I understand why casinos kick out card counters, the casino wants to make money and card counting is “cheating”. But if you are able to do it all in your head, is that not the same as being really good at poker? Knowing whats left in the deck and estimating your opponents cards based of that info and by reading your opponent. How do you prove counting vs skill? Is it just a way for casinos to weed out people who would take a lot of money?
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This is nearly a myth. Casinos almost never kick out card counters. Casinos will, on rare occasion, remove someone who they think is not a good customer – which includes *some* card counters.
Most people who try to do card counting will never make money with it, and will just boost the casino’s profits. Making money with card counting is wildly over-glamorized in popular media; it is not sitting down with $100 and walking away with $1000 after an hour. In order to make money at all, you have to pay close attention to the whole game and play in a very unusual way. You need to bring in a large bankroll to be able to weather the ups and downs, because you’re still gambling, you just have a tiny advantage. You need to not drink anything or get distracted by the casino’s plentiful distractions, or you’ll lose focus. And there’s a bunch of techniques the house can easily apply to cut off your advantage, ranging from increased decks (which reduce the edge) to continuous shuffling (which just makes card counting pointless).
Further, even if you pull it off and make a few hundred or thousand dollars on the blackjack table, you need to have the discipline to then leave the casino with that – and never get drawn into the other games that will just drain your money again.
So a lot of people think they can do card counting, and try to do it casually, and end up playing more & losing more money than they would otherwise. Overall, the concept of card counting is actually beneficial to casinos. I would not be surprised if some of them actively push the “we kick out card counters” concept in order to increase the feeling of “thrill” that people get from “getting away with it” – drawing more people to try it out and lose more money.
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