Card Counting Scan Drill — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] A while back I read a blackjack book by Nathaniel Tilton and in that book he had tons of drills to kind of help him perfect his card counting abilities and he and his partner actually were able to beat the casino for a ton of money. It's a great read. I encourage you guys to read it. I think it's called The Blackjack Life.

[00:17] That said, one of those drills that he and his partner would do is they would have someone go into a different room and the other person would lay out a bunch of cards, kind of like this picture, on the table. They'd have a few flipped over.

[00:30] And anyway, as fast as they could, with kind of the lights dim and, you know, there's pressure. I think they would play like Sesame Street counting videos in the background. They would have the other person try to figure out what the count was and kind of what the missing cards should be.

[00:46] So with that said, this is a similar drill. I call this a scan drill. And it's not necessarily as crazy as that because we're going to put the cards out where they should be, kind of on the betting circles here.

[00:58] And, for example, again, using high-low card counting, let's say this was my first hand. In fact, I'd probably play it out kind of to completion where a soft 17 versus a dealer's 8 should hit.

[01:10] Now a hard 17 would stand, the dealer would flip over their card, and they would have 18. All right. Now, the idea behind this drill is just to add up really quick, what is the count currently?

[01:22] And here, of course, would be D2 or minus 2D for down. Easier to say than negative. All right. And so I'm going to have several rounds of this where it's going to get progressively faster. In fact, this was a request sent in by DASA1969.

[01:38] And they said, can you do one where there's multiple spots kind of laid out? And I'm sure we can do that. We're going to start with kind of one spot by that was into kind of three sections of eight here So the first one we're going to do one spot the next one

[01:51] We're going to do three spots the next set of eight since the last one review five spots And you're gonna have to come with the counts again faster and faster I want to do it in sections like this so that you can kind of progress if you're not quite You know able to do all five maybe you can do one and three

[02:05] That's fine So you can get kind of faster and come back to this video So you might want to save it to your watch later playlist or something so you can see how you progress over time. So with that said let do a practice one here Alright here the first picture and I going to give you kind of a countdown timer at the bottom you just going to try to figure out what the count is using high low card counting right so times up on that one

[02:29] and it turns out the count there was plus four okay so again if you want you can call out a practice one we're going to do eight more of those with just one spot and see my own account number of paper have this ready to go from your

[02:41] positive to back to time and then we'll do three spots and then eventually five So the number of paper kind of 1 through 24 and then I will reveal those answers at the end Here are those first eight getting faster and faster as we go

[03:16] All right, here's the answer for those first eight.

[03:43] Hopefully you were able to get all of those correct. Again, kind of check yours versus what you wrote down on that piece of paper. And now let's try the next eight where we're going to play in three spots.

[04:15] Thank you Thank you Alright guys here the answers

[04:58] Numbers 9 through 16 if you're marking it down on your piece of paper. Hopefully you'll get all those correct. If not, you might want to go start from the beginning and try it again. However, this next set of eight is going to be five plus.

[05:10] And because of that, it's going to be a little bit more challenging. I'm going to start you out with a little bit more time. It will continue to get faster and faster as we go. However, before we do that next set of eight, I want to talk to you about how I learned how to count cards,

[05:22] and that's with Blackjack Apprenticeship. Blackjack Apprenticeship is a worldwide leader in card counting and advantage play. Not only does Blackjack Apprenticeship have good drills that you can practice with, but they also have pro betting software.

[05:34] If you're going to take this card counting thing seriously, you absolutely need ProBetting software to kind of evaluate what your bet spread is, your risk of ruin, and know your expected value before you even sit down at the tables.

[05:46] Additionally, they have Casino 411, which shows you kind of where there's a lot of casinos located, and you might want to take your Blackjack trips to places like that, because you can hit up a lot of casinos along the way. They also show you kind of what the table conditions are for each of those casinos and the specific rules at each of those tables.

[06:03] Additionally, they have a forum where you can network with other advanced players and ask your card counting specific questions and things that can help you improve your game. They also have a results tracker, video courses, and lots of other stuff I don't have time

[06:16] to cover now, but if you check out the link in the pinned comment of this video, there's some demo videos as to everything that they offer there at Blackjack Apprenticeship. It's a great tool. You absolutely get your money's worth. I highly, highly suggest it.

[06:28] That said, let's get into that last set of eight, where we're counting five spots at time

[07:02] Music

[07:30] All right guys here's the answer to that last set of eight on the scan drill. Again they're getting

[07:43] pretty fast as it's kind of five spots that's a lot to count up in a very short amount of time. So if you need to come back to this video maybe practice for a few days or something and come back see if you can complete the whole thing with 100% accuracy this is a great video to come back

[07:57] to over and over and over again. I want to end this video with a little bit of a challenge. I'm going to go back to the picture from the beginning of this video where Nathaniel Kilton and his partner would lay out those cards on a table. It'd be a little bit dark and dingy to kind of emulate what the casino is like.

[08:13] And I want to give you guys about 25 seconds, which sounds fast. If you have to pause the video, that's fine. I'll give you guys 25 seconds to figure out what these five cards should be. Again, using high-low card counting. Ready?

[08:25] Go. All right, that's 25 seconds.

[08:51] So what should these add up to be? Well, it turns out we have minus 3. All right, so if you had a count of plus 3, the opposite is true for minus 3, which would get us back to 0,

[09:06] and therefore that would balance out the count. All right, guys, that is a scan drill. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. If you did, please hit the thumbs-up button for me. That's the easiest way to help out this channel. Until next time, remember, this is A1 Blackjack.

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