Card Counting Drills

What about if you have trouble counting the cards? Now, I'm not talking about actually sitting there and doing card counting. We're not talking about advantage players card counting. I'm talking about, as the dealer, when you're looking at 4, 5 or 6 cards, can you actually count to 21? Can you count those cards and know exactly what the player has? As soon as you look at it, a lot of dealers can't. A lot of dealers have trouble with this. So what we're going to do is we're going to run through some card counting drills that will help you, speed up how fast you can do math. This is extremely helpful, especially as a blackjack dealer.

Now, the first part of the drill is to take a single deck and go through it. And I want you to take out every single ten value card that you see. Leaving the aces, because a lot of people have trouble with the aces. So we're going to leave the aces in there. And I just want you to take out the tens, Jacks, Queens and Kings. So that way there are no ten value cards at all in the deck. Once you've gone through the deck and taken out all the ten value cards, now I want you to go through and run through the card counting drills.

Set up the cards just as you would if you were playing and start counting them. So we have a 5 + 4, which is 9… + 9, which is 18. And then we're going to hit again. We have an ace for 19 and then we have an 8 for 27. Now I want you to keep going until you go past 21. It doesn't matter if you have 19 or 18 or even 20. I want you to keep hitting those cards until you go past 21. And I want you to know exactly what the player has. I know some of you cheat a little bit, and as soon as you go past 21, you're like, okay, player bust, we're done. And you don't have to think about how much the value of the cards actually are. But for this exercise, I want you to count past 21. So as soon as we get past 21, that's when you stop. And that's when you go on to the next one.

So we're going to stop and we're going to go on the next hand. So now we have 4 + 11 + 12 + 17 + 21 even though we have 21, we hit again and get 29. Okay. So we bust and we're going to move on to the next one. And what I want you to do as you're practicing at home, and I want you to practice and do this for at least an hour, multiple days until you feel comfortable, until you can look at it and you can see the patterns and you know exactly what the player has in an instant. That's when you know you're ready. Otherwise, keep practicing these drills until you're ready. Now, it doesn't matter how slow you are or how long you take. Again, speed is not a factor. We don't care about speed at this level of our learning. What we're doing is we're just practicing counting the cards and getting our math skills, to be a little bit more stronger. Just keep doing this over and over and over again until you're all out of cards, and then shuffle, riffle, whatever you want to do and do it all over again.

So again, your homework is to practice these card counting drills and to keep going until you can look at a, let's say, five cards and know exactly what the player has based on the patterns that you see in the cards.

So if I'm looking at these cards right here and I want to know how much they are, I'm going to look for patterns. So I have a 7 and a 3 right here. There's one pattern. We know a 7 and a 3 is a 10. So automatically we have a 10. We have an 8 and 1 and a 2. So we know an 8 plus 2 is another 10. So we have 10 right here. And then we have 10 right here. So just quickly looking at this a hand we automatically know we have a 20. Just by looking at the patterns.

Let's do another one so you know what I'm talking about. Well let's do one where we don't bust. So on this one the pattern that we see is the 9 and the 2. We know that a 9 and a 2 is automatically 11. So we look at this and we see 11 plus 7 is 18. So that's how we know what this is automatically.

So again here's another one. The pattern is a 6 and a 4. We knew a 6 in the 4 is a 10. The other pattern is this right here: the 8 and the 2 we know that's also a 10. So looking at this card without even counting, we could see a 10 and a 10. And we automatically know that this is a 20.