Counting cards – a player speaks

Discovery Channel Magazine, February 2013

Patrick Butler (not his real name) knows all about the shadowy world of counting cards. As a young man, he paid his way around the world by using the system on the blackjack tables of Macau and Australia; then he ended up on the other side of the fence, combating card-counters as an executive at leading casinos in Nevada and Lousiana. He tells his story to Chris Wright.

I can teach you to count cards in about four minutes.

The idea behind counting cards is that you want to increase your bet when you believe the odds are in your favour, and decrease when the odds are in the house’s favour. Generally speaking, the advantage is to the house. If you were to play perfect basic strategy (and they publish this on little laminated cards that they even sell in the casino gift shops, they’re perfectly happy for you to do that) then in Vegas the house would have about a 0.41% advantage, which means probably half to one hands per hour. I remember the best game in Vegas was a four-deck shoe at the Monte Carlo, but still the odds would be in the house’s favour.

So how do you try to turn that advantage to you? Generally, the more 10s, faces and aces are still to come out of the shoe, the greater the advantage to the player.  Almost all hands in Vegas are dealt face up, so you can see every card that is going to be played in the game. As the 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s and 6s come out, you think +1 in your head. When it’s 7, 8 or 9, you don’t add anything. When a 10, face or ace comes out, it is minus 1. Negative is bad; positive is good. And then you increase your bet in proportion. So if you’re normally betting $10 a hand, and the count in your head is three, you’d bet $30. If it’s five, you’d bet $50. But you have to make sure your running count is normalised by the number of decks in the shoe, whether it’s four, six, eight or 100 decks.

What we’re doing here is reversing the edge to us, putting more money in when it’s to our advantage to do so. That 0.41% edge starts to degrade and turn positive to us.

When I count cards, I do not consider it gambling. I am a robot. All the decisions are made for me. I just need to keep track of the numbers. I’m not trying to get lucky: if I play long enough, I know what the outcome will be. People think it’s like James Bond, but it’s actually incredibly boring. You have to concentrate on a single number the entire day, and you have to play 10 or 12 hours to be profitable.

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