Can You Win At Blackjack Without Counting Cards

Learning to count cards in blackjack can help you win big. Blackjack is a casino game phenomenon worldwide because, as well as being fun, you have a decent chance at pocketing whatever you win. Card counting is a system that experienced blackjack players use to get a profitable advantage over the casino. There are many individual “counts” or systems. Many of them are named after colorful professional gamblers from times past. The 2008 movie “21” bought card counting to the attention of the general public. It followed the true story of members of the MIT blackjack team as they. As specified in this eBook, the blackjack hands can be viewed as combinations or arrangements (the order of the elements counts; like in horse racing trifectas). 1) Let's take first the combinations. There are 52 cards in one deck. There are 4 Aces and 16 face-cards and 10s. The blackjack (or natural) can occur only in the first 2 cards.

• Counting Cards Blackjack Shoe
• Can You Win At Blackjack Without Counting Cards

One of the popular myths surrounding blackjack in casinos is that the average player can get an edge over the casino if he just plays his hands correctly. In other words, a lot of people think that you can win at blackjack just by mastering basic strategy.

But basic strategy isn’t enough to win at blackjack in most instances.

You need an additional strategy – an advantage technique – to get an actual edge over the casino in blackjack.

This might mean counting cards, but there are other ways, too. I’ve written extensively about counting cards in blackjack in the past.

But today I want to take a different approach.

Here’s how to win at blackjack WITHOUT counting cards.

The First Step to Winning at Blackjack Is Mastering Basic Strategy

In blackjack, you have a finite number of potential situations to deal with. The dealer can only have one of the following face-up cards: ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10.

And you can only have one of a handful of potential totals, starting with a total of 3 and going up to a total of 21.

And many of those situations offer obvious strategic decisions. You’d always stand with a total of 21, for example. It’s an automatic winner. You’ll also always stand with a total of 20. You have far too many ways to bust in this situation to ever make it worth your while to hit in that situation.

The same holds true for a lot of your smaller totals, too. Any hand totaling 11 or lower is impossible to bust, so you’ll always at least hit in that situation.

But for many hands, you must compare what you’re holding with the dealer’s face up card to determine the playing decision with the highest expected value. In a lot of these situations, your expected value is negative. Imagine having a hard total of 16 against a dealer’s face up 10, for example. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in that situation.

But, in those situations, some plays have a lower negative expectation than others. Your job is to make the play that loses the least amount of money in the long run.

Luckily, basic strategy is easy to memorize and implement. When you use basic strategy for every blackjack decision, you reduce the house edge to its theoretically lowest possible number. In most casinos and under most rules, this means that the basic strategy player faces a house edge of 1% or less.

You still can’t win in the long run with a house edge of 1% or even 0.5%.

But your probability of being a winner in the short run improve dramatically.

An average blackjack player with no knowledge of basic strategy is probably giving up between 2% and 4% of their house edge.

Counting Cards Blackjack Shoe

Advantage Play Techniques and Blackjack

An advantage play technique is a way of playing a casino game that gives you an edge over the casino. The most common advantage play technique is counting cards, but that’s not your only option. You can win at blackjack without counting cards, even though it’s probably the easiest way to get an edge.

How does card counting in blackjack work?

Counting cards is just a means of roughly tracking the ratio of high cards (aces and 10s) to low cards in the deck. When the deck has a higher proportion of high cards, the player is more likely to get a blackjack. That’s a 2-card hand that totals 21, and players love this hand because it pays off at 3 to 2 odds.

Bet $100 on a hand of blackjack, get dealt a natural, and you’ll get a payout of $150.

Card counters raise the size of their bets when their probability of getting a blackjack goes up based on the count.

And counting cards isn’t hard, either.

You just subtract 1 from the count every time you see a 10 or an ace.
You add 1 to the count every time you see a card worth between 2 and 6 points.

If you’re playing in a game with multiple decks, you adjust that running count to account for the extra decks of cards in play. That’s as simple as estimating how many decks are still in the shoe and dividing the running count by that number.

For example, if the running count is +8, and you estimate that there are 4 decks left in the shoe, the true count is only +2.

Why does this matter?

Because you raise your bets proportionally related to the count. You’ll bet more when the count is +8 than you would if the count was +4.

Not everyone wants to learn how to count cards, though.

You Can Win at Blackjack Without Counting Cards by Getting Lucky

The house edge in blackjack is a long-term phenomenon. In other words, your short-term results might look like anything. You’re mathematically expected to lose between 0.5% and 1% of your action at
the table in the long run.

But, in the short run, anything can happen.

So, one way to win at blackjack without counting cards is to keep your session short and walk away when you’ve won a specific amount of money. This is called having a “win goal.”

Most gamblers who use win goals set a win goal based on a percentage of their bankroll. For example, you might sit down at a $10 blackjack table with a $200 bankroll for the session. Your win goal might be 50% of that $200 – or $100. In that case, if you ever get to a point where you have $300 or more in chips, you walk away from the table and book your win.

Since blackjack is a negative expectation game, you’ll have more losing sessions than winning sessions over time.

But, unless something weird happens, you WILL inevitably have some winning sessions.

Another Way to Win Is to Bet Really Big and Negotiate Better Rules
Don Johnson is a living example of a blackjack player who won really big at the game without counting cards. He won over $6 million on blackjack in a single evening. Here’s how he did it:

To start with, he had mastered basic strategy. Everyone who’s ever been interviewed about him said that he played perfect cards. If you want to duplicate Johnson’s success, start with mastering basic strategy.

The next thing he did was negotiate with the casino. High rollers like Johnson, who bet $10,000 or more per hand, don’t have to play by the same rules as the average casino-goer.

It’s common for high rollers to get loss rebates. This means that the casino offers a player a discount on his losses. For example, if the casino is offering a 10% discount on your losses, and you lose $100,000, you only really lose $90,000 because of the rebate.

Some casinos also give high rollers bonus money to gamble with up front just to get them started gambling. Online casinos do this all the time, but brick and mortar casinos save this kind of treatment for their higher rollers.

Don Johnson negotiated a 20% loss rebate on his action the night he won all that money in Atlantic City.

On top of that, he negotiated specific blackjack rules that reduced the house edge to a tiny percentage. They played with a hand-shuffled, 6-deck show, and the dealer was forced to stand (rather than hit) a total of soft 17.

In total, all the rules changes wound up making this blackjack game a game with a house edge of only 0.25% — making it almost an even money game.

But on top of that, because of his loss rebate/discount, he was only risking 80 cents for every dollar he stood to win.

He had to buy in for a million dollars, but he was guaranteed a 20% discount on his first $500,000 in losses. Also, he wasn’t required to lose the entire million. He could lose the $500,000, quit, and get his $100,000 rebate – leaving him with “only” a $400,000 loss.

On the other hand, if he started winning – which he did – he could just keep playing.

And that’s how he won over $6 million without counting cards.

Other Advantage Techniques in Blackjack

Counting cards isn’t the only strategy for getting an edge at the game of blackjack. Advantage players use other techniques, some of which are well-known.

Dealer tells is one of these techniques. This describes the tendency that a dealer has to give some kind of physical clue after looking at his or her down card. The savvy blackjack player can then adjust his decisions based on the information he gleaned from the dealer tell.

Shuffle tracking is another advantage technique. The idea is that even though decks of cards get shuffled and randomized, they don’t get completely randomized.

If you can keep up with clusters of cards that are heavy with 10s and aces, you can raise the size of your bets when the dealer gets close to using those cards.

Hole carding is similar to dealer tells. It’s when a dealer accidentally reveals his actual down card when he looks at it to check for blackjack. The advantage of knowing which 2 cards the dealer has is obvious from a strategic perspective.

Other advantage play techniques exist that advantage players don’t share in public, too.

Conclusion

Counting cards is definitely the easiest way to win at blackjack, but you can without this technique. It’s harder to do, though, and I recommend learning to count cards if you’re serious about becoming a blackjack winner.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Playing Online For Real Money

Mississippi Stud is not widely available at online casinos but it is available at these brands:

NOTE: If you’re running IE9 and the game keeps crashing, you need to update your Java installation (for it has nothing to do with us but with Microsoft, as they kindly note in their Support Page). Speaking of upgrades, you might want to upgrade your browser to Google Chrome.

Mississippi Stud is a well-liked and a simple poker-based table game by Scientific Games. If you’re into polishing your skills while having good fun, this Java-based online trainer might be just the right thing — it allows you to play free for up to $50,000.

The PGA is our in-house developed feature that advises you on your best plays. Working like a pop-up window in your browser, it lets you know when your move might be a risky one. You can turn it on/off by selecting the checkbox “Warn on strategy errors” atop of the game screen, and you can switch between two modes while you play.

For you to make the best of it, we highly recommend reading the Wizard’s Mississippi Stud introduction. Once you get a grip at rules, strategy, paytables, and analysis, the only other decision you have to make is whether you’ll play with or without our Personal Game Advisor.

Paytable is neatly set on the right side of the screen and is quite self-explanatory.

On the bottom of the screen is a control strip that lets you set up all parameters of the game and provides for all relevant information. There is a balance field, chips and wager info, control buttons, and win amount.

Start your game...

...by making the ante bet with chips in denominations ranging from $5, $25, $100, and $500. You’ll notice yellow borders encircling them when selected. You can increase ante in each value by a single click —for $200 bet, click twice on ante field with $100 chip selected. The maximum ante is $1,000.

Two buttons — Deal and Clear — are used to direct game moves once you’ve set your ante.

When the five cards are dealt, you’ll get two of them with face up and three with face down. Your control buttons will be replaced by four optional ones: Fold, Bet 1x, Bet 2x, and Bet 3x.

If you decide to bet, one community card will be turned over. Once you’ve examined it, you can proceed by selecting one of the offered bets. If you do so, the next community card will be turned over. In doing so, you actually have a possibility to go from 2nd Street bets all the way up to 5th Street or to fold whenever you deem proper.

When the hand ends

There will be two temporary control buttons displayed: Repeat and Clear. By pressing the former you reload previous bet settings, while by pressing the later you put yourself in the position to set a new bet.

Once the hand is dealt you can see information about the outcome right below your wagers. In case of a win, you get the info that correlates to items on the Pay Table.

This version of Mississippi Stud is quite funny and exciting to play. All relevant information is always visible, the game flow is smooth, it all develops rather quickly, and you always keep control by rather simple and intuitive command buttons.

The Personal Game Advisor works neatly and non-intrusive. While it may not always be right, it is in a number of cases which makes it a useful learning tool.

The game itself may show its volatile side on larger bets. It is quite enticing to win a large sum, particularly when betting on $500 and going all the way up to the 5th street, although, admittingly, it is much more fun to do so knowing that none of it would be applicable to real life scenario.

Can You Win At Blackjack Without Counting Cards

In any case, this online trainer is an exciting and valuable option for any type of player.

For entry-level guys, it is a nice opportunity to feel the table, options, best plays, overall vibe and mood of the game.

For advanced players, it is quite an interesting tool to improve on their game, learn new stuff (particularly when supported by Wizard’s analytical skills), and to simply train to be better without having to use real money.

Regardless of your skills level, always approach your games in a responsible and safe manner so you can have great fun while you’re at it. On our behalf, we wish you very best of luck in doing so.