How fast do you need to be as a counter

There are perhaps several million people who have tried their hand at card counting by now. The Internet has spread card counting knowledge like wildfire along with the ability to Play blackjack online of course. But there is a world of difference between card counting quiet games and card counting busy games. If you are playing heads up against a dealer then the number of cards per round is minimal. This is offset of course by the fact that you have no moment of pause because there is only you on the table.

But on a full table, there will be seven hands plus the dealers hand and all subsequent cards that the players take. A fast dealer will be dealing the cards very quickly and under real casino conditions, this get take some getting used to. This was never a problem for me as I had served numerous years working inside casinos as a croupier. I had been practicing my card counting skill in actual casino conditions.

Also it isn’t that easy for novice card counters to remember which cards are worth minus one, zero and plus one (if you are using the high/low) in the heat of battle and converting cards to a numerical value at high speed and keeping a track of the running total isn’t as easy as it sounds when you have dealers staring you in the face asking you for a decision on your hand.

That can throw an awful lot of people and losing the count is very easy to do. In fact I have lost the count numerous times; this is usually through lack of concentration but can also be through a lack of practice as well. In fact I have sometimes struggled to maintain the count myself after several weeks away from the game.

You should be able to scan and count an entire deck of cards with no more than a couple of seconds viewing time. It takes practice to reach this speed but there are various techniques for speeding this process up as well. One such technique is to use cancelling out moves. For instance if we use the high/low again as an example, two high cards on the same box and two low cards on the next box equals zero because they cancel each other out.

So in this instance it is possible to scan four cards and know their total count without having to do it individually. This is another advantage to the high/low system as it allows this to be done at high speed. I could scan an entire table with the merest glance when I was a counter and this allowed me to do other things like interact with gaming staff, punters and anyone else who just happened to drop by.

Using cancellation systems will dramatically speed up the entire process but it is also a necessary technique to learn in order to increase your level of cover. Using cancellation systems offer numerous advantages. Firstly they create you one thing that is very precious as a counter and that is time. The added time that you save can be used to hit the casino with other strategies and to also interact so that you do not resemble a card counter.
So to answer the question of how fast you need to be to be a card counter…….fast!

Carl “The Dean” Sampson