjack a career. This is why I was playing online poker just a few years later. Just like with online poker where you are struggling to find profitable games, it is often better to play semi-professionally or as a serious amateur than to try and go full-time.

I certainly do recommend though that you try and play blackjack in a live setting because it will be well worth it.

See you soon

Carl
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There have been big debates down the years about the merits of card counting systems and comparing one to the other. This kind of reminds me of online poker and what is the best way to operate. With online poker then there is simply no one shoe fits all policy and there never can be in a million years.

Much depends on how good you are, how fast you can play, if you have rakeback, how your game stands up to multi-tabling, does watching your opponents figure greatly in your play and the list goes on and on. Usually you need to find your own level in online poker or any other form of poker to be able to make money.

Players that cannot find their own level or are constantly trying to move up and be big shots usually bust out. There is little difference with blackjack, the best card counting system is basically specific to each individual. You cannot quote some level 4 type system as being optimal if the individual cannot use it properly without losing count.

So if a certain system is “best” for you then it is “best” and it is that simple. It is the same when financial consultants recommend financial products to clients. There is no stand out best product, only what products are best for certain people.

So a blackjack player who struggles with adding up and true count conversions may find the KO Count optimal. Then again, someone who was playing long hours who was also shuffle tracking and wanted to incorporate everything as efficiently as possible may find the high/low optimal (like we did).

Then again, a player who has the mental fortitude and is doing nothing but counting and wants optimal power and results may use a level four system. So there is no such thing as the “best system” in the world…..only what is best for the individual.

See you soon

Carl “The Dean” Sampson
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