Card counting has been a trade among gamblers for… well, practically as long as cards have been around. Numerous techniques have been invented, books have been written, documentaries produced, and all signs point to the fact that there’s not only a right way to play blackjack – there’s many right ways. As long as you memorize what cards have been played and what have not and then watch for the shuffling of the deck, you can realistically predict your chances and odds and then determine how much to bet on your own hand, and on the hands of the people playing beside you. Sure, you always run the risk of being thrown out, but if you do it right you can get rich, like those kids from “21”. But what about card-counting in online casinos? If you count cards online there’s no one to throw you out or tell you anything, and you can easily become a millionaire… right?
Sadly, the people running online casinos have already thought of this, and they’ve put measures in place to ensure that nobody will be exploiting their system. Card counting in online casino is absolutely and completely impossible in most places, regardless of what anyone has told you. As I mentioned earlier, in order to card counts properly you need to watch when the deck is shuffled, as a shuffle pretty much “resets” the deck and is an indication that you need to start all over again. In real life these shuffles only happen once in a while, as they take time and the dealers just want to keep the game running smoothly. But in online casinos each shuffle takes less than a second, so they can happen as often as after every hand. As a matter of fact, in many (even most) online casinos, that’s exactly what happens.
But what about live casinos, you may be asking. After all, they operate on exactly the same principle as real, physical casinos, which means that they should allow you to count the cards, right? Well, not exactly, no. While it’s true that their shuffles are a lot less frequent than in the online (AI) version of the game, it’s important to note that the live casino version of blackjack is slow… Like, really slow. I won’t bore you with the details, but usually, when counting cards, you’re supposed to do so over numerous hands in order to have a good estimation of what’s left in the deck. In the live casinos, though, by the time you start having a good idea (which might take up to an hour) the deck will have already been shuffled. Not to mention, you also can’t bet on the hands of your fellow players. You can only bet on your own hand, which significantly reduces your odds. So overall, trying to bother with card counting in most online casinos is an endeavor doomed to failure. My advice would be to stick to physical casinos for the time being. Just make sure that you’re not caught!
