History of Card Counting

For years, operators of clubs and casinos offer visitors blackjack tables, and players did what they had to do: lose their money. Most losses were due to players with no experience of the game found their casino account in this slight advantage over the players, even sophisticated, which often does not take the trouble to understand the strategies of black jack. They saw instead a game of chance and ignored any optimization or strategy. For years, casinos could therefore afford to ignore them as the intricacies of the game they were proposing. This, simply because only few players were able to run the game to their advantage.

In the 50s, everything changed for the casinos. A short article by Roger Baldwin spent analyzing the best ways to play each hand a mathematical perspective, appeared in the United States. This basic strategy blackjack player tells the most profitable action mathematically as his cards and the dealer. But at that time, the advantage is always in favor of the casino, namely 1%.

During the 60s, a mathematics professor Edward Thorp, realized that the game of blackjack could actually be an advantage for the player, if he had an idea of the cards in the deck yet. Edward Thorp was the author of the first method of counting cards at blackjack in his book ” Beat the Dealer . “

A panic began to blow from the casino owners: the mastery of the game was now in the hands of players. So that counting becomes impossible, the rules of blackjack were hastily changed in all the casinos in Las Vegas. The number of decks used was changed as how to cut and shuffle the cards, thus preventing the easy gains specialists counting. The problem was that many blackjack players that do not count the cards especially, did not like any of these rule changes and their habits. They deserted the casinos lost a very important source of profit.

Finally, to attract disgruntled players, casinos relax the rules of the game and the players returned to the tables. The news spread, new players “counters” were then rushed by the thousands in casinos. But for most novice and inexperienced players lost their money, and casinos have drawn their pin in the end of the game Blackjack dethroned and became the craps table game most popular in casinos since the late 70 .

The reasons for the popularity of blackjack

The great popularity of blackjack is based on a premise that, although real, remains for the majority of casino players, a kind of fantasy. Since these discoveries about the possibility of beating the casino blackjack, using a counting system, the message to people is: if you are clever you can beat the casinos at blackjack. The reality is different and requires much more than being brilliant.

Let me briefly describe the steps that make a player a professional.

Perfect knowledge of the basic strategy rules for the party it faces.
Mastery of a counting system recognized
The ability to visually estimate the number of games remaining to be distributed and to convert the RC (current account) in TC (true count).
Knowledge of the indices that change the game basic strategy depending on the account for the system chosen
An implementation strategy developed for the selected part, taking into account several factors, including the rules and playing conditions this strategy is mathematical and does not depend on chance.
A bank of play based on a calculated risk of failure and an acceptable rate of return given all this according to the variance in the target area.
Perfect self-control of these emotions and its concentration in game situation

The few items listed above are the result of hundreds of hours of practice counting, learning the game clues, reading and understanding of dozens of books on the subject. Once these concepts well understood, the trader will increase as much time developing its implementation strategy based on its bank stake and the risk he is willing to accept. All pass through simulations of millions if not billions of simulated hands to obtain a correct prediction of the chosen strategy.

In a word, a tiny handful of people are capable of such devotion and such passion in this game becomes a job.

How do I see young people in casinos, to the table with just enough knowledge to make an attempt, but not enough to be winners in the long term. Because it is long term in question. A professional player can spend a year in casinos and traveling around the world without having a positive twelve months later. I have seen players not proficient enough counting, others are under-capitalized, unruly, etc..

But the message remains … Come and visit us if you are brilliant, you win. Everything that surrounds card counting, the counters as legendary Uston and more recently those of the famous MIT team, make it even more the popularity of the game of Blackjack and casinos should be grateful to these characters. Card counters are the biggest free advertising (or almost) that casinos could afford. The truth is that meters are a professional food very very very rare.

And for the few that exist …

The meters do not take money from casinos, they bring money to the casino through those who try to resemble them.