One of the most popular and highly intellectual games of skill is blackjack. This ancient card game originated in France and gained worldwide fame very soon afterwards. Players love to spend their time practicing and mastering their skills to become professionals, play blackjack online successfully and profit in this complicated game.
During the course of blackjack game development, lots of different strategies and tactics were created to beat the blackjack dealer and to get as close as possible to 21 points total. One of the most complicated and at the same time effective blackjack system is called card counting.
Card counting basics
Card counting is the term that appeared because of the main idea of this system. Players have to keep track of all dealt cards, when they play blackjack, and assign these cards a value and this will help to estimate if the remaining cards in the decks are in favor of a dealer or a player.
The remaining cards may be beneficial for the one of them. For example, the high value cards are in favor of a player whereas the low value cards are beneficial for a dealer. Card counting can be used in addition to basic blackjack strategy as it simply more sophisticated way of gambling. This system is considered to be illegal and card counters are not welcomed to play black jack games in land casinos.
How to play blackjack with the help of counting cards
“Hi/Lo” or “plus-minus” system
Each dealt card in blackjack is assigned the value of 0, +1 or -1. After doing math, the results can be analyzed and more profitable decision can be taken be a highly skilled player.
So, let us find out the principle of counting cards. The cards from 2 to 6 are counted as +1, the cards from 7 to 9 are counted as 0 and the rest face cards from 10 to Ace are counted as -1.
This system is very popular and effective. A lot of skills are required to be able to count cards without being noticed.
Apart from Hi-Low system, there are different systems that are even more complicated and this way are more accurate as players assign the value from 2 to -2, which increases the blackjack odds. The most famous are such systems, as Wizard Ace/Five, KO, HI-Opt I, Hi-Opt II, Zen Count, Omega II.
Measures against card counting
As it was mentioned above, the card counting is very helpful for players wishing to increase the chances for winning and this way decrease the casino advantage. Always check online blackjack betting rules. So land casinos must take such measures to protect themselves:
Add decks to the shoe;
Switch dealers;
Increase shuffle frequency;
Change some rules, table limits and stakes;
Ban players from increasing their bets.