Casinos vs the blackjack card counter
This section is a continuation of Counting cards. Is this cheating at blackjack? Most of us know that various casinos are not going to let us just walk into their place and freely apply various counting techniques to give us, the blackjack card counter a significant gambling advantage, they are going to have something in place for the avid gambler who thinks they can come in and walk off with all their money. At Ace and a Ten we will go over a few solutions that Casinos have come up with to keep there gambling odds at the Black Jack table in their favor.
High Tech Surveillance Cameras
The term "big brother is watching" is a mild under statement some casinos employ the use of highly sophisticated state of the art camera video surveillance, watching you from above at every conceivable angle one could imagine.
And if that is not an uncomfortable message, to the new would-be blackjack card counter trying to make a quick buck, they have gone one step further they have extremely good card players (even ex-card cons) who are now on their payroll and they already know the tricks of the trade, watching your every move and gesture.
That just sends a cold shiver down one's spine to think how many eyes are watching us playing blackjack and scrutinizing one's every move. Some establishments have gone to extreme measures and they have installed real-time face recognition software which scan an unsuspecting persons face and compares it to a large video database network of known casino black list players, if a scan is registered as a match the individual or individuals are kindly escorted off the premises with the help of the Pit Boss and a generous helping hand of security guards.
The casino has a few more surprises for the blackjack card counter, please continue reading.
Counter Strategy 1
They have introduced the ingenious technique called burning which basically is (discarding) one or more cards, after every play. Usually, these burned cards go to a section of the blackjack table called the discard tray, and the customer never sees them. This is obviously a major irritation for the blackjack card counter in the ideal situation; these cards are accounted for in our basic mathematical formula of card counting.
Counter Strategy 2
At the Blackjack table dealers begin to shuffle the deck more frequently. This now creates an unfavorable situation for the avid card counter, because it resets the black jack card count and prevents the counters from obtaining a desirable deck with a high plus count. For a example say the table dealer noticed that a particular player was suddenly making large bets all of a sudden after wagering the table minimum for many deals, the dealer may suspect a card counter and shuffles the deck of the remaining cards immediately as a course of preventative action.
Counter Strategy 3
If you thought things could not get any worse for the blackjack card counter to keep track of the cards in the deck after every game, casinos have introduced the blackjack multi-deck game. What does this mean? Well in a nutshell most casinos started using four, six, or even more decks shuffled together. This is too cumbersome for dealers to handle so many cards physically, so they introduced a new device to the black jack table called the shoe.
With so many cards in the deck, each card represents a smaller percentage of the deck, so counting provides a smaller advantage. Methods have been developed to account for multi-deck play at the casino, but the fact remains that it makes things a lot harder for the blackjack card counter. Other blackjack strategies would have to be devised to combat these new stumbling blocks invented by the casino industry.
Does this mean that card counting is dead and buried? Not really please continue to check back at Ace and a Ten for more systems developed to give the card counter an added advantage.