Gadgetory

hi I'm Micah Ponte and I'm at DEFCON 20 I was one of the leaders of the mit blackjack team and we used card County to hack Las Vegas and beat the casinos for millions our story became the basis for the best-selling book bringing down the house and the major motion-picture 21 now a lot of people think that you have to be a math whiz or Rain Man to count cards but actually it's quite the opposite so right now I'm going to give you hard counting 101 now with card counters they're concerned with three different groups of cards first we have the neutral cards seven eight nine and over all the neutral cards don't favor the dealer or the player so ultimately card counters actually ignore these cards so that leaves us with the high cards ten through ace and the low cards 2 through 6 now the high cards are really good for the player because these are the cards that give you blackjack which plays three to two they also make it more likely that the deal will bust when hitting on totals of twelve to sixteen and they also make better draw cards than doubling down and splitting on the flipside the low cards two to six favored a dealer because these are the cards that turn the dealer's bad totals of twelve to sixteen into winning totals of nineteen twenty and twenty-one also the more low cards remaining the fewer black checks that will be dealt which are good for players and bad for the dealer's so as you can see there are an equal number of high cards and low cards so this is a balanced count system called the high-low which is what the MIT team used so at the start of a brand-new shuffle the count is zero because you haven't seen any cards and then as the cards are being dealt the count is constantly fluctuation every time a hard card comes out ten through eight the count goes down by one now the reason the high cards have a count value of minus one even though they're good for the player is that every time one of them is depleted that's one less high card that can benefit players in the future conversely every time a low card is dealt to through six the cap increases by plus one because that's one less low card that can hurt the players moving forward now as the count increases on the positive side that means there has to be more of the favourable high cards remaining and so what a card counter does keep track of the count in order to identify the rounds of situations when they're more likely to get Blackjacks the dealer's more likely to bust and so you want to bet little or nothing when you don't have the advantage as a card counter and then proportionally more as your advantage increases so as you can see card counting isn't as complex as people think but of course like anything it takes practice to become really good at it so let's steal one round of cards and see if you can keep track of the count now scanning these cards over what we can do is group up the high cards versus low cards in pairs so that they cancel out so for example this ace cancels out the three this Queen cancels out the four and then we can ignore two seven eight nine because they don't affect account at all and so that leaves us with two low cards which each have account value plus one said account of these cards is plus two which means there has to be two more favorable cards remaining in the ship