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The Latest From Our Blog....
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Member's Only Podcast - Max Rubin - May. 16, 2013
A few months ago, a few of us BJA pros were able to return to the annual Blackjack Ball, an invite-only event hosted by Max Rubin. It’s a collection of about a hundred of the most accomplished card counters and advantage players in the world. The room consists of people who ran many of the [...] Read More »
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Blackjack Hero - Max Rubin -
Biography Max Rubin is a professional gambler and is well known for his book Comp City: A Guide to Free Gambling Vacations. Rubin has traveled the nation with diverse speaking engagements and seminars, and now is a consultant for many casinos teaching staff how to spot card counters. Read More »
Blackjack News
No feed items found.↓ How Card Counting Works ↓
If your goal is to become a proficient card counter, network with other card counters, or discover the best blackjack games to play, you’ve come to the right place. But before you get ahead of yourself, let’s talk about how card counting works and why we are here.
In it’s simplest form, “counting the cards” isn’t that difficult. If you can add and subtract by 1, you can count cards. But beating blackjack consistently is about much more than that. It’s about thinking like an advantage player, perfectly executing every element of the game of blackjack (basic strategy, card counting, deviations, and betting), investing your money at the tables, and handing the casino environment. Let me explain each of these:
- Thinking like an Advantage Player - The first thing you should know about card counters is that we think differently. We like finding angles to make, save, or conserve resources wherever we can. We want to be pennywise AND pound wise. This is the idea of Expected Value. We analyze every opportunity to see if it can yield a positive return. Here are some of our best blogposts about Thinking like a Card Counter.
- Investing your Money - We don’t want to just teach people how to count cards; we want to teach people how to have the edge with their money. Our biggest fear is that people use card counting to become a gambler, not an investor. If you are looking for a get-rich-quick opportunity, you came to the wrong place. Card counting is for the disciplined investor; the person who makes calculated risks based on math, not luck; the person who’s not trying to defy the odds, but use the odds to their advantage. Is that your goal? If not, that’s okay, but you should run from the casino (and our website) as quickly as possible. But if you want to learn how to be a disciplined investor who uses their money and their brain to make more money, then we want to invite you into the Blackjack Apprenticeship community.
- Handling the Casino Environment - Casinos don’t like card counters. That’s okay. We don’t particularly like casinos. But you need to know what your rights are, how to deal with heat, and how to be smart and fearless in the casino to make it as a card counter. We’ve done it all, making tons of (costly) mistakes along the way. We owe a ton to the card counters who came before us, and our goal is to share what we’ve learned with others.
- Perfecting Every Part of your Blackjack Game- Even if you can count through a deck of cards in 16 seconds, you may not be a winning blackjack player. Card counting has a small advantage. Getting your blackjack game to 98% isn’t good enough. To make money at this, you have to train to perfection. We created these Blackjack Drills to get you started on your training.
- Basic Strategy - Basic strategy is the foundation of card counting. Basic strategy determines the mathematically optimal decision to make with each and every hand. When implemented perfectly, it cuts the casino’s advantage down to a mere .5% (that’s half of one percent). This doesn’t typically give the player the advantage, but it makes the casino advantage so small that card counting is effective. Download our free basic strategy chart.
- Keeping the Count - Counting cards is keeping a running tally of high cards to low cards, then translating that to information you can use. When people want to know “how to count cards”, they typically mean “how do you keep the count”, not considering everything else we’ve already mentioned that is necessary to be a successful card counter. Counting the cards has little to do with memorization, and everything to do with assigning a value to each card that comes out of the shoe. This will give you insight into what type of cards (high value or low value) cards are left in the shoe. We go into much more detail in doing this effectively in the card counting video course. You can also see a comparison of card counting systems here.
- Deviations (Betting and Playing) – If you can play perfect basic strategy and keep the count from round to round, all you have left is deviating your play based on the information you have. The count will tell you when you have the advantage and when the casino has the advantage. So like a sharp investor, you want to put more money out when you expect a positive return and have as little at stake when you expect a negative return. You can also change your playing decisions based on the changing composition of the decks. These are called playing deviations, and they give you an additional edge on top of your betting deviations. Deviation charts are available for free along with the rest of our blackjack charts.
