Beginners Black Jack

Back when I ran my first blackjack team in the autumn of 1998, I realised even then that in order to get a meaningful edge at the game would involve more than just counting cards. I had known numerous card counters personally and they had either been caught or they had basically failed to make any meaningful money.

There are many reasons why most card counters don’t make money, most of them don’t have a deep enough understanding of the game. They believe in their own mind that card counting knowledge is enough on its own……it isn’t. You must practice game selection very well and the game conditions must be good also.

If you are constantly facing situations where shoes are being cut very deep or you only have one table to choose from and that table is being dealt very slowly then you are basically wasting your time counting this game as it simply isn’t a money earner.

Then you have to take into consideration travelling time and there are not that many available live casinos in many parts of the world. So your choice may be limited and then you have to factor in having to disguise winnings and your career may not be a long and prosperous one.

You definitely need extra strings to your bow so to speak and this means either shuffle tracking or using a technique called ace location. When we operated I used a piece of software called “Shuffle Trak”. We would go into the casino and map the shuffle of a particular dealer. Then someone would go outside and call me and I would input that shuffle into my laptop and the software would decipher where the cards were going in the next shoe.

We then had code words for each shuffle type and we had built up over fifty different shuffle variations mainly from dealers who had their own individual quirks and mannerisms. Sometimes if the shuffle was already inside the database then it would take no more than about a minute to find out where the cards would be distributed. Then it got to a stage where we could tell where the cards were going simply from memory as we became acquainted with the more common shuffles.

This allowed us to bet big off the top of the shoe which no conventional card counter would ever do and this allowed us to have more cover than we would have done as conventional card counters. It also allowed us to be able to increase our bet sizes significantly without it appearing to come half way through what could have been a “counted shoe”.

Blackjack is a truly fascinating game, it is also extremely frustrating as the variance in blackjack is severe. I remember the great Ken Uston (author of “Million Dollar Blackjack”) almost quitting at once stage despite going on to take the casinos for millions of dollars.

Many people have asked me “is blackjack still beatable in 2009”? Well that sort of depends on where you play and if you can get some decent shoe games or not. The great Ken Uston even went as far as to disguise his own physical appearance in order to gain access into casinos that knew him well.

This just shows that if the act is good enough then you can basically make anything happen. It was rumoured that Uston once went from the table minimum to the maximum and back again in the same shoe. All this was achieved inside a casino that not only knew him but who also knew the intricacies of single deck blackjack inside and out. But what this proves is that the casinos are really no match for the player with guile, bravado and imagination.

This article was produced by Carl “The Dean” Sampson