Professional Black Jack Advanced Strategies

Anyone who is aware of my history already knows that I played black jack before I played online poker. There are many common similarities between the two games and especially when it comes to the area of bankroll management and game selection.

Many inexperienced blackjack card counters simply learn how to card count and then sit down and attempt to try and make money. Most of them fail for numerous reasons but the main ones are poor game selection coupled with getting caught by being too obvious.

But learning how to count cards and playing professional blackjack are worlds apart. Just because you have learnt how to drive a car doesn’t mean that you can be a racing driver. I knew several card counters personally who were skilled at counting but couldn’t make money either through poor game selection processes or poor evasion techniques.

The importance of selecting beatable games is as important in blackjack as it is in poker, if not more so. At least with online poker you don’t have to drive for miles to the only casino in the area only to then discover that the game is unbeatable. A combination of factors compile to either make a blackjack game profitable or not.

The first one is the number of hands per hour that are being dealt. A novice trainee dealer on a busy game may be only dealing as little as thirty hands an hour. This is too low and probably nowhere near the level of action that a serious blackjack player would be looking for.

However the flip side to this is that a fast dealer on a relatively small game could be reaching as many as one hundred hands per hour. This is why it is advantageous to play at casinos that have more than one active table. Obviously it isn’t possible to have one person successfully count two tables at the same time but this is why team play is so effective.

Having said that though, there are ways for one player to operate between two blackjack tables! An experienced blackjack player will know that once the count reaches a certain negative point that there will essentially be no profitable opportunities arising during that shoe. So if this shoe on Table A is too negative, this player can then switch to the shoe that is about to start on Table B without having to waste time counting a massively negative shoe on Table A.

This is a common tactic by individual card counters to increase the number of hands per hour that they see and thus the number of profitable situations and with this their hourly rate will increase. Another factor of game selection is what is known as “level of penetration”. What this essentially means is how deep the cutting card is placed into the pack by the dealer on commencement of the shoe.

Some dealers cut very deep which then begins to almost offset most if not all of the potential advantages that a counter could see during that shoe. Casinos as a rule do not like to see dealers do this as it obviously increases shuffling time and decreases game time and with it profitability for the casino!

Casinos tend to only implement this tactic against known or suspected card counters. At any other time it is merely costing the casino money but many dealers do this as shorter shoes mean that they can essentially take a short break from dealing the game by shuffling. This also allows them to maybe chat to the inspector or the players themselves. This is something that a professional blackjack player needs to guard against if possible.

This article was produced by Carl “The Dean” Sampson