Blackjack Strategy: Card Counting

Any discussion of basic player strategies for Blackjack would be incomplete without some coverage of the technique of ‘card counting'. This technique is one of the most sophisticated, and usually misunderstood, methods by which a player can achieve an advantage at a casino. It is not technically cheating, but casino's frown heavily upon it and if a player was detected using it they would be asked to leave rather rapidly!

The central concept of card counting is to track which cards have been played from a deck after a shuffle, to gain some intelligence of how the cards remaining in the deck might favour certain outcomes. The technique works in tandem with the basic Blackjack strategies explained elsewhere in this section of your site, so it requires considerable application and concentration to execute, plus a healthy dose of acting talent to conceal your conduct from the watchful dealers and pit bosses of a real-world casino club. In short, it's tricky to pull off and is most likely far beyond the skills of most casual players.

Before you get excited that UK online casinos could be easier environments to target with this technique – after all they can't physically see you, and you could use software tools to help you do the card count - their virtual decks are invariably shuffled after every hand effectively defeating any attempts to use card counting, so we'd suggest the only strategy worth spending time learning is the right basic strategy.

For those of you still curious about the mechanics of card counting, the basic scheme (around which there are a number of variations) is to gain an understanding of the density of high value cards still to be played from a deck. This is achieved by assigning point values to cards, and then tallying the values of cards as they are dealt. This running tally will begin to indicate whether the deck is becoming more or less favourable to the player. In basic terms, as the density of tens and aces relative to other values increases in a deck the more the deck will play in favour of the player over the house, and vice versa.

The sheer complexity of card counting techniques and the barrier to actually using them to any advantage in an online casino for reasons explained above means we feel it is not of practical benefit to our visitors to cover them in any more detail here.