How to Count Cards (and Bring Down the House)

Hey I'm calling from blackjack, apprenticeship and I'm here with my good friend David also known as loud and. often and we're gonna teach you how to. count cards at blackjack and bring down the house hey I'm Colin and this is, David and for roughly fifteen years we've been professional card counters we've played on our own we've played as parts of teams between the two of us we've won over 1.5 million dollars and our teams have won close to four million, dollars and we now help teach others how. to count cards at blackjack apprenticeship if you want to find out, more you can subscribe to this channel. or we put out weekly trainings and updates and stories and all that stuff, but let's show you how to count cards, first thing you need to know about card, counting is it doesn't involve having a, great memory do you have a terrific. memory no are you Rain Man No are you a rocket. scientist I am not so one of the big, misconceptions is that you have, incredible photographic memory you don't need any of those things it's actually when we show it to you it's gonna be a, lot simpler than you expect though it, does take quite a bit of time to become perfect at first step is perfect basic. strategy do you know how to play basic, strategy yes inside and out yes how long would you, say it took you to get basic strategy. down few weeks a couple hours a day do. you know a winning card counter that doesn't know basic strategy no it's, really important that you don't just think hey I can learn card counting and, go beat the casinos you have to first. know basic strategy but once you have. that down the next step is going to be learning what's called the running count. first step to card counting is gonna be assigning a value to every card so this. card hanging system I'm gonna explain is. called high-low it's what we have always used and what basically every major car. cane team has used to beat casinos and. what we're gonna do here is I have a, fourth of a deck a two through ace of. spades so four of these one of these in. every suit would be one deck of cards. and what we're going to do is separate these into different values so we're, gonna have two through six which are gonna be our low cards and those are going to be given a value of +1 so every time you see a 2 3 4 5 or 6 you're going. to. add one to your running account over here we have 10 through ace so every. time you see a 10 Jack queen king or ace. we're gonna subtract 1 these are our high cards and then 7 8 9 these are neutral cards they're going to be assigned the value of 0 or you can. basically ignore them. with your running count so I've got our, quarter of a deck of spades here and I'm, going to flip these over and Dave is. just going to count through them as we. go negative 1 0. still 0 1 0 still 0, still 0 1 0 negative 1 negative 2. negative 1 so at this point David's. saying we have a negative 1 running count there's one card left, and so because high-low always ends at a 0 we know that this is going to be what. kind of a card a low card a low card which is a 2 through 6 and all right so. it's a 4 so we know he was keeping his count accurately this is called the. running count and we just do this for. every card as it comes out of the shoe, from the very beginning of the shoe and till the dealer shuffles and that's the. first step so this is keeping the running count we're gonna be doing what David just did for every card as its

played and the nice thing about high-low. is because it always starts and ends at 0 because it's a balanced count because. it's a pretty good stable versatile, count you can use this exact same system. whether you're playing one deck two. decks six decks eight decks we've played at all and we always use high-low so, you're going to be counting every card. whether it's the other players cards. your own cards the dealer's cards you're. gonna be counting everything until that. cut card comes out so let's show you a, few examples of what this is going to look like keeping the rank count as it's dealt here's our first example round and I actually don't recommend counting, until the second card is being dealt to each player so then right here we would, say 1 2 3 2. one two and so we have a two because. this is a neutral this is a zero and one, thing that's really nice a shortcut is. if you have a high and a low card like. this hand or this hand these actually just cancel each other out so the other way you would count it is one two cancel cancel still are running two and then at this point you would count each card as it comes out with splits and all that. stuff so at this point we have a running. two and now you're going to count as every card comes out of the shoe so we have plus 2 and then 1 2 3 2 1 0 1 2 and. a running 2 now we're going to keep that. running count into the second round so. we have a running 2 and again wait for the second card to come out so we have 2. 1 0, those are both zeros negative 1 negative. 2 and negative 1 this player is gonna. stay this far is gonna stay he's got a. blackjack so we have negative 1 negative, 2 and negative 3 and we actually we, don't say negative we say d4 down like, d3 it's just a little bit faster to say, a little bit easier to do and we can keep that running count that negative 3. into the 3rd round again waiting for the, second card cancel so we're still at d3. negative 3 negative 2 negative 1, negative 2 negative 1 he's gonna stay. he's gonna double so now we're at 0, negative one and we're at negative one, so this is what we're going to continue, to do round after round as the count. fluctuates going more positive or more, negative as it goes more positive that's, going to give us the information we're. going to need to know when we have the advantage and how to play accordingly as. it goes more negative the advantage goes, further to the casino and we're going to, use that information to our advantage as. well what's the point of what we've been. doing so far with the running count, let's say we're seeing the cards go into. the discard tray and the running count is changing what does that even mean for. us more low cards are coming out it means there's more high cards in the shoe yet to come which helps the player, that's right so this is how blackjack is fundamentally different than every other, game in a casino every other game is. based on independent events like a throw of the dice or a spin of the roulette, wheel those are independent events but if a bunch of small cards have come out, of the shoe those aren't going to be in. play again until the dealer shuffles. what we know is that what's in here, correlates to what remains in the shoe so like David said if the count is going high because lots of small cards have. come out that means lots of what kind of cards high cards yeah tens and aces are going to be coming out, of the shoe which is good for the player, it's not enough yet but that tells you. where we're going conversely if lots of. high cards have come out lots of tens. and aces was that mean for the player,

bad news bad news that's right the, casinos advantage is going higher and higher which is not good for us, so at this point we're keeping our. running count but that's not gonna be. enough for us because that only tells us. in the entire shoe how the composition, of the shoe is changing but there's a big difference if let's say we have a. running ten and if you look at this this, card tray there's about deck there that means there's five decks left so if. there's a rank 10 with five decks left that's going to be very different than, if we have a running ten with only one deck left to be dealt so what we have to, do at this point is convert to our count, per deck or what we call the true count, and you might be getting overwhelmed sand what else do I have to do but it's. really. fourth-grade division and what we're. going to do is take that running count that David's been keeping this entire, shoe and divide it by how many decks. remain to be dealt so this is a six deck discard tray here we have one deck in. there that means there are five decks. that remain to be dealt let's give you a. few examples of converting to the true Count so David let's say we've got a. running 15 right now what would that, mean for us in terms of the true count. well I've got five decks left 15 divided, by 5 is 3 so our true count in this situation if we add a running count of. 15 would be a true 3 and that will, dictate how we BET and even playing decisions which I'll get to in a minute. and as soon as you make that calculation, it's going to determine your best you're, playing decisions and then you just go. right back to that running count of 15, that's right here's another example. there's about 3 decks in the discard. tray that means there are 3 decks left 3. decks left so let's say we have are, running negative 7 negative 7 divided by, 3 is negative 2 so in this situation we would have a true count of negative 2. and David would be saying I'm gonna go. make a phone call that's right he's. gonna step away from the table because. this is a bad situation for a card, counter let's do one more example so in, this situation we've got about four. decks that have been dealt four decks in. the discard tray let's say we have a running nine so nine divided by two. decks left is four even though it's technically four and a half we would just round it down to a true four and that is gonna be a pretty good count for. us and so that's going to determine our bets here the fourth step as a card counter is to use this information to determine both our bets and our playing deviations which are going to be times, where we actually don't follow a basic. strategy based on the running count or, true count so perfect basic strategy perfect running count perfect true count. conversion gives us enough information. to actually gain the edge over the, casino it's not easy but it can be done. so this gives you an overview of how to. count cards but to be honest there is a lot more you need to learn that's what we're here for if you want to subscribe below you'll. get our weekly updates you can check out, the channel, we've got tons of videos on card. counting and beating blackjack also at, blackjack of friendship calm we have a, free card Kang mini-course where you can. learn more and I get into some more, examples of how to count cards to how to make it easier how to be faster at it as, well as how to think like a card counter and all the common mistakes to avoid as. the new card counter check that out at blackjack apprenticeship calm