Applying the basic strategy reduces the advantage of a casino to the minimum. However, it is not enough to win in blackjack regularly. If you want to improve your chances to win, you have to apply a strategy called “card counting”. Click “Read more” to get to know the techniques used in this strategy.

The beginning of „card counting” dates back to the early 50-s our century. If you believe in old legends from Las Vegas, the first man who worked out the system was greasy John (greasy because he loved to eat chickens during the game). Greasy John used to spend in casino many hours every day and he always won. Everybody knew that he had a different method that made it possible for him to win, but nobody knew that method. It has never been revealed, because greasy John had a heart attack and he died taking his secret with him.

Since then, many specialists, among them mathematicians and statisticians, have tried to figure out the formula for a blackjack game, that allows winning. Finally, a Ph. D student of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Edward Thorp disclosed the secret. He wrote about it in his bestseller book from 1962 Beat the Dealer - A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One. Thorp calculated that the probability of winning changes whenever some cards leave the table. If dealer has given many figures at the beginning, it will be more difficult to get some of them later, because only cards with the value less than ten are left. The same reasoning applies to the opposite situation-the bigger the number of lower cards at the beginning the more figures at the end. Thorp realized that he could make a fortune if he works out how to estimate the number of both low and high cards in the decks after some of them already have been given to a player.

Of course, the first difficulty that arises is to remember all the cards that have been used during the first stage. However, the young scientist found a way to do it. He divided the cards in three groups: the first group with cards from 2 to 6; the second group with cards from 7 to 9; and the third group with cards from 10 to ace. He valuate the cards from the first group with the value +1 – player’s chances increase when there are less cards from 2 to six in a deck. The second group was given the value equal to 0 and the third one was given the value -1 to emphasize the player’s worse position, if those cards are not anymore available in a deck. He called this method Hi-Lo Count.