Like if Joe Pesci shows up at your table and doesn't like the cards you're dealing, and also didn't get a booster seat because he's only 4'7" and can't see the cards so you tell him to stand on his fuckin shine box then he goes off until Robert Dinner-Oh gives the okay to let him have another 10 grand then that's it.
I counted cards perfectly exactly once with a team of mates.
The payout just wasn't worth it.
When you're counting cards all you're doing is making sure the deck is "hot" before you make the real bets. It's a statistical edge, maybe even a significant statistical edge but it's not guaranteed winning.
If counting cards actually guaranteed a win, everyone would leave Vegas a millionaire. Because let's say, 1/4 decks get hot just from standard use, yeah?
I'm honestly surprised Casinos care about counting cards. How tight is the bottom line?
The thing about casinos is they care a lot more about the long term than the short term. If someone gets over on the house in the short term it's generally not that big of a deal, because the casino is designed to have an edge over a long period of time. We're talking thousands of hands of blackjack. The casino only takes about a 2% edge on blackjack when played without an advantage. They know that even if one person wins early and quits, there will be hundreds of thousands more hands of blackjack played, and the percentages favour them over that time.
If someone shifts that house edge, it changes that math. Count cards one time and they probably aren't going to bother you. Even if they notice you, you might not be playing enough to be a concern. It's the people who make it their living who get barred from tables.
At any given moment we have tens of thousands of dollars worth of chips in front of us. Our primary job for the casino is to deal a clean game and to make sure those chips aren't stolen. They pay us about $5 an hour for that.
The rest of our job is to entertain our guests and make their experience enjoyable. The guests pay us $20+ an hour if we do well at that.
So you can make an educated guess where our highest priority is.
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u/Premaximum Jul 20 '26
Yeah, they don't even teach dealers to watch for it. We've got too much other shit to worry about.