What’s the use of card counting anyway?

If casinos are your thing, then the odds are pretty good that you will know somebody who claims that they are able to get the better of blackjack through ‘card counting’…

For those who aren’t aware, card counting is simply the name given to a means of keeping track of which cards have already been dealt during a game of blackjack; the reason for this is that players are then, theoretically, able to make highly informed guesses to how they should be playing future hands during the game.

Although this sounds simple in theory, the memory of the average person (and even the above average person) doesn’t lend itself well to this kind of task – after all, there is reason that people take telephone numbers down by pen – most people cannot remember a sequence of more than 7 digits at a time, so you can imagine how hard the task becomes with a deck of 52 cards…

In addition to the difficulty of card counting, it is also highly frowned upon (or, indeed banned) in all land-based casinos, and such casinos also use multiple decks for blackjack as a fail-safe measure.; while online casinos use algorithms that are modeled on multiple decks of cards, making it impossible to utilise card counting during play.

So, the next time your friend begins talking to you about the “wonders” of card counting, it is best to take such claims with more than a little pinch of salt… Failing that, you could just remind them that there is no chance of being able to card count in modern casinos…