eli5 how do casinos determine if someone is counting cards?
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I suggest reading “bringing down the house”, an entertaining book that explains some card counting strategies. They made a movie, but some of the detail gets cut out.
As was already said, it’s the betting that gives you away. You could count the decks for days and never observe a meaningful statistical advantage. When it happens, you gotta bet table limits, it’s too obvious when someone goes from $5 bets to $500
Counting cards involves either varying your bet from the minimum ($5-10) when you are observing (counting) and then betting high when the count is good. Almost no players do that. Little guys stay little. Big players consistently bet big.
So if you are regularly betting $5 for fifteen minutes, then go to $100 until the next deal, it’s quite obvious if you are paying attention.
And if the people in the pit aren’t watching, the people watching the cameras are.
It’s real simple: you count cards, and adjust your betting to take advantage of that info. They see you adjust your betting, and know that you’re counting cards. Casino employees can count too.
I count cards as a hobby. In my career, I’ve taken about $20k from casinos.
I’ve only been asked to leave the premises five times. Professionals have lost count of how many times they’ve been backed off. Four of my five times, it was the eye in the sky that caught me. The casino simply doesn’t have the resources to track every card on every table, so instead they watch player behavior. Most of the time, card counters are betting the bare minimum at the table, but when the advantage shifts to the player, they start betting larger.
Generally, what happens is the eye takes note that you were playing the table minimum. When you suddenly start playing with much higher stakes, the casino notices. They may review the footage to see where the count was when you changed your bet. If the count became positive enough for you to bet larger at the same time you pushed out a larger bet, they’ve caught you.
Sometimes this happens quickly, other times they’ll be oblivious for hours, days, weeks, or months. Once you’ve mastered the skill of counting itself, card counting becomes an art of deception. You have to be covert enough to actually get time at the tables before you’re made to leave.
The way you make your money with counting is by increasing your bets with positive counts (among other things but that’s the primary factor). If the casino sees you have a high bet spread, if you always bet the minimum at the start of a shoe, they can review the video and see if it correlates with the count. Then they have you.
There are some other tells such as playing deviations like splitting tens but these happen relatively infrequently.
As others have said though they don’t need proof to ban you.
If you’re betting against standard Hoyle strategy and winning consistently, you are very likely counting or maybe outright cheating.
They have table based systems now that detect this. Cameras in the table can see the cards as they get dealt and tracks each players betting patterns to figure out who is counting. They can detect it pretty quickly.
I would be curious to know if any casinos bother to check counting at tables with a single deck shoe. I have two brothers-in-law who swear up and down that they can successfully count cards (to their advantage) in a single deck shoe. To me, there’s too much of a turnover for it to make sense to even try.
They hire Laurence Fishburne to watch you like a hawk then he takes you out back to beat you up.
Short Answer: They also count cards themselves. They follow the count as well, and if a player is changing bet size massively when the count is in their favour, they can put 2 and 2 together and assume youre counting cards…
They guess based on known patterns that all counters use. I was politely told that my reservation had been moved to another hotel. One that conveniently did not have a casino. They did take care of the bill and my room was double the size. I cannot count cards. I Meraki just got lucky on like 7 hands in a row.
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