How to Keep the Count With All the Distractions of a Casino

It’s one thing to count through a deck of cards in the comfort of your own home. It’s a whole other thing to keep the running count in a casino while playing basic strategy, betting, dealing with other players and the dealers and all the other sights and sounds in a casino. If you’ve ever struggled with this in this article I’m gonna give you five tips to help you keep the running count in the casino while playing blackjack.

My first tip is something you don’t want to do. Which is don’t use your chips to keep track of the count. First off it looks really weird to surveillance. If they see someone stacking their chips after every round for the running count you just don’t want them seeing you doing that between every round it looks weird. Secondly, I don’t know a single professional card counter that has something like that, a shortcut, to keep the running count. You have to get to a point where you know in your head the running count after every single round.

My second tip and this is really an important one is that you need to be repeating the running count in your head over and over so if my running count is seven I’m saying in my head Seven. Seven. then the running count changes to eight. Eight. Eight. Seven. Six. Six. You’re constantly repeating it and then that number is changing every few seconds as the running count changes.

My third tip is to make the running count the priority. Before you add up your hand update the running count. Before you celebrate $1000 blackjack, update the running count. Before you freak out because you busted and you just lost a whole bunch of money you update the running count. Okay, my fourth tip is a little bit of a shortcut but I still think it’s valuable I still use it and that’s that you can actually use your fingers under the table to help you remember the running count. And my fifth tip and this is actually the best thing you can do to get really good at keeping the counting that casino. Get really good at each individual step as a card counter.

So one of the most important things you can do is to step back and get really good at basic strategy mindlessly good at basic strategy. And get really good at counting mindlessly good at counting where you always can update the count you can count the table very quickly then it’s really not that difficult to put those two together.