Over the past couple of months I've been pondering my future in card counting. I think it is mainly due to a series of losing streaks counteracting my initial winning streak taking me slightly below (but still close to) EV.

When I first starting counting I had some phenomenal success due to some nice winning streaks. I was way above EV. A lot of this was due to multi-hand play at high counts and some slight over-betting. (I was using a renewable bankroll - so it's not technically over betting). This was all near the end of 2008.

Since then, there have been some major corrections and I hit some pretty hard losing streaks, which unfortunately coincided with the point when I decided to increase my bet levels. This was especially painful and it hit my bankroll pretty hard, forcing me to drop my betting unit back to its original level. So whilst my EV in terms of units is still on track, my bankroll is a little worse for wear.

Since then, my bankroll has only gone up a little. At a much slower rate than when I started, but not too far off EV. So I'm still making money - but is it worth the time I'm spending?

June was actually a decent month for me, and I increased my bankroll by about $1,500. But looking at my overall bankroll per hour again, I'm making just under $5 per hour (since I started) after all expenses. My bankroll is still way too small to make serious cash from counting cards. My worry is that I'll be caught and banned from all my local joints before I have enough cash to do some serious damage.

This has all lead me to question what I'm doing when it comes to counting cards. I know I am capable of counting cards and I have seen the positive results. But for $5 an hour - is it worth it? For $10 an hour, its a definite yes for me, but $20 would be even better. In other words, I need to double my betting unit, then double it again. At my current rate of play, this will take approximately 18 months. By that time, it is very likely I will have been banned from some if not all my local joints.

So, why not find an alternate source of income to make $10 an hour and build my bankroll that way. Then, when my bankroll is big enough to comfortably support and EV of $20 an hour, I can return to counting cards then. That's my current feeling anyway. Still not decided which way I'm going to go.

Card counting is only a part-time activity for me.

Casinos don't like it when you win. Sure they pretend they do, it's part of the act of creating an enjoyable, amiable atmosphere whilst emptying your pockets at the same time. Running a casino is a business, and they expect you, the punter, to pay.

Most of the location I play at I'm up overall. Glad to say I've attracted no heat from pit bosses as yet. However, I have been asked more than once by the dealers if I was a card counter. A card counters biggest fear is being caught and barred. In some places you will get barred from a whole chain of casinos or worse, be put on a counter list that is distributed to casinos. For me though, since I play at a series of independent casinos - this is not so much a worry.

So here I am again, hitting a small winning streak, and the amazed dealer can only think of one thing - he must be card counter. Yet the pit boss is no where around to be seen. So there is no actual heat. It's just the dealer trying to figure out how I'm winning.

Let's put it in context. Dealers are only at the tables for short stints at a time. They are not allowed to see my whole game. So it often happens that you hit a number of winning streaks with one particular dealer, whilst your losing streaks are spread amongst the other dealers. So the dealer is only seeing you win.

Another factor is that most blackjack players don't even know basic strategy. They are pure gamblers who make stupid, instinct plays not backed up by statistics. These players always lose, and they lose quickly (much more than the expected 0.5-1%). So dealers here have little experience with players who follow basic strategy, and thus last longer on the tables. If more players followed basic strategy, counters would stick out a lot less.

So when a dealer asks me if I count cards - it's not cause I'm getting heat, it's just a perplexed dealer who isn't used to seeing players win. Even if I wasn't counting, but just following basic strategy and hitting some winning streaks, they'd still think I was counting cards.

So I just lean back and deliver off one of my pre-formulated answers "Sure I'm counting. 1, 2, 3 upto 21. Anything over and I bust right?". This shuts them up pretty quickly.

Now, if a pit boss asks me if I'm counting - that's a different scenario.

When I first decided to become a card counter, this is where I started:

Learn how the M.I.T. Blackjack Team made millions in Vegas bringing down the house! Basic Strategy Card Counting Optimal Betting Camouflage and Team Play! Also included: Bonus Audio Track, Basic Strategy Chart, and Optimal Betting Guide!

Andy Bloch is one of the original members of the MIT team and is a featured player in Bringing Down the House. He has reportedly earned between $5 - $10 million from his card counting exploits! Of course, these days he is too well known and spends most of hit time applying his analytical mind to his successful poker career.

If you've been following along with my blog, you will note that I point out some of the shortcomings of this instructional DVD as I discover them during my career. It glazes over important subjects such as the spread, penetration, risk of ruin, expected returns, bankroll fluctuations and the long run. Important knowledge for a seasoned card counters. So while this is an excellent place to start, it is by no means the complete education needed to be a successful card counter.

For a beginner though, I highly recommend this!
It reminds you a lot of Hollywood's '21', but with instructions as to how exactly they do it. They say seeing is believing, but seeing is also understanding and learning. You can visually follow along as Andy explains what Basic Strategy is and how to use the chart. He explains how to count cards, calculate the 'True Count' and turn that to your advantage. You watch as he and his team take on a casino and it climaxes in an exciting win for the team as they disperse before the Pit Boss can catch them. Obviously this is a little over the top, but it makes it interesting.

So if you want to know what all this card counting malarky is all about without all the maths to it, then this is a great place to start. Watch with friends! Maybe you'll be able to start your own team.

For my blog readers, you will notice that I don't adopt the Team Strategy used here for various reasons, both personal and logistical. You may have success with other team strategies that I discuss later on in this blog.

For those of you who remember, I started out card counting with my buddy Zola. But so far our training was done separately, apart from watching some instructional DVD"s together.

I learned Basic Strategy and the Hi-Lo counting system on my own in a couple of days, but we waited a week for our first team meeting. I had 'tested' the system and was pretty confident that it all worked and made sense. I was ready to start perfecting my skills and get into the casinos.

We met in a public place to start our training; not busy so that we'd get disturbed.
Not surprisngly, however, Zola had made little progress on his side, having spent only the hour before the meeting learning basic strategy. I'd been kind of expecting this, so wasn't too dissappointed, after all we both have full time jobs too.

He went on about wanting to be cautious, and wanting to test the system before we started. He wasn't yet convinced that counting cards worked. I reassured him that we wouldn't do anything until we were convinced that it worked. I told him to go buy some cards and test it for himself at home until he was convinced. I was, there definitely was something to this card counting stuff.

So instead we spent the meeting running through some drills, testing basic strategy, practicing counting cards.

Now, training yourself in the comfort of your home is one thing, but doing it with someone else there is a whole different matter. Basic strategy was all of a sudden not so obvious. I started to question if I was making the right moves, counting cards with someone else counting along as well, but getting different counts, was challenging, and on top of all that, having people walking by and wondering what the hell you were doing made it a little more difficult.

While we may not have achieved much out of team meeting numero uno, we did learn that a lot more serious studying and training was required if we wanted to take this any further.

Until now, I had taken it on blind faith that counting cards works, but there was no way I was going to put into practice without testing it first.

Now, according to card counting strategy, when playing blackjack using basic strategy, the house has an approximate 0.5% edge over the player. This is the average edge over the long term. However, it has been proven that when the deck is heavy in high cards (10's), then the advantage actually swings in favor of the player. The richer the proportion of 10's, the bigger the advantage to the player.

Why is this, you may be asking. Simply because, the higher the proportions of 10's, the more likely you are that your double downs will work, you will get a blackjack and the dealer will bust from hands like a 6. Conversely, the lower the proportion of 10's, and the more small numbers, then the advantage swings even more into the houses favour.

Convinced? Well it makes sense, but why should I believe it! So I set up a rather simple test to determine whether or not what they were saying was the truth.

So, I took my brand new 4 decks of cards and removed 20 low numbers (2,3,4,5 and 6 - removing four of each). This left me with a deck that had a True Count of 5. (Yes I know that you don't know what true count means yet - I'll cover that in a later post). When the true count is +5, that means that the player has a 2% advantage over the house.

So, using my stacked deck, I started to play one on one with the dealer. The results, surprisingly positive! I was making more than I was winning. I sat there for a couple of hours playing well over 200 hands and recording my win loss ratio and I was winning money! (well theoretically anyway). With my minitest under my belt - I found new confidence in the fact that counting cards worked!

Of course, all you experienced card counters and statisticians out there know that a sample of 200 hands proves nothing. To get a true sample you need to play thousands, even millions of hands to get a true proof. You also need to work out the percentage advantage you have. Unfortunately, at this point of my career I'm sad to say that I acted like an idiot blinded by all the easy money I was going to make. I possessed no understanding of the meaning of the term 'long run', all I could see was short term gains.

So Step 1 was over. I know my basic strategy. It was time for Step 2 - learning how to count cards. I have briefly explained the counting system I first learnt in the previous post.

Now, it had only taken me a couple of hours to learn Basic Strategy. Memorising the chart was pretty simple and playing a few dummy hands to test my knowledege was pretty easy too. But counting cards looked a bit more difficult. I got the old DVD out again (Beating BlackJack with Andy Bloch), and ran through the section on how to count cards.

This part of the DVD is great. The instructional bit on how to count cards is priceless. You watch, follow along, and learn how to count cards. +1, -1, +1. +1, +1, -1. The count is 2! Wow, this is easier than I thought (funny how the count on the instructional DVD is always positive). The first couple of times I ran through the DVD, I found it hard to keep up with him. Assigning numbers to other numbers and counting them is a tricky skill to learn, but after a little practice you do start to get the hang of it.

Of course as any counter knows, being able to add and subtract is not enough. You need to be able to do it in pairs, do it at speed and do it accurately! Being off by 1 is not going to hurt you overall, but if you're off the count by anymore than that - you're in trouble!

It was at this point I realised that I didn't have any playing cards to practice with. Doh! So I went out and got some at $3 a pack and started on some easy drills.

Drill 1 - Counting down a deck.
In the movie 21, there's a scene where he counts down a deck on a plane. I finally know what he's doing now!
The Hi-Lo system is a balanced system. This means that there is an even number of positive and negative cards in the deck, so that by the end of the deck you should always end up with zero. And that's what I did. I counted the deck down a few times until I confidently hit zero three times in a row. Man, I'm ready to go play now - I can count, I know basic strategy - I'm ready to win some money!

Drill 2 - Counting in pairs
On the Andy Bloch DVD - he points out that in casinos you get dealt cards in twos, so you should be counting in twos. It makes it less obvious that you're counting and you should be more efficient too.
So I sat there for an hour dealing myself three hands at a time and counting down 4 decks. I always came out at 0, or if I was off, I was only off by 1.

I'm pretty good at this counting stuff, eh? At least I thought I was.
As I was soon to find out, counting in the comfort and privacy of your home at a nice slow speed is not the same as doing it in a noisy, public environment.

Next post, I test to check if counting cards works
http://confessionsofacardcounter.blogspot.com/2008/12/testing-system.html

Step 2 to becoming a card counter is learning how to count cards.
There is a common misconception that you need to be some sort of genius to be able to count cards. I mean, keeping track of all the cards already being played to figure out what cards are left in the deck? Who can do that?

Well I'm here to tell you that counting cards is easy. Anyone can do it with a little practice.
Back in the movie '21', you may have remembered they used a secret code to tell the new player what the count was. Instead of 16, they would say 'sweet', or instead of 14, they would say 'chair'. The code itself is not important, it is the numbers that are important.

So what have these numbers got to do with counting? Everything. Let's face it you have to be super human to be able to keep track of every single card shoe after shoe. So counters don't keep track of every card, but assign values to each card and keep a running count.

There are in fact many different types of counting methods, Zen, Hi-Lo, Red-Seven, KO, Mentor, Kisses and many more. There's also balanced counts and unbalanced counts. But let's keep it simple for now and stuck to the popular Hi-Lo system. This is the one I started on and the one I'll be using for quite some time. In fact, most counters don't ever move beyond Hi-Lo. It's easy to use and does the job.

What is Hi-Lo
The Hi-Lo system is a balanced count system. It is simple to learn and decently efficient to use. In the Hi-Lo system, you assign the value of 1, 0 or -1 to each card as so:

Face Value Count Value
2,3,4,5,6 1
7,8,9 0
10,J,Q,K,A -1

This means that every time you see a 2, you add 1 to the running count. if you see a 10, you subtract 1. If you see a 7,8 or 9, you ignore the card as if it wasn't there.

And that's the Hi-Lo counting system. You start from a count of 0 at the beginning of the shoe and keep a running count as each card is dealt. Of course there's more to it than that, but this is sufficient to know for now.

Read on in the next post:
http://confessionsofacardcounter.blogspot.com/2008/12/learning-to-count-cards.html

So here I am. It's roughly June 2008 and my friend (ZoLa) and I have watched the movie '21' and decided to give card counting at blackjack a shot. We have some fairly unrealistic expectations and no clue what to do. Counting cards eh?

So where to start? Well, we turned to our good old friend Google and plugged in MIT Blackjack Team and Card Counting, reading dozens of articles about how the MIT Blackjack team had taken Vegas casinos for millions using card counting in teams. Seemed great, but still no clue as to how to count. There were hundreds of sites with tons of information on Basic Strategy and little on how to actually count in teams.

Eventually I got my hands on a copy of "Beating Blackjack with Andy Bloch". Andy Bloch was one of the members of the notorious MIT BlackJack team, and along with Expert Insight had produced an instructional DVD on how to count cards in a team. The DVD had shades of the movie '21', with mock situations of Andy Bloch evading casinos Pit Bosses and rushing loot out of the casino. (Of course, Andy Bloch's DVD was made well before the movie '21' so who copied whom eh?).

ZoLa and I watched the DVD several times. It made the whole thing look exciting and easy. Our favourite bit was where the team wins $80,000 in a single hand right at the end! It was so exciting that we couldn't wait to get started.

The DVD laid out exactly what we needed to do to become card counters.
1. Learn Basic Strategy
2. Learn to Count Cards using the simple Hi-Lo system
3, Assign your team roles and hit the casinos!

We're going to make a lot of money!

Next time: Basic Strategy.
Warning: To anyone reading this blog and thinking about becoming a card counter, please do not follow the instructions laid out in Beating Blackjack with Andy Bloch. It may be entertaining and motivational, but it conveiently glazes over IMPORTANT card counting knowledge such as betting spreads and streaks. If you are interested in becoming a counter there are some much better free resources out there which will give you a more complete picture of counting cards which I will mention in a later blog post.

Continue on to the next post:
http://confessionsofacardcounter.blogspot.com/2008/12/intoduction-to-basic-strategy.html