Avoiding detection in casino blackjack

You have no doubt read enough of my articles now to know how highly I rate avoiding detection with regards to casino blackjack and betting. It is the single biggest factor above and beyond knowing the technical side of card counting with regards to casino gambling.

What you have to remember is that you absolutely must not look like a conventional card counter at all costs. To better understand this, you need to know just how they supervise their casino games and how they spot conventional card counters. Once you know this then you are well on your way to avoiding detection.

One thing that you must watch out for is your bet spread. As a card counter, you must significantly increase your wager when counts go positive. But yet doing this will get you noticed if that spread between your minimum and maximum wager is too great. Say for example that you go from betting the £2 minimum to the table maximum £200 then this 100/1 bet spread is literally asking for trouble.

There are ways around this of course and one such technique is team play made famous by the late Ken Uston who wrote Million Dollar Blackjack. Team play allows a big playing team member to bet what would otherwise be a normal bet size for them without the actual card counter increasing their bet at all.

This too is also known to the casinos but one such tactic is to start your bet size far higher than the table minimum. Let us say that the casino blackjack game has a betting limit of £200 with a minimum of £2. The smaller denomination chips will be of a different colour so switching will stand out.

The casino edge is around 0.5% at the start of the shoe but starting at £10 and then getting to £200 is now a spread of only 20/1 and not the 100/1 that we had before. Now this means that you are losing money by betting more money in negative counts but if the count goes too negative or slips to a house edge of 1% you can switch tables and go and play another blackjack table if you have the option.

When you jump into another game that is mid-shoe then you can treat the count as zero as the positive situations will cancel out the negative ones. This is great cover for a card counter because no one expects a counter to switch from table to table and bet in mid shoe at a level that is above the minimum.

Also once again you can disguise your operation here tremendously but it does involve handing back part of your earn rate although in reality, any earn rate that involves moving from table minimums to table maximums is nothing short of

An illusion for the simple reason being that no blackjack player will be able to get away with this for long! Also you can start at £10 and use a doubling up progression system and that only involves four double ups and you are approaching the maximum. Doubling up in neutral counts prepares you to increase the bet even further when the count goes positive and this process is called ramping. You must think like a casino in order to prolong your blackjack life these days.

This article was written by Carl “The Dean” Sampson