Blackjack Card Counting has become very popular in recent times due to the release of the new hit film 21, depicting the true story of a group of MIT students who devised a way of card counting that is not only very effective, but also easy enough for the average human like you or me to learn.
Card counting is based on the principle of online dominoes because the casino uses five decks of cards at the blackjack table and keeps using the same five decks over and over again, if you can remember the location of all the cards – or even the key cards – you will be able to tell what cards are coming. next to placing smarter bets.
So how does blackjack card counting work properly? In short, you need to have some sort of ability to remember where certain cards are in the deck. Now, as a math genius or someone with a truly photographic memory, you need a method to learn how to do this. This is by no means a secret of card counting, just a way of embedding the locations of these cards into your memory; commonly called ‘memory anchoring’.
Without realizing it, we all accidentally tether things in our memories almost every day. For example, is there a certain smell that triggers certain memories to come to your mind? Or it could be that whenever you hear a certain song, it brings back a time or place in your past that has a connection to it. This is how memory anchoring works.
When you think about memory tethering in this aspect, it is generally imprinted by our subconscious mind without us realizing it, or even wanting it to happen. So, what we need to do is find a way to use the short term memory retainer to remember the cards in the blackjack deck.
Before I go any further, let me stress that you don’t need to remember every card in the deck, only the important cards that will make or break your hand; These are the Ace, King, Queen, Jack and Ten cards. If you know the location of these cards, it doesn’t guarantee you will win, but you will have a huge advantage over the casino and every other player at the table, ensuring you will have hundreds or thousands of dollars at the end of each betting session.
There are many ways to use this memory holder, but one of the better ones is to connect each card to a specific ‘place’ in your mind. For example, you can create a house in your mind, and each room of the house has a certain card symbol on each door. You can have King room, Ace room and so on. For this to work, you also need to remember which card came before.
Say that the Jack of Hearts appears in the deck and the card that comes just before the Eight Diamonds. In your mind you would walk into Jack’s room, and place a Diamond Eight – or to put it easier just a red Eight or even just an Eight – next to the Jack of Hearts. When you do this in your mind, you will focus on the room and its cards very deeply for a few seconds, essentially imprinting this in your mind.
You’d be surprised how well this method works, but I have to admit it’s not the exact method the MIT student devised in movie 21. For their card counting secrets, you’ll have to do a bit of searching online, but don’t worry, you don’t have to. looking too far!