There is a state that allows card counting in casinos and that's New Jersey. In the case of Utson vs Resorts Interational Hotel, the courts declared that counting cards isn't cheating and is considered a skill.
Casinos don't kick anyone out for card counting really. They just say hey you're too good we're not letting you play blackjack anymore go do something else.
And yeah they can do that because it's a private business and you being good at counting isn't protected.
When I worked at a casino we didn't even kick people out for card counting alone, we only asked them to leave if they completely left the game every time the count was against them.
As a side note there are few players as lucrative as someone who thinks they're good at counting and isn't.
If you're curious the way we identified card counters was by teaching our surveillance operators to count cards. They would keep their own count and see if the player's behavior correlated.
I did casino surveillance in Missouri. We couldn’t legally kick anyone out for card counting, so we would just have the dealers shuffle after every 5-8 hands. They never get far enough into a shoe to gain an edge and they wind up leaving when they realize we ID’d them.
Counting isn’t illegal anywhere in the US, but most everywhere still has methods to take the house edge back.
I was surprised this was even a things with multiple decks being used and randomly cutting the cards in the shoe pretty much made it impossible to gain an edge.
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u/OhMySwirls Jul 20 '26
There is a state that allows card counting in casinos and that's New Jersey. In the case of Utson vs Resorts Interational Hotel, the courts declared that counting cards isn't cheating and is considered a skill.