How do casino dealers know when somebody is counting cards?
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The dealer typically doesn’t.
There are other people watching every table, and noticing betting patterns and wins versus losses, and how much is won versus lost.
The obvious signs are wildly fluctuating bets and winning a lot. But with 6 deck blackjack and early reshuffles, card counting advantages are greatly diminished. Since it doesn’t allow the count to get too high or too low. Casinos don’t care if you count. Most people won’t do it right. But if you start winning too much, then they’ll ask you to try another game.
Typically, card counting doesn’t involving knowing every single card already played and every single card left in the deck. It is generally knowing when the deck is more advantageous to the player or more advantageous to the bank. For example, in casino blackjack, the player has an advantage when the remaining deck has more aces and tens, and the dealer has the advantage when there are more low cards; that is what card counters try to figure out. But in order to take advantage of that edge, the player needs to increase his bets when the deck is to his advantage and decrease it when it’s to the bank’s advantage. And those changes in bets are what dealers and pit bosses notice and what makes them suspect a player is counting cards.
Its not dealer looking for this. It is the Pit Bosses watching over their group of dealers and tables and then the other observers watching the Pit Bosses and their tables.
Pit Boss or above them will note someone winning a lot or giving off tells that they are doing some kind of memorization or tracking of cards. Its not against the law but as a Casino is no different than any private business, they can refuse service to anyone if they feel you are costing them money or are a problem.
A card counter will increase their bets when they think they have a good count in the deck and decrease when they think they have a bad one.
This can be pretty obvious compared to a standard blackjack player that would bet predictably and consistently based on the cards in play. If your betting patters are highly erratic they may suspect you’re up to something.
So then the counter would have to use a more sophisticated plan with some intentional losses to throw off the casino.
In many jurisdictions the casino can just kick you off the table for winning too much anyway. They don’t need to closely monitor every player for complex betting patterns to *prove* you’re counting cards, they’ll just bounce you after you’ve won enough.
Dealers often don’t. That’s not their job. Security watches overhead. They watch for people who don’t seem to have the right run of luck. Sure you can win a lot. But if you never lose, that’s suspicious. The odds are in favor of the house.
They are also on the lookout for teams. Like the MIT team that was counting cards used a member at the table betting low and only playing in the barest sense. Then when the odds were good for a player, they signaled their partner to come play big. Security is on the look out for people who aren’t doing normal things, like just barely playing. Or being around the same people, especially if they act like they don’t know each other.
Counting cards, as an individual, with no devices, is technically not illegal. But it is much harder to count the cards just in your head, without another person, and maintain a cash flow that lets you stick it out for the big hands.
Bet fluctuations can give it away.
Someone who plays minimum bet all the time but suddenly starts raising their bet drastically half way into a shoe is either crazy or a card counter.
Close attention may also reveal strategy differences. As a wild example, splitting a pair of 10s often becomes a profitable move only if the remaining shoe is very rich in high cards.
Habits such as not presenting a players club card despite playing high stakes games may also indicate someone doesn’t want their activity tracked.
It’s not really the dealers job to know whether someone is counting cards. It’s likely they can pick out obvious stuff and may have a way of alerting other casino staff, but the majority of detection of cheating or counting cards (not cheating but detected the same way) is going to be through tracking.
Casinos have cameras *everywhere* and monitor them for suspicious activity.
They also have pit bosses which are trained to spot indicators of “unfair play.”
On top of that, some casinos have software that tracks players, hands, bets, etc and will alert staff to any players that have betting patterns that raise an alarm.
Once a player is kicked out for counting cards, their face will be added to a list of banned players and shared with other casinos, at which point facial recognition software can be employed to notify employees at the casino when a banned player enters.
Dealers, pit bosses, and surveillance all know how to count cards as well. The dealer probably isn’t counting because they’ve got other things to do and, let’s face it, they’re most often minimum wage employees depending on tips – it’s not really in their job description to stop counters. They will, however, yell to notify the pit boss of weird moments, like an unusual double/split or a big bet change – that’s often a requirement of their job.
The pit boss or a surveillance person can definitely keep track once they’re suspicious, and take note of when the suspected counter is raising or lowering bets. If those coincide with the count going up and down, it’s pretty reasonable to assume they’re counting. And of course, they have databases and lists of known card counters, so somebody who has made a lot of money or done it a lot may very well be on their radar.
And of course, they don’t actually have to *prove* anything. Card counting isn’t illegal, they aren’t taking you to court. If they think you’re card counting and especially if you’re winning, they’re just going to (depending on jurisdiction) ask you to stop playing blackjack, or if they aren’t allowed to in their state/country, they’ll change the betting rules to eliminate any advantage anyways. None of that requires proof, they can do those things for basically any non-discriminatory reason.
If you’re counting and losing money, they’ll likely let you keep going – casinos have probably made more money on people who *think* they can count but mess up, more than they’ve ever lost to actual counters.
They change their bets according to the count, which lets them know the the high cards are coming.
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