Card counting is not illegal, but what s there is a group? is it cheating?

Question

like 1 person sits there for a long time and then when the table is hot, call up their mates to count and win. so basicly, its a group of card counters working together.

Answer 1

Card counting isn't illegal, but a casino has the right to kick you out if they want as it's their premises. However, they kind of like it when people try to card count because it just plain doesn't work and people get sucked into the gambling dreamworld thinking they can beat the casino, no one will ever beat the casino. The reason card counting doesn't work is because casinos now have anywhere up to 8 decks in a shue, so therefore there are over 400 cards to play with but the card get re-shuffled after not even one deck has been dealt out, so card counting is basically dead as the casinos have countered it. Don't let the new 21 movie fool you I can assure you that these people are no longer making money from blackjack, no one is but the casinos

Answer 2

What clucky36 wrote is right.

It is not illegal - so the only way casinos deal with this is by preventing card counters from playing. A casino is a private property and the owner has the right to decide who gets to play.

I watched "21" and I don't understand why the card counters in the movie used the same predictable signals and why they were heavy betters as students (too suspicious, too much of a giveaway).

Answer 3

The technique of working with a group like you describe has been widely used since the 1970's so casinos are on the look-out.

- My understanding is that casino's don't really find it worth hassling card counters who are betting the minimum. Statistically they can't earn enough to justify the difficulties of reshuffling the deck after every hand. There's enough people who try to card count and fail, that it sort of balances out.

- There are still casinos (downtown Las Vegas) that deal the single deck game. So in a sense they are trying to lure in the would be card counters.

Answer 4

Card counting is not illegal.  But casinos are going to have a problem with a group of people working together with the goal of beating the house.

I don't think calling up 'their mates' is really an issue.  The shoe is either good or bad for a fairly short period of time, then it gets reshuffled and you start again.

So again casinos may get annoyed with people working in some kind of groups sharing information.  They may ask such people to leave.

The bottom line is as long as you are only using your mind and not cheating, it is not illegal.

The reality is casinos LOVE the movie 21 and they LOVE card counters.  Because the fact is for every person that tries to card count, maybe 5% are able to gain a house edge of less than 5%.  The rest lose just like everyone else.

Answer 5

Card counting is not illegal unless you use a outside aid like a comuter, a camera or something of that sort to aid in doing so.

typically card conters do not work as a team liek that and simply play by themselves, winning trivial amounts of money that the casino could care less about.

once they start crossing a certain threshold betting which would give them higher return rates per period of time, say somehting like 50$ an hour, then they might start doing something about it, if they know they have somebody winning 50$ per hour they may make an effort to swat them out.

when playing as a team, your spotters are constantly losing money placing minimum bets, the more spotters you ahve the more money the team loses.  A blackjack team woudl have to be placing enormouse bets to counteract that and also make it worth whiel for all of the other players on the team when they split the winnings, so when the big player comes up to the table, you can expect that he is betting 500 per hand and up, this equates to tremendous losses to the casino probibly on the order of, and im just guestimating here based on a few unknown variables relevant to playing on a team, soemthing on the order of 350 dollars per hour minus about 10 for every spotterr they have.  Thats some serious money pouring out the casinos door and you can bet they will make every effort to stop it especially if they are betting even higher, maybe in the 1k and up range.

Answer 6

Either way, its not cheating.

If you're sitting at a card table, you can say to your friend "Hey man, i'm winning a lot on this table!" and its still not illegal.

The only reason people use code and signals is because the casino will throw you out because you know how to beat them at their own game. Sore losers if you ask me.