Blackjack Card Counting

Card counting is a blackjack strategy which is used by player to win effectively in the game. There are several blackjack card counting strategies and some of them are complex. Blackjack card counting tracks the ratio of the low cards to high cards. The strategy is able to determine the ratio of the remaining cards in the deck whether they are high cards or low cards.

How to Read the Count

Any count that has got a positive sign means that there are more low cards than high cards remaining in the deck and a negative sign would mean that there are more high cards than low cards in the deck. A deck which is rich in high cards gives more advantage to the player due to the fact that the dealer is most likely to bust and also giving an advantage to the player obtaining a blackjack.

On a lower count, the dealer is less likely to bust. Usually when a count is zero this would mean that the deck is neither favorable nor unfavorable.

Card counting is based on several systems and I will look at some of these systems briefly.

Basic Card Counting – This card counting systems assigns the negative, positive or zero value of each card. Cards dealt on the table automatically adjust the count of the system and the count is increased by low cards and decreased by high cards. Cards of value 7-9 make the count to remain constant and these are assigned with zero.

High-Low System – This systems is considered the level-one count or single-level count due to the fact that the count will never increase or decrease by more than a single point. The only major problem with the use of this system is that it can make a player to play slow due to the keeping in track of cards being dealt. But alternatively a blackjack card counter is able to make more money if the card counting strategy is used correctly for accuracy.

Running Count vs. True Count

Running count is the card counting which is updated each time a card is dealt on the blackjack table. This type of count reflects the cards of value 10 including aces and low cards (2,3,4,5,6)
True count is the calculation of the running count and half the number of decks remaining to be dealt. True count is the running count divided by the number of half the deck of card remaining.