Card counting, over the years has been given the glamor treatment in movies and is seen by some blackjack players as the ultimate in skill and the perfect way to beat the house. In 1962 Edward O Thorp published a book called ‘Beat the Dealer’ which showed exactly how card counting worked and how it was mathematically proven to be possible that when done correctly, anyone could in fact take on the casino and win. The book was a huge success, even making the New York Times bestseller list, unheard of at the time for a book that is basically mathematical theory. Although card counting has been around for a lot longer than the book, it was ‘Beat the Dealer’ that brought it into the limelight, and no doubt led to more than a few blackjack players trying their luck in the Vegas casinos.
Card counting is indeed possible and has been used by many players throughout the years, in fact card counters have been a thorn in the casinos side before tactics to counteract card counting were developed. The basics of card counting involve the effect of removal, and this stipulates that the best way to determine which cards are more likely to be dealt next is to ‘remove’ cards from the deck such as 5’s and 6’s and leave the good cards such as Aces and tens. One of the most popular techniques is the Ace-Five technique which is very simple to do and involves a count that keeps track of Aces and fives that are remaining in the deck and has been practiced by many years by card counting aficionados. Land based casinos caught up with the card counters and started using multiple decks which all but cancelled out even the most complex counting systems, and then came the online casino.
Sadly, every card counting technique known to man is pretty much useless in an online casino simply due to the way the cards are dealt. The cards in an online casino are shuffled after every single hand and this makes it impossible to keep a count going. The random number generator that all online casinos use means that each hand is totally random and played with a fresh deck. This is not to say that you cannot beat an online casino...you can and many online blackjack players do, you simply need to play optimal strategy and cut that house edge down to as much as you can. Online casinos are random and fair, the RNG makes it so, and playing blackjack online is exactly the same as playing in a land based casino, should the cards have been shuffled just as you took your seat.
