Easy Blackjack Counting

Many old-timer gamblers swear on the effectiveness of card counting. Because of such statements and claims newcomers to the blackjack have tried to do the same and many have affirmed the old gambler's message.

So far, card counting has been the most successful strategy in tilting the blackjack advantage to the players. Edmund Thorp certainly agrees. In his blackjack career it gave him thousands. Those who followed suit with his methods of card counting also claim they were able to gain larger amounts of winnings using card counting than when not using it.

A probability analyst warns that counting cards alone does not help players win. With card counting there is a 44 per cent chance of winning because players are able to manipulate the amount to bet in the rounds to come.

Card counting tells if there are more high cards or more low cards left. More tens, jacks and other high-valued cards mean advantage to players and also if the dealer is more likely to bust or not. The low-valued cards are the ones that disadvantageous to players.

A prerequisite to card counting is mastering the basic strategy. There hundreds of sites on the Internet that have easy to follow charts on hitting, standing, doubling and splitting. It's when one commits such strategy in mind that one can proceed to card counting.

For a simple card counting, cards two to six have a count of +1; seven to nine is zero while ten to ace counts as -1. Trying counting the whole deck with such count value to be overly familiar with it and can employ it during a game without difficulty.

After that one may proceed to a true counting system so as to accurately gauge the advantage and disadvantage. This will be hard and demands commitment.

'It is a hard strategy', an old gambler may say. No need to worry, there is something less tedious.

In this short cut of card counting a player should only take notice of the general cards presented. One may observe that after several hands of face cards a few ten-value cards appear once in a while. That would be a signal to the player that low cards are slowly dominating the deck.

If it is the other way around face cards have only appeared once or twice then more than not some high cards are to prevail in the next rounds of play.

Compared to normal card counting such easy counting is not effective. Such easy counting will be most helpful to experienced card counters for they have conditioned their minds to count values of cards. In such a way intermediate players can a normally feel they have an idea of what to expect after a few hands.