This article will teach you how to count cards using the Hi-Lo Method. The reason the player who can properly count cards is feared by the Casino is simple. It puts the odds in the player’s favor. The house edge in the game is destroyed when the shoe 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 likely to bust hand. The dealer must hit any hand lower than a soft 17 (Ace and a six). A rich shoe in face cards means the dealer has a higher chance of busting their hand.
The idea behind card counting 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 few low cards remain and the majority of the cards in the shoe are high cards, the shoe favors the player. When this situation is present, the player raises the size of his bets. The easiest and most popular method of card counting is the Hi-Lo method which will be described here.
Card counting may be the most famous advantage play (AP) method, but it also provides a low edge to players. Even as a skilled counter, you’re only looking at between a 1% and 1.5% advantage over the house. Balanced Counting Methods. Balanced counting methods may involve running counts and true counts. The running count refers to the running total of a card’s assigned value. When following a balanced counting method, such as the Hi-Lo method, the running count is changed into a true count, which takes into account the number of decks used. Counting from the Knight of Pentacles. The Knight has a count value of 4, so counting from him, and including him, count four cards to the right. You will land on the 3 of Cups. Assess the 3 of Cups, including the cards immediately either side of it if you’re reading card combinations. Card counting methods are measured using a few metrics: The first is betting correlation, which is how much betting correlate to the count. This is important in shoe games, and methods like hi-lo have good betting correlation. Most methods have a decent betting correlation though, but this is especially important in shoe games. How Card Counting Works. Typically, casino blackjack is dealt from a shoe of somewhere between six and eight decks. The cards are dealt until a certain amount of the shoe has been dealt – often, something like 75% of the shoe will be used before reshuffling.
First, you must know the point values to assign to each card. Memorize these or you will never be able to successfuly implement this strategy.
Low Cards: Two, Three, Four, Five and Six cards are valued at +1. Low cards are helpful to the dealer who keeps drawing while the value of his hand is under 17. Low cards give the dealer a higher chance of beating your hand and a less likely chance to bust.
High Cards: Ten, Jack, Queen, King, and Ace are valued at minus (-) 1. You want the deck to have more high cards remaining near the end of the shoe. This is because they make the dealer more likely to bust. It also gives you a higher chance of getting dealt 17 or higher on your first two cards, including blackjack.
Neutral Cards: Seven, Eight and Nine have no value, or zero (0). The purpose of this is to balance the system. It allows there to be an equal number of high cards and low cards so the final count of an entire shoe equals zero.
Now for the process of counting. When you have the counting values of each card down, you will now start to keept the “running count“. The running count is the process of adding and subtracting the values of each card as they are dealt. For example, if the first five cards that come out of the deck are Jack, 7, 3, King, Ace, the running count would be minus (-) two. (J=minus 1, 7=0, 3=+1, King=minus1, Ace=minus1). This may seem easy or difficult to you, but either way, practice makes perfect. The more you practice keeping the running count, the better you will get. The purpose of this site is to help you get better and this is why we provide the unique Card Counting Trainer for your use. Use it as often as you like to get better at keeping the running count.
The running count, however, is not the final step in the Hi-Lo method. You must also learn to convert the running count into the “true count” of the shoe. The true count gives you a better determination of whether the shoe gives you the advantage. The way to determine the true count of the shoe is to divide the running count by the remaining cards left in the shoe. Casinos offer games ranging from a single deck of cards to eight decks of cards, so you will have to know how many decks are in the game you are playing. You will then also have to be able to estimate how many cards or decks are left in the shoe. The way to estimate this is to look at the amount of cards in the discard tray by the dealer. Let’s say you are playing a standard six deck shoe, your running count is at 9, and you see about three decks in the discard tray. Take your running count of 9, divide it by the remaining amount of decks 3 (6 deck shoe minus 3 discarded decks = 3 remaining decks) and you get a true count of 3. to be more accurate, you can estimate to the nearest half deck of cards remaining.
The last step is applying your card counting skills to your betting. You gain your advantage against the Casino by betting larger when the count is positive and betting smaller or the minimum when it is negative. The true count determines the size of your bet. What you will do is value each bet as a unit based on the size of your minimum bet. If you are playing a $25 table, one unit is $25. You will increase the amount of units based on the true count. Follow the table below for playing at a standard 6 deck table.
True Count Units to Bet
0 or less 1
+1 2
+2 4
+3 8
+4 10
+5 or greater 12
Now you know the basics of card counting using the Hi-Lo method! As stated earlier, practice makes perfect. Please utilize our unique Card Counting Trainer to help you get better and better at keeping the running count. You can also visit some of our recommended online casinos to test your counting skills while wagering real money. While online casinos do not keep a true shoe and the card counting will not give you an advantage, it will still help you get ready for the live casinos by including all of the actions of placing bets, keeping the count, and knowing when you would increase your bet.
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Card counting is one of the most infamous strategies in blackjack, but it is also one of the least understood by the general public. Slingo bingo review. Movies and television have portrayed card counting in blackjack to be a way to get rich quick. In films like Rain Man, we’re given the idea that card counters crush the casinos, winning hand after and hand and calling out exactly what cards will be coming. But of course, not just anyone can card count; it takes a mathematical genius who can calculate complex equations on the fly while keeping track of the positions of hundreds of different cards.
However, the truth behind card counting – for better and for worse – is very different. In truth, card counting doesn’t guarantee that a player will win big in the short run. Instead, the techniques used in card counting only serve to give the player the same sort of small edge usually held by the casino. On the other hand, there is good news; it doesn’t take a genius to count cards. Most people can learn simple card counting systems relatively quickly, and if you’re willing to put in the time, chances are that you’ll be able to learn more complex systems that promise the player a slightly bigger advantage over the house. However, it does take some hard work, and it’s certainly not an easy road to getting rich.
If you just want to jump straight in and get started, you can learn how to card count using our infographic here.
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How Card Counting Works
Typically, casino blackjack is dealt from a shoe of somewhere between six and eight decks. The cards are dealt until a certain amount of the shoe has been dealt – often, something like 75% of the shoe will be used before reshuffling. This means that by tracking which cards have come out of the shoe during play, we can have a pretty firm handle on which cards are still waiting to be dealt. If a rabbit crosses your path.
How can this information help the player? It turns out that having certain cards in the deck is great for the player, while other cards are better for the dealer. As a general rule, big cards favor the player, while small cards favor the dealer. More specifically, aces and tens are very good for the player, while fives and fours are great for the dealer.
This is mostly because aces and tens do a lot of things that the player can take advantage of with the options they are given. For instance, the player will get more blackjacks, which pay the player 3-2, while the dealer only “wins” the player’s bet if they make a blackjack. The player can also stand on hands below 17, while the dealer cannot, meaning that the dealer will bust quite often in shoes that are still rich in tens. Roulette game on line. Furthermore, the player will do better on double downs (when the player almost always will be happy with a ten and often with an ace), can start taking insurance if the deck is rich enough in tens, and can surrender more confidently in spots where the dealer is likely to have a very strong hand.
In short, everything the player can do works even better when the deck has plenty of tens and aces available to him. Conversely, small cards thwart these efforts. If many small cards have already come out of the shoe, the rest of the deck is very, very favorable to the player.
Card counters can take advantage of knowing how good the remaining deck is in several ways. As we said earlier, card counters will sometimes take insurance based on the remaining cards in the shoe, and on rare occasions, they might even deviate from basic strategy based on their counting. However, the biggest way that card counters pick up an advantage is by simply betting more money when the player has the advantage, and betting less (or avoiding playing altogether) when the odds swing too far in favor of the dealer.
Dangers and Challenges of Card Counting
Here’s the good news: contrary to popular belief, card counting is not illegal. As long as you’re not cheating or using a device to help you play, you’re welcome to play each hand however you want, including mentally keeping track of the cards that have been played and adjusting your play accordingly.
But that doesn’t mean that casinos can’t fight back against card counters. While you can try to count cards, casinos can also try to make the conditions for card counters difficult or impossible. For instance, a suspicious casino may start shuffling their cards more often to lower the deck penetration, thus making counting much less effective. If you’re a known counter, they may even bar you from playing blackjack entirely, as the casino has the ability to simply refuse to let you play at any time.
This means that one of the biggest challenges for a card counter is properly balancing taking advantage of the information they have with covering up the fact that they’re counting at all. If there was no danger of being caught, the player could simply bet the minimum until the odds were in the player’s favor, then switch to betting the table maximum. However, trying this strategy is a sure way to get yourself banned from playing blackjack! Instead, most blackjack systems rely on small, incremental changes that hope to keep the player from getting caught, while still doing enough to overcome the house edge.
One other danger in card counting is overestimating how big an edge you have over the house. Yes, in the long run, a good card counter does expect to come out ahead of the casino. However, your results will prove to be just as volatile as they are when simply playing basic strategy; it’s only in the long term that you’ll see your small advantage realized, while in the short term, you’ll see significant wins and losses.
Card Counting Systems
There are a number of different card counting systems available, including the following:
- Ace-Five Counting Systems – Easiest card counting system to learn
- Unbalanced Counting Systems
- The Knock-Out Count (and derivative systems)
- Revere Counts
- Wong Halves
These systems vary from very simple (Ace-Five and Hi-Lo) to devilishly complex (Wong Halves), but most of them share some common elements. For instance, different cards are given values that the player must keep track of during the course of a given shoe. Cards that are good for the player are given negative values (since we’d rather they stay in the shoe), while cards that are bad for the player are given positive values. In many systems, this number is then divided by the approximate number of remaining decks to get a true count, which tells the player how rich the remaining shoe is in good cards.
In most counting systems, the player will use this true count to decide how much to bet on a given hand, and whether or not to take insurance if the dealer is showing an ace. Occasionally, the count will also tell players when to abandon basic strategy and play a hand differently, based on the fact that the remaining composition of the deck has changed the odds in favor of an alternative play.
Some card counting systems also ask players to keep a separate side count of aces. This is because aces have a very different effect on the game than other cards. While players want to bet more when there are lots of aces available (thanks to the fact that they make blackjacks more common), they don’t have as much impact on how you should play hands as tens. Thus, more complex systems will keep an ace count independent of an overall count, in order to make this distinction.
This brings us to an important point: there is a tradeoff to make when choosing a card counting system. More complex systems offer bigger potential rewards, but also come with more risk. Players are much more likely to make mistakes when trying to keep track of extra information, and just a few mistakes can be enough to remove whatever advantage the player has gained. If there’s a choice between using a simpler system that you’ve mastered, or a more complex system that you’re unsure about, it’s almost always better to pick the simple system, even if the more complex system promises a bigger edge against the house.
Ace-Five Counting Systems
Perhaps the simplest card counting system around is the ace-five count. This is a name given to a variety of different card counting systems that share one thing in common: they only keep track of aces and fives, ignoring all the other cards in the deck. This is done because aces are the best card in the shoe for the player, while fives are the worst.
The basic idea is simple. Start with a count of zero. Each time you see a five, add one to your count. If you see an ace, subtract one from your count. Higher counts will be better for the player.
Where counting systems vary is in how you use this information to change how much you bet during play. Some will advise you to double you bet every time the count gets beyond a certain point, while others say to bet a certain number of units based on the given count. Many try to reduce your losses in bad shoes by having you quit at a certain negative count. However, the basics are the same; when the count gets high (at least +2 or higher), the player should bet more than the minimum. The higher the count goes, and/or the longer it stays high, the more the player should bet, up to a maximum amount that the player is comfortable betting on any single hand.
Ace-five counting systems usually don’t require changing the way you play; you should simply use basic strategy and rely on your bigger bets making you a winner when the shoe is good for the player. The advantage gained by the player using these systems isn’t big, but it usually gives the player a slight edge over the house – and combined with the comps and rewards players earn while playing, can turn blackjack into a game that’s more lucrative and more fun for the player.
Final Thoughts on Blackjack Card Counting
Before learning a card counting system, it’s essential to first master basic strategy. The basis of any card counting system is playing perfect basic strategy, since making simple mistakes will undermine whatever advantage you hope to gain through counting. Even if you have to use a basic strategy chart to help you at the table to help you, always remember that you need to master the fundamentals before moving on to more advanced strategies if you want any hope of succeeding.
It’s also worth noting that there are a large number of blackjack games in which you won’t be able to effectively count cards at all. For instance, many casinos now use continuous shuffling machines, which essentially remove all deck penetration. This is also true in most online casinos. Some online casinos use a shoe made up of infinite decks, meaning that your odds of getting any given card are always exactly the same, no matter which cards you’ve seen. Other online casinos deal out of a regular (simulated) shoe, but shuffle the cards after each hand. This has the same effect of eliminating penetration, just as with a continuous shuffling machine, making card counting impossible.
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