How To Count Cards! (A guide that actually works)

[00:01] use to win at Blackjack a proficient card counter or team can make hundreds or even thousands of dollars per hour playing Blackjack you might have heard a card counting from movies like 21 and assume that it was dying out due to

[00:14] facial recognition technology or something like that although casinos do try and stop car counters I can tell you from personal experience that measures like facial recognition technology or kicking out card counters aren't nearly

[00:26] as effective as the casinos would like you to believe even in 2021 card counting is still very much alive there are lots of videos on the internet explaining how to count cards but most of them are greatly oversimplified and

[00:39] you're only left sort of understanding how card counting Works in this video I'm going to give you a proper Deep dive explaining exactly how car counting works not holding anything back but before I do I want to quickly let you

[00:52] know about Blackjack apprenticeship.com Blackjack apprenticeship.com is the place to learn how to count cards in this video I'm to explain exactly what you need to know but BGA accelerates your learning process they've got

[01:05] when you make a mistake they've got video courses and they've got the best darn Blackjack Forum in the world I wouldn't be counting cards without it I genuinely without being over dramatic there are few things in my entire life

[01:17] that I would recommend so highly as blackjackapprenticeship.com if you do Link in the description as it helps the channel understanding Blackjack you Blackjack but you might not be aware of the one element of the game that makes

[01:32] apart from other gambling games that you can exploit to win money before I can explain that let's quickly go over how Blackjack is played blackjack is a game these days Blackjack is normally played with a few decks of cards shuffled

[01:46] you're near the end of the shoe where the cards will be reshuffled and you start again the player is dealt two cards and the dealer is dealt two cards first to win you simply need to have a higher hand total than the dealer

[01:58] without it being higher than 21. picture cards are worth 10 and aces are worth either 1 or 11 whichever gives you slash the dealer the better hand you act first another card from the dealer or to stand if you're happy with the total that you

[02:11] have you can hit as many times as you like but be careful because if you go over 21 you bust and you immediately lose the hand after your turn it's the Dealer's turn to play they aren't making any decisions themselves they must keep

[02:23] hitting until they have a hand total of 17 or higher you win the hand if your dealer has gone bust they win the hand if their hand total is higher than yours also a couple of special plays you can make you can double allowing you to

[02:37] card or if you have two cards the same value you can split adding another bet the same as your previous and turning your one hand into two hands there's card and an ace then you win not the usual one-to-one payout but three to two

[02:52] giving you 1.5 x your bet as profit nice in some casinos they will pay you six to five for blackjack which is terrible it's an awful thing that they do just to those games like all casino games the house has an edge AKA an unfair

[03:07] advantage in blackjack it's that you have to go first when you go first you lose the hand it doesn't matter that the dealer might have gone bust themselves or had a bad hand if you go bust you've lost your money that's it the dealer

[03:21] advantage that over the course of your Blackjack playing life you're probably gonna lose money so how can you win what's the floor in this game what makes Blackjack beatable let's imagine a simple fictional gambling game here's a

[03:34] deck of cards 26 cards are red 26 cards are black the deck is shuffled you bet 100 and if the top card is black you win 100 if it's red you lose it was black dollars let's Shuffle the deck again same game what are the odds that the top

[03:50] card is black given that it was black the last time it's still 50 50. even if we played this game 100 times in a row and each time the top card happened to be black the odds of it being black in the next game are still exactly 50 50.

[04:04] that's because the deck doesn't have a memory it doesn't care what the deck was before because it's been shuffled Fate has been reset it's really hard to grasp this because it feels like surely if it's been black 100 times in a row it's

[04:18] this game a hundred million times it's very likely that by the end about half black and about half the time the top card will have been red but in the short term each individual round is still independent from the previous so it's

[04:32] still 50 50. as a side note roulette wheels often have this little screen roulette wheel that's to encourage this flaw in human psychology you get to see row to encourage you to make a wager

[04:45] makes no difference back to our little car game same game but we're going to you've placed your bet and the top card is revealed it's not shuffled back into take it out and get rid of it this changes everything because now if

[05:02] black cards left in the deck which means there's a slightly higher chance that the top card next time will be black if we keep playing and every round the card on where there's actually a lot of black cards left in the deck and barely any

[05:16] of the next card being black and if you are able to keep a mental tally of how times when it'd be super likely that a black card is an X instead of betting a thousand dollars and sure you won't be

[05:30] right most of the time and that is all it takes to make a lot of money playing this game unfortunately no sane Casino would offer this game but that's okay because this is the exact principle we can use to win at Blackjack Blackjack

[05:44] shuffled together and the card counter will keep a mental tally of what cards indication of what cards are left similar to the red black game if there are a lot of high value cards like tens and Aces left in the deck then the

[05:58] player is actually more likely to win than the dealer a car counter will bet bet a small amount when they're less likely to win they won't win every time but they'll win enough times to make a big profit Blackjack has a memory before

[06:12] you can count you must know how to play keeping track of what cards have been played is only useful if you can actually play Blackjack well it doesn't matter how good you are at counting cards if you hit when you have a 20 or

[06:24] to lose a lot of money the first thing every aspiring car counter must do is Master basic strategy this is the most important step everything else will crumble if you do not get this step down people have had computers play millions

[06:40] and millions of blackjack hands and through trial and error they figured out the best way to play every single hand combination there's no room for debate in Blackjack it's a purely mathematical game for example if you have a hard 15

[06:52] and the dealer has a six as their odd card you should stand every single time it doesn't matter if you have a really good feeling that a six is coming next you should stand basic strategy is a system that you have to memorize and

[07:04] know perfectly you must know basic strategy so well that you don't have to counting cards you're going to be doing a lot of thinking basic strategy can be the plays aren't intuitive I frequently play blackjack with players on the same

[07:19] table as me that will actually tell me off for making the wrong move I've even had dealers tell me that's not basic strategy when I know it absolutely is don't let others tell you what to do so step one memorize basic strategy it's

[07:32] not fancy it's not particularly fun but it's the foundation and you need to know it perfectly step two the running count there are different types of card counting system in this video we're focusing on the most popular high low in

[07:44] assigned a point score two through six are worth plus one seven eight nine are worth zero so they're ignored and tens and aces are worth minus one point all a card is played they're keeping a running total of the point score for example

[07:59] let's go through a few cards we start on zero a six is worth plus one so now we're on one a five is worth plus one so now we're on two a picture is worth minus one so now we're back to one a ten is worth minus one so now we're back on

[08:13] zero a seven is worth zero so we ignore it and eight is worth minus one so now we're on minus one a card counter counts every card that they see come out of the the dealers card or the player next to you every single card is counted to make

[08:28] repeat it in your head again and again I've actually had times when I've left the casino and I'm still repeating the count from the last game because this it's hard to stop if you're not repeating the count again and again in

[08:41] easy it is to forget the count completely for Speed and ease a counter will often not start counting the cards until the second card for each hand is being dealt that means if there's a plus one card and a minus one card on top of

[08:54] completely instead of going plus one minus one in your head a quick tip when saying negative one negative one negative one it's much quicker if you just shorten that down to N1 for negative one or D1 for down one which is

[09:09] what I personally use or M1 for minus one shorting it down just makes it easier a proficient counter has no trouble keeping the running count and playing basic strategy at the same time without making any mistakes step three

[09:22] true Count conversion imagine you're going fishing let's say I've told you that there are two pawns you can fish in and one Pond has ten fish in it and the other Pond has 20 fish in it which Pond would you rather fish in presumably the

[09:34] one with 20 fish in it right well what if I told you that the pawn that has 10 the pond with 20 fish in it is absolutely huge you'd probably change your answer even though there are more fish in the big pond your odds of

[09:47] actually catching one after smaller than in the other pond fish to Pond ratio is important it's a similar thing in card counting you've been keeping track of are but now you need to gauge the so-called true Count which is your fish

[10:00] to Pond ratio only when you know that can you judge if it's a good time to bet big or to fish the pond in blackjack is how many decks are left in the shoe as I played with multiple decks of cards shuffled together so the first thing

[10:14] table is gauge how many decks are in play you can do this pretty easily by top of each other with practice you can just look at it and know but it's also not very suspicious to just ask the dealer how many decks are this and

[10:28] you keep the running count but you also keep track of how many decks of cards are left to be played the easiest way to do this is just to look at the discard tray and judge how many cards are there if you're playing a six deck game and

[10:40] see that there's about a deck there then you know that there are five decks people would intuitively do which is try and peek how many cards are in the shoe you can do to learn deck estimation but it basically just comes down to looking

[10:54] at a pile of cards thinking that's about two decks and then checking if you're estimate to the nearest half deck or even quarter deck which gives them more precise information now we get to the next major step in car counting which is

[11:07] true Count conversion or in fish ponds terms figuring out how likely you are to cards in a six-stack game and you've got a running count of 12. you look over to are two decks in the train well it's a six-step game so you know that there are

[11:22] four decks remaining to figure out the true Count you simply divide the running count by the amount of decks remaining so 12 divided by 4 is 3 so it's a true three now I know a lot of you are like odd division anything but division don't

[11:36] worry it's easy division we actually round things so if it's a running 15 and still a true three because it's not quite a true four we cut off the decimal figure and honestly on big counts you can always take a second and secretly

[11:49] table trust me the division isn't difficult and I'm someone that hates division step 4 make tons of money now you've got that true Count that magic number what is it what does it mean how do you use it well it's pretty simple in

[12:02] most blackjack games playing basic strategy at a true one you have the advantage hooray and that Advantage increases to a point by about 0.5 at every true Count and if you think that that Advantage is small it is it is tiny

[12:16] but that is all you need to make a lot of money from casinos you simply have to bet big when you have the advantage and that's more when you don't and you have to repeat that as often as possible to overcome any potential negative outcomes

[12:28] the pond has a lot of fish you're not going to catch a fish every time and sometimes the fish might catch you you won't win every hand you won't win every session but you'll win more than you'll lose and make money step 5 bonus make

[12:42] more money doing very little extra work remember how I told you about basic strategy the optimum place to make during every hand combination well there make to that strategy depending on the count for example normally you should

[12:54] hit a 16 versus a 10. but if the running count is in the positive it's actually smarter to stand on that hand learning what we call deviations which there are a ton of but there's 18 that give you the biggest benefit can actually

[13:06] increase your earnings playing Blackjack by 20 to 40 percent not bad for just a little bit more memorization and let's be honest at this point you're pretty there is also nothing more fun than

[13:18] splitting tens or doubling a soft 20 moves that you would normally never make people think you're absolutely insane step 6 the most important step of all not going broke by now you know that when counting cards you only have a tiny

[13:30] five thousand dollars worth of money dedicated to playing Blackjack and then dollars a hand you're gonna go broke blackjack players have to carefully calculate their bet spread which is what you bet at each true count your risk of

[13:44] all and your rounds per hour as well as a bunch of other stuff many car counters not do this step properly and lose all their money it is to me the most tedious and boring and confusing part of the whole Blackjack process is fearing this

[13:58] stuff out but luckily at Blackjack apprenticeship.com they've got software for you and it makes it so easy I cannot imagine how tedious it would be for me but the software just does it all for you super easy so that's it a complete

[14:12] very thorough and accurate guide on how to count cards quick shout out to my script of this video to make sure that I didn't say anything stupid if this video it a shot I'd highly recommend Blackjack apprenticeship.com I've played a lot of

[14:25] blackjack and I'm amazed at how many car counters I come across that make pretty major errors as weird as this sounds a lot of the time you can tell who's been in the description it costs you nothing extra and it really helps support the

[14:39] channel in this video I've deliberately not talked too much about my personal I'm currently in the process of posting regular documentary vloggy Style videos documenting my process of learning to count cards they've got everything my

[14:53] first tried counting cards in a casino my run-ins with the police when counting cards and a ton more please subscribe and turn on notifications if you want to check out that Journey [Music]