I am going to vegas at the end of next month for my friend's bachelor's party. I don't like play games I know I am going to lose or where I feel i don't have some hand in controlling my fate. so I will probably be at the sports book and blackjack tables a lot. have any of you guys learned how to count cards with proficiency? I have learned basic strategy but I am certainly nowhere close to being fast at card counting. even if I was fast at it I would still be a vegas n00b and I would probably get busted for it. just curious if anyone here can do it.
Can you even do that on Blackjack? The decks are like 6 inches thick, how could you predict the cards at all?
yes you can most def do it in black jack, we tried it at Turning Stone Casino in upstate NY and had pretty good results with it. the main thing it you have to count fast, and divide the count with the number of decks remaining, since they are using 6-8 decks, you are gona have to estimate the decks very quickly. another thing, you can observe games, so feel free to watch the table for a bit, when the count is good, jump in. most places wont bust you for card counting, especially if its a low minimum game, if you place a say $1000 minimum game and your bets fluctuate rapidly and frequently, thats the sign you are counting. so just experiment with $10 minimum tables, and see how that goes.
Read Bringing Down the House. A great book about the MIT blackjack team. The only way to beat the game is to bet very large when the count is in your favor. This is an obvious sign to the casinos that you are counting and can be spotted easily. The MIT team would use signals to get team members to come over to their table and bet large when the count was in their favor.
This was proven to be a fabrication, the Bringing down the house crew never happened. As for cards, you can go downtown and play some single decks.... DD
i will probably just be playing the cheapest games. i'm not looking to make a ton. i just want to have fun, get my drinks, and not lose too much money. this one guy i used to work with said that he used to count cards when he was going to college. he said the casinos didn't make too much of a deal out of it if you were playing at the cheap tables and not making a ton of money. still i am going to be practicing my blackjack basic strategy and card counting. it's a fun challenge. counting down a deck fast is freaking hard, but then again i have only been learning it for a week. outside of that the basic idea is just to scale your bets up when you know there are a ton of 10's and aces. from there you just have to play your hands correctly.
i was just getting ready to ask for that link too. i've spent the last 15 minutes looking for the story and i can't find it.
you're not gonna learn how to count cards efficiently within a month without actual real life practice so i wouldn't sweat it.
You know what, I heard it from the pit boss at the Mandalay Bay, but now that I actually LOOK for a link, I can't find one. Hmmmmmm. DD
You can count cards, just don't make it obvious that you are doing it. If the dealers start talking to you about anything where they mention a lot of numbers then that means they are on to you. They will talk about dates, number of children, scores to games, anything to try and get your figures mixed up. If they start talking like that, then you should stop counting and mention some numbers just like they are. That will show them that you are not counting, and might throw their suspicion off for a bit.
yeah i'm just trying to learn it for the challenge of learning it. i don't really want to be having the massive swings that can happen with card counting too.
Don't bother trying to learn how to count cards if you are going to play the lowest limits of blackjack in vegas. You will be playing out of a shoe that has at least 6 decks in it probably. Also, it will get shuffled quite frequently. You have no hope. Don't even think about it. Also, don't play the single deck blackjack that pays 6:5 on blackjack, it is a rip off, don't do it.
The more decks the better. You can get the count hugely in your favor with 6 decks, but the only problem is if they shuffle early.
I guess that's my point, they never play through the whole deck, a lot of these low limit games have auto shufflers now.
From what I have read card counting does put the odds in your favor (a very rare thing in Vegas) but it is not like a 60/40 thing. If you could break the bank by card counting, casinos would have long been out of business. My sniff test says Urban Myth. I suspect that the professional gamblers make their living off of the Texas Holdem poker tables versus the weekend warrior thrill seekers (and decidely not aginst the house in the other games.)
From the times I played, they always reshuffled with 1.5 to 2 decks not played in the tray. I have also seen that the dealer at their own discretion will reshuffle, before getting near the end of the tray. This leads me to believe that some dealers also are keeping count and reshuffle when the count gets too high.
