1. Placing minimum bets when odds are in the casino's favor.
2. Placing large bets when odds are in the player's favor.
This makes the betting patterns of solo counters very different and easily identifiable from average joes.
Some players do try to add some variance and make intentional non-optimal plays to avoid detection. But every non-optimal play costs money and doing it too frequently eats up any potential profits.
Adding more decks doesn't fully prevent advantage play. More decks aren't harder to count. Adding more decks lowers the variance of the odds distribution through a shoe.
In a one-deck shoe the odds vary in a "spiky" way. It's more likely to be highly favored for the casino or highly favored for the player.
An eight-deck shoe the odds vary in a far smoother way. Most of the time they'll be slightly in favor of the casino or slightly in favor of the player.
A one-deck shoe is better for an advantage player because they can sit out when the odds are unfavorable and make very profitable bets when the odds are highly in their favor. But you can still make money by playing a lot of hands correctly in a eight-deck shoe.
Counting is always possible, nobody can tell if you're just counting in your head. What's detectable and counterable is the way to get advantage from it: you must make your bet much bigger when the count is favorable. That behavior pattern alone is enough for a casino to choose to toss you - they don't even have to prove that you were counting.
Counting works in general because the player's advantage is concentrated into a small number of possible hands. Almost all of your profit comes from blackjack hands paying 3:2, with a bit more from some particular cases like splitting aces and doubling on 11. For everything else, you lose more hands than you win (the asymmetry is that if player and dealer both bust, dealer still takes your money), and you're just trying to tread water to get to the good stuff. The good stuff all requires aces and tens, and counting is to identify the cases where there are more of those available.
Besides counting, the other way to play blackjack profitably is shuffle tracking. It's possible to watch as aces go into the discard pile and visually track them through the shuffle. When you know an ace is coming up soon (even within a range of the next 20 cards), bet big since even a 5% extra chance of an ace makes the expected value of that hand profitable in your favor. Casinos also know to foil this and will eject you in the same way, for a pattern of suddenly making big bets even if they don't necessarily know or prove you're doing it.
Sort of. Look up StevenBridges on YouTube, he documents his career as a card counter. It's certainly possible and you can get some profit, but the casino will sooner or later ban you from blackjack, so you also need a steady supply of them.
I just watched one of his videos this morning. Yeah you tend to hit like into the thousands and they tend to see you as a problem, especially on single deck tables. It's not hard for them to spot someone using well known strategies. You can still turn out a modest profit and I think one thing to keep in mind is in places like vegas you might want to find the casinos that aren't owned by the two big companies that own most of them because they share information on punters...
His whole book is like 'why you probably shouldnt learn how to count cards' and its because its a massive pain in the ass and you can probably make more money doing something like poker instead. It's fun from what I hear though every person I know who has the mental math skills to do this has gone to vegas only to get limited at around 1000$ or so. Sometimes they even catch you within like 3-5 hands haha
Fun fact, Ed Thorpe developed blackjack basic strategy and card counting through computer simulation and is pretty much the guy responsible for casinos having to change all their rules at one point with the game. One thing I thought was funny was how steven bridges was trying the fake beard thing, it seemed like the most obvious tell that he was doing some funny business to me, it looked like shit haha
Not an expert but my understanding is that it's only feasible on a small enough scale to eke out tiny profits over the long run, too much success will get you rapidly 86'd.
If anyone reading this is intrigued by games of chance with an available skill edge and is considering learning advantage Blackjack, I'd highly recommend learning Poker instead. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other players, and the house is not incentivized to clamp down on the edges available (though of course they take a cut of everyone's winnings). And it's an endlessly deep strategic game instead of a mechanistic counting game that advantage Blackjack is, which is to say, it's actually fun.
Card counting is largely defeated by adding more and more decks to the shuffle. Once you get to a 6-deck shoe, it becomes very difficult to use card counting to successfully "beat the odds".
I believe it's not strictly more decks, but also how often they shuffle. If they add 7 decks but don't shuffle until near the bottom, it's actually advantageous as the count can get very skewed (e.g. 50 cards left and 30 facecards remaining). However, with 7 decks and reshuffling halfway through the count doesn't reach as much relevance to the next card.
Casinos are not dumb, they have countermeasures as well as people watching the game counting the cards themselves to see if players are OBVIOUSLY counting from their playing pattern.
Is card counting still possible, or have casinos implemented enough countermeasures to defeat its advantage?
Advantage play in Black Jack boils down to:
1. Placing minimum bets when odds are in the casino's favor. 2. Placing large bets when odds are in the player's favor.
This makes the betting patterns of solo counters very different and easily identifiable from average joes.
Some players do try to add some variance and make intentional non-optimal plays to avoid detection. But every non-optimal play costs money and doing it too frequently eats up any potential profits.
Adding more decks doesn't fully prevent advantage play. More decks aren't harder to count. Adding more decks lowers the variance of the odds distribution through a shoe.
In a one-deck shoe the odds vary in a "spiky" way. It's more likely to be highly favored for the casino or highly favored for the player.
An eight-deck shoe the odds vary in a far smoother way. Most of the time they'll be slightly in favor of the casino or slightly in favor of the player.
A one-deck shoe is better for an advantage player because they can sit out when the odds are unfavorable and make very profitable bets when the odds are highly in their favor. But you can still make money by playing a lot of hands correctly in a eight-deck shoe.
Counting is always possible, nobody can tell if you're just counting in your head. What's detectable and counterable is the way to get advantage from it: you must make your bet much bigger when the count is favorable. That behavior pattern alone is enough for a casino to choose to toss you - they don't even have to prove that you were counting.
Counting works in general because the player's advantage is concentrated into a small number of possible hands. Almost all of your profit comes from blackjack hands paying 3:2, with a bit more from some particular cases like splitting aces and doubling on 11. For everything else, you lose more hands than you win (the asymmetry is that if player and dealer both bust, dealer still takes your money), and you're just trying to tread water to get to the good stuff. The good stuff all requires aces and tens, and counting is to identify the cases where there are more of those available.
Besides counting, the other way to play blackjack profitably is shuffle tracking. It's possible to watch as aces go into the discard pile and visually track them through the shuffle. When you know an ace is coming up soon (even within a range of the next 20 cards), bet big since even a 5% extra chance of an ace makes the expected value of that hand profitable in your favor. Casinos also know to foil this and will eject you in the same way, for a pattern of suddenly making big bets even if they don't necessarily know or prove you're doing it.
Sort of. Look up StevenBridges on YouTube, he documents his career as a card counter. It's certainly possible and you can get some profit, but the casino will sooner or later ban you from blackjack, so you also need a steady supply of them.
I just watched one of his videos this morning. Yeah you tend to hit like into the thousands and they tend to see you as a problem, especially on single deck tables. It's not hard for them to spot someone using well known strategies. You can still turn out a modest profit and I think one thing to keep in mind is in places like vegas you might want to find the casinos that aren't owned by the two big companies that own most of them because they share information on punters...
His whole book is like 'why you probably shouldnt learn how to count cards' and its because its a massive pain in the ass and you can probably make more money doing something like poker instead. It's fun from what I hear though every person I know who has the mental math skills to do this has gone to vegas only to get limited at around 1000$ or so. Sometimes they even catch you within like 3-5 hands haha
Fun fact, Ed Thorpe developed blackjack basic strategy and card counting through computer simulation and is pretty much the guy responsible for casinos having to change all their rules at one point with the game. One thing I thought was funny was how steven bridges was trying the fake beard thing, it seemed like the most obvious tell that he was doing some funny business to me, it looked like shit haha
https://graham-kendall.com/blog/claude-shannon-edward-thorp-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O._Thorp
Not an expert but my understanding is that it's only feasible on a small enough scale to eke out tiny profits over the long run, too much success will get you rapidly 86'd.
If anyone reading this is intrigued by games of chance with an available skill edge and is considering learning advantage Blackjack, I'd highly recommend learning Poker instead. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other players, and the house is not incentivized to clamp down on the edges available (though of course they take a cut of everyone's winnings). And it's an endlessly deep strategic game instead of a mechanistic counting game that advantage Blackjack is, which is to say, it's actually fun.
Card counting is largely defeated by adding more and more decks to the shuffle. Once you get to a 6-deck shoe, it becomes very difficult to use card counting to successfully "beat the odds".
I believe it's not strictly more decks, but also how often they shuffle. If they add 7 decks but don't shuffle until near the bottom, it's actually advantageous as the count can get very skewed (e.g. 50 cards left and 30 facecards remaining). However, with 7 decks and reshuffling halfway through the count doesn't reach as much relevance to the next card.
Casinos are not dumb, they have countermeasures as well as people watching the game counting the cards themselves to see if players are OBVIOUSLY counting from their playing pattern.
Possible enough so to encourage new people to think they can try, not possible enough to become a millionaire.
Possible enough that to be elite your life turns into a sort of arbitrage trying to scam casinos in exchange for a mediocre salary.
It's not a scam to use math to your advantage. Casinos do it all the time.