It is amazing to me how deluded these players are. They are not even aware of how much they lose at the game because they fail to keep profit and loss accounts. Deep down they would rather live in delusion about their “skill” and “expertise”. They love it when other players seek their advice. This feeds their ego even more and another trick that they perform is to scan the table and try to guess the next card.

This never ceases to amaze me but in a way, this is actually grounded in some warped logic. When an “expert” looks at the table and sees no low cards and he has a hand that can receive a ten value card, they often remark how there must be “high cards due”. There is a strange logic behind this because the cards do have memory in blackjack and high cards will come eventually. But to do this without card counting is never going to produce profits in a million years! It is amazing though how these so called “experts” are always thinking out loud. They want the entire table to know how good they are but yet what they never realise is that if they were that good then the casino would not let them continue to play.

There are several ways around this; one is to count for someone else who will be the big bettor. However I am referring to individual counters here. The second is to leave the table when the count goes really negative and start with a higher starting bet than $2. If you start with $10 then this is only a 20-1 bet spread to reach $200. But you would never want to play through all of the negatives with a $20 minimum bet as you would now be losing $6/hour and not $0.60 as before.

This is still an acceptable loss but far less so and you would ideally like to save as much of that $6/hour as possible and you can do this by leaving the table in really negative counts. This firstly gets you away from situations where you are betting in what are –EV situations and also if you come back to the table and the seats are taken then you can back count easier. So this can add to your disguise as well and make it easier to record profits. One other such tactic is not to cash out large amounts and to also buy in for large amounts of money even if you don’t need the chips. This means hiding chips on your person but you need to give the illusion that you are a losing player.

So card counting inside actual casino conditions is very difficult when you know or feel that your actions are being scrutinised. This spooks an awful lot of people and it feels like you are under interrogation. So this creates pressure and anyone that says that they feel absolutely no pressure are obviously not aware of what exactly needs to be done inside casinos to avoid detection.

To be playing optimally then you need to be aware that you are under possible surveillance and act accordingly. This by sheer definition creates some sort of pressure even if only negligible. I actually got used to the pressure probably better than most people for one simple reason and this was because I had worked inside casinos for numerous years. But to go inside a casino for the first time as a counter is very difficult and I can only imagine what that must be like. Suddenly you are not reading a book anymore but are physically immersed in it.

What we are looking at here is beating the game that has an automatic shuffling machine instead of the shuffler itself and that is not the same thing. Games that have automatic shufflers are still being operated by weak dealers and you attack the weakness and not the strength. So what do I mean by this? Well firstly in no way am I condoning cheating and in no way am I advising it. But this is precisely how these games can be beaten for a few dollars per hour.

A game that was producing fifty hands per hour with an average bet size of $10 would mean $500/hour in action for the player. The average house rules mean that the house has an edge of roughly 0.5% and so this means that they will take 0.5% of your action per hour in the long run. This equates to roughly $2.50 per hour that the casino is taking from you.

This also means that you cannot make money from this game in the conventional way but that $2.50 is only a quarter of your average bet. If you could manipulate dealers into paying you just one bet per hour that you shouldn’t have had then you are no longer losing $2.50 per hour but making $7.50 per hour. If you were skilful enough and the dealers were weak enough to be able to find more situations per hour then the hourly rate would increase by $10 per situation per hour.

Remember that I am not just talking about shuffle tracking here and pulling it off, that isn’t difficult. What I am talking about here is doing it for hour after hour, day after day and week after week against totally inconsistent dealers. This is what makes it tough. We used Shuffle Trak to help identify where the high card segments were going but the downside of this is that the software doesn’t know when a dealer has done something different.

This can only be detected by the naked eye and so you have no option but to get the skill yourself. The problem with having extra team members stems from having to split profits amongst more people. While this sounds good in theory, it opens up whole new complexities. It is often better to keep something simple when you are trying to make money and we eventually dropped trying to track shuffles. So it is not something that I would ever go back to again even if I had the option to do so. It is far better and just as productive to look for weak dealers instead.

But for me personally then shuffle tracking was by far the most difficult discipline that I have ever tried to execute in a game of blackjack. The theory is pretty simple but executing this theory in actual play is really something different. As an individual counter then you are having to keep the count which is work in itself. Then you are having to do true count estimations. On top of this is the fact that you are trying to interact as much as possible and this in itself detracts from your ability to be able to do many things at once.

So then on top of this you are having to keep separate count per deck or separate count per half deck scores for the purpose of keeping track of shuffles. All of this is mentally fatiguing and in my experience then shuffle tracking not only shortens your playing sessions based on being able to be on top of your game mentally but it also makes it very difficult to execute areas of your game that should be otherwise straight forward. This is before we even get into the subject of how difficult shuffle tracking really is anyway. Nearly everyone that I have ever spoken to about this struggled with getting any sort of meaningful edge with tracking when trying to do too many things at once.

Electronic shufflers will also cut down your action so you simply will not be able to spread your action between several casinos over a rather small area. So the mere presence of just one single electronic shuffler impacts on the conventional card counter as it cuts down on their theatre of operations.

The second alternative involves cheating games that have electronic shufflers. These tactics or many of them are not even grey area……they are cheating plain and simple. But I am aware of people who do this and so any casino executives reading this blog need to take heed.

The games with automatic shufflers can be attacked from other areas and to doubt whether this is so then we only have to look at the house edge. At blackjack then it is around 0.5% for the house. This means that the house will win 0.5% of your action. So let us say that your average bet size is $15 and the dealer is dealing 60 hands per hour.

This means that you are placing $900 in action per hour with the casino expected to take o.5% of it per hour over the long run if you are using good basic. This equates to an hourly rate of -$4.50 per hour. But yet your average bet is nearly four times that amount at $15. You can see the potential here because a cheat or a player in even slight collusion with a dealer who was getting away with one bet per hour would not be losing -$4.50 per hour but making $10.50 per hour.

If you think about this for a minute then the advantage is rather obvious. Every time that you take a card and bust then the dealer wins. So if you have 13 and they have 10 then you feel compelled to take a card to better your total and this is correct play. But there will be many times where you will recieve a ten value card or a nine value card and bust immediately. But yet when the dealer plays on then the dealer may well turn a card from 2 to 6 and then bust.

But if the dealer busts after the player busts then the hand is not a push but a loss for the player. This advantage is substantial but it is not one to be over estimated. With accurate basic strategy then the house edge is only in the vicinity of 0.5% and with even adequate card counting skills then this can be at least reduced to 0% and possibly a slight edge.

The second and more subtle factor is connected to the first and this is that the player will be forced to bust their own hand in an attempt to improve their total. This is correct play and cannot be avoided and is another reason as to why the house starts with an edge and the 3/2 pay offs for blackjacks/naturals do not do enough to offset this.

But systems like the Reverse Labouchere for instance can use progression in an entirely different way. However it needs to be pointed out that in no way can a progression system turn you from a long term loser into a long term winner although on blackjack then it has the potential to do so if you are using good solid basic and card counting methods.

But even here, it is the card counting strategy that is providing the profit and not the progression system. In this environment then the progression system can serve a very good strategic purpose as it can allow the player to look like an everyday player when betting in this way. So even though the progression systems cannot and will not provide long term profits in their own right, everything has its place at some stage.

Even though we never used progression systems when we played blackjack, the strategic use of them as cover cannot be under estimated. But if you were to go into any casino for a day or an evening and use a progression system then your chances of success and walking out in front would be very good indeed as that isn’t an amount of time that is long enough for the house edge to take effect.

Even though you may think that blackjack is straight forward and that winning should be straight forward if you can follow basic and implement a counting strategy……life isn’t that simple. Using poker once again as an analogy then it is a bit like knowing good solid poker principles like position, hand values, bankroll management and such. These are all good things to know but yet will not make you an automatic winner in a poker game.

You will need other “skills” that can only be derived from playing. Casino blackjack is the same and it will seem strange to you to be card counting in a real game with casino staff watching you. When the time comes to increase your bet and the croupier is watching you and maybe an Inspector as well then it isn’t easy to do something that you know that if it was to be detected that you would be prevented from playing.

And also, if wagering money is something new to you then nothing can really prepare you for the times when you have substantial bets at risk. It is all too easy to watch what happens on these hands instead of doing what you should be doing and that is to keep the count at all times. You will need to be able to interact with casino staff so that you do not look like a counter and this isn’t easy at first. I was fortunate in that I never had to overcome this obstacle because I had practiced counting for years as a croupier on the inside.