Point of view of a professional card counter

Card counting is a method to keep track of the cards left in a deck while playing Blackjack. The odds nudge in your favor when there are more large numbers and face cards. Basically, you collect data at the table to forecast the next hands.

A professional card counter, who posts videos under the pseudonym Quattro, describes what it’s like in the casino.

Other times, I’m basically escorted out of a casino. The pit bosses at a gaming room are always on the lookout for anyone who might be card counting. You can see the results of those confrontations on my YouTube channel. I’m sitting at a table, making my bets, and before you know it, the pit bosses in my peripheral vision are making phone calls to the surveillance team upstairs. Suddenly, I get a tap on the shoulder from security telling me that they don’t want my business anymore. (However, they also tell me that I’m free to play any other game but blackjack.) In other cases, casino management will charge me with straight-up trespassing and tell me I’ll be arrested if I ever come back to their property. This is super common in the card counting world. It doesn’t take long either. Sometimes I’ll only be sitting at a table for 10 minutes before getting booted from the game room.

He uses a hidden camera to record his experiences:

I took up card counting as a hobby a few months in between college and graduate school. I was going to take my sliver of probability knowledge and Edward O. Thorp’s Beat the Dealer to heights unimagined. A chart printout similar to the one above rested in my pocket so that I could study during downtime.

But then school started, and I had to put my dreams on hold.

While it sounds like pit bosses know what to look for to kick you out quicker, I didn’t think people were still counting cards with any success these days. Maybe it’s time to revisit. Watch out, casinos.