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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 had another casino trip last night and after I had watched the Spain vs Paraguay game in the bar, decided to play a little blackjack. I had been counting for a while but my maximum bets were only very small and about £30 or so. Everything had been going very well on the table even though I was down about £100. I had been having friendly banter with the staff and everyone had been talking about football and England being so bad.

Then the dealer went to pull a card to her own hand when she already had seventeen. She quickly placed the card under the shoe to be the next card out and I had seen that the next card was an ace. So I quickly asked for £200 to be placed on first box and the dealer went to place the chips when the Inspector stopped her.

When I asked why, he said that it was because I had seen the ace. I then said to him that this was academic because it was their mistake and not mine and that there was no law saying that I couldn’t bet the maximum on any box I chose. Suddenly the mood on the table shifted but the Inspector was adamant that if I placed this bet that the box would receive no cards.

So my next line was to say that I hadn’t seen the ace to which he then replied that I wouldn’t have jumped from £30 to £200 if I didn’t know that the next card was ace…….fair point and difficult to argue and the only thing that I could think of at the time was to say that it was going to be my last hand anyway and that I was having one big blow out. This was semi-believable seeing as I had over £200 in £5 chips on the table. The Inspector thought for a second or two and then allowed the bet to stand…… I did get my ace but only a total of 19…….the dealer had a nine which made…….you guessed it…….19!

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.

Yesterday I looked at gambling theory in general and how important that is with regards trying to make money from casino games. Now obviously you are not supposed to be able to make money long term from casino games but that is not the objective for most people. Casino action gives people the opportunity to experience the thrill of casino game play while presenting the opportunity for short term success.

If you go into the venture with that in mind then you will be fine. Try to forget everything else that I have talked about on this blog because that stems from me having an awful lot of experience and inside knowledge that you simply will not have.

As an ex gaming employee then it is far easier for me to get away with certain things although even then, the average croupier is far more knowledgeable these days and the average casino manager is certainly so since I left gaming for good back in 1998. Theory is very powerful if you want to reduce the house edge to a very tiny percentage on all casino games and especially blackjack and roulette. Knowing basic strategy will not get you an edge at blackjack but it would almost certainly almost eliminate the house edge…….almost!

With sign up bonuses and loyalty bonuses that online casinos offer then you could find yourself almost breaking even or even better. Theory must be approached with caution because knowledge as they say is power but knowledge in the wrong hands or misinterpreted in the wrong way and used wrongly can be very damaging.

Give a reckless maniac the knowledge of how to drive a car and he could kill himself and others so knowledge isn’t always good. The bottom line is though that theory is important but it simply isn’t the be all and end all and success cannot be automatic as a result of knowing something…….it depends on what that something actually is.

Blackjack is a game that has been with us for an awful long time now and its sister game…..Pontoon means that many people come to blackjack who have had experience of playing Pontoon. Over the years there have been many variations to change the game and I remember when the “Over/Under” feature came into existence in the UK in the mid 1990′s.

But as online gaming has took off over the past few years then there has been an even greater need for the game to be revitalised periodically. So we are now facing a situation where new variations of blackjack are coming out with greater frequency. Early and late surrender were other popular features that caught on in some casinos.

But 21-3 blackjack is an interesting concept that attempts to merge the game of blackjack with poker. The player simply makes a separate wager that his first two cards and the dealers up card make a three card poker hand.

In this instance, if their first two cards are of the same suit and the dealers card is also the same suit that constitutes a flush. If their cards are say 8,7 and the dealer is showing a 6 or a 9 that that constitutes a straight. There are even more special odds paid for big hands like trips and straight flushes. Trips are obviously where the player has a pair like 4,4 and the dealer also shows a 4.

A straight flush is if say the player has 7h-6h and the dealer is showing the 8h. The pay offs with respect to the poker hands differ from casino to casino but if you like poker and the idea of merging the two games appeals to you then 21 +3 Blackjack may just be your game.

I recall one of the very first card counters who I ever spotted was back when I was a dealer in my local casino back in the very early 1990′s. The only blackjack knowledge that I had at that time was when I had read Beat The Dealer by Edward Thorp.

But that book was more than enough for me to be able to spot any conventional card counter and certainly one who wasn’t making any effort to disguise his play. We actually went on to become very good friends and still are to this day.

One of the things that gets counters spotted is the intense concentration that they exhibit when they go about their job. This is a dead give away as is looking at the discards. When a counter looks at the discards then what they are trying to do is to calculate the true count. In another post on the same subject, I mentioned how not converting the running count into a true count was one of the biggest mistakes with regards novice card counters.

To better estimate the true ratio of high cards and aces to low cards then you need to divide the running count by the number of decks remaining to be dealt. This is why a counter often looks at the discards. However it is a mistake to look like a counter as if anyone in the casino has this knowledge then your playing life is going to be cut severely short.

When many players learn the rudiments of card counting then they tend to learn the basic high/low system first. There is nothing wrong with this system and to call it “basic” is misleading. The high-low count captures most of the advantage opportunities that more sophisticated counts capture but it also has the advantage of simplicity.

This allows the player to keep count more accurately and for longer periods without fatigue. It also allows the player more “down” time to be able to interact and do other normal casino activities. The high-low count attributes a score of -1 for all tens and aces and +1 for all low cards of a deuce through to a six.

The sevens, eights and nines are considered neutral and are not counted or counted as zero which is the same thing. Keeping a total of the cards that have been dealt is called the running count. But yet many players use the running count to base their betting decisions and this is a big mistake in multiple deck games.

This is to do with the ratio of high cards to low cards and you could get two identical running counts and yet the advantage for the player is vastly different. Let us look at a count of +10 in two separate situations in a four deck game, one where only one deck had been dealt and the other where three decks had been dealt.

In the first example with only one deck dealt, there are exactly 156 cards remaining and a count of +10 equals on plus point for every 15.6 cards. In the second example with only 52 cards remaining and the same +10 count then we have a ratio of one point for every 5.2 cards. This means that the ratio of high cards to non high cards is greater in the second example……far greater.

After watching the Fulham vs Tottenham game last night we headed to a casino for the first time in ages. In fact regular readers of the blog since it started will have read some of my earlier posts regarding these trips. The journey took about an hour so we arrived at about 9pm.

Casinos tend to be quiet at around this time so it is a good time to go. You don’t have to wait at the bar or wait for coffee for ages either. As usual we took a friend for my partner as I hate playing and leaving her. She merely likes to watch and has no interest in gaming.

The blackjack game was a six deck shoe game (not my favourite) but I decided to play anyway. Sometimes when you manage to get an inexperienced dealer then they can often make mistakes. Although in England the mistakes are often picked up by the Inspector anyway.

However I don’t have any good news to report as every dealer that I encountered seemed competent to me. I merely played table minimums for about an hour and then became bored after losing about £10.

I hate the new electronic games inside casinos these days as they leave no room for creativity with regards to gaining an edge….at least not for people like me anyway who is old school. It felt good to be back inside a casino again, maybe I just need to find some now that have decent blackjack action.

Why not come and bet in the bwin casino with some great casino?

When I wrote my first book, “Princes of Darkness : The World of High-stakes Blackjack” back in 2006, many people jumped on me for only using the basic high/low count. This is a basic level 1 counting system where you only add and subtract in units of one.

Some of the criticism amazed me and especially from so called blackjack experts who clearly had not read my reasons further into the book. These were clearly people who were stuck in what was conventional card counting blackjack train of thought.

I on the other hand was thinking beyond conventional card counting. I simply did not want (could not handle) complicated multi-level counting systems whilst trying to shuffle track at the same time. Card counting is difficult at the best of times whilst having to interact in normal ways and worry about signalling in BP’s.

On top of this you are trying to keep a score on what has been won and lost and if you have people in your team who you cannot trust, you have more than enough to think about and if any “expert” thinks that while doing all this that they can use a multi-level counting system on top then I have two words to say to that……try it!

Even IF you succeeded which would be very doubtful then you still have the rather serious problem of fatigue waiting ominously just around the corner. To do all these things whilst trying to supervise several team members at the same as well as keep an eye out for casino personnel and any potential heat is very difficult.

In fact I would have to say that had I not had all of my years in gaming where I practiced counting speed and multi-level counting systems coupled with already knowing about casino techniques and surveillance then I just don’t think that I would have been able to pull everything off. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have probably been forced to drop the shuffle tracking element.

But seeing as I didn’t see how card counting could be profitable as a stand alone way of making money from blackjack in 1998 then it is doubtful if the entire thing would have got off the ground to begin with.

see you soon and take care

Carl “The Dean” Sampson

When you have been in gambling as long as I have (far too long actually) then you begin to take certain things for granted and certain types of knowledge. One of those pieces of knowledge is basic strategy for blackjack.

The thing is that basic strategy isn’t rocket science and is so easily learnt. All you have to do is memorise a few simple charts. But one of the underlying problems behind why millions of blackjack players worldwide both in live casinos and online casinos do not use basic is not because they cannot memorise the tables but because they simply do not believe in it.

There is a tendency to be seduced by the effect of immediate short term results. This happens in poker an awful lot. If a player re-raises a rock with K-10 and the flop comes K-10-5 and he ends up busting the AA of his opponent then this underlines in his own mind that he made the proper play.

This happens in blackjack, you tell someone that they need to take a card on 15 against a 10 and they do so. They then bust on six consecutive occasions and then think that taking a card on 15 is wrong and go back to their old way of playing.

They then say things like “well if I had stood instead of taking a card then at least I would have had a chance”. They just cannot comprehend that these strategy plays are computed over hundreds of thousands (even millions) of situations and when replicated often enough is the correct mathematical play.

You can also have certain players who try to “feel” what the next card is. I like watching these types and find them hilarious. This is especially the case when they are on the last box playing the role of “goalkeeper”.

It is quite amusing to see the look on their faces when their play leads to the dealer busting on several consecutive occasions. They almost look like some “blackjack Zen master” when all they are is extremely misguided and naive about blackjack.

Carl “The Dean” Sampson