As an ex-blackjack player who has also written a book on the subject then I often get asked about the viability of being able to beat blackjack in 2010 and if card counting is dead. Well if you happen to encounter a game with automatic shufflers then card counting certainly is dead just like it is with online casinos. But this just supposes that the game can only be beaten by shuffle tracking and that as many people who regularly read my articles isn’t true.

If you find a casino with a shoe game and multiple decks then you can still get an edge. If the game is six deck and the penetration is poor then you may find that card counting techniques leave you basically recycling money. Most of the really advantageous techniques come towards the end of the shoe anyway so in six deck with poor penetration, the ratio of high cards to low cards never gets high enough for a meaningful edge.

However to beat blackjack these days usually requires more than just card counting and especially on games with automatic shufflers where counting isn’t even possible. Here you are dependent on being able to beat the dealer. For people who do not know what I am referring to here then let me enlighten you in one word……cheating! Well actually you don’t always need to cheat because if the dealer makes genuine errors in your favour then you are certainly not at liberty to inform them.

But techniques that deliberately manufacture situations are basically cheating although even then in many cases it probably isn’t. If you are sitting on the first box (known as first base) and the dealer is constantly exposing the next card to be dealt then that is their problem and not yours. Even if you are going out of your way to spot these mistakes then that is still a grey area where any player can claim that it is a dealer error.

In this instance then it is no different to spotting someone’s cards in a poker game. If they cannot be bothered to conceal their own hand then they basically have no place in a poker game. It can be argued that it is certainly unethical to go out of your way to see someone else’s cards but the point is that if the player is not educated enough or careful enough then they are basically doing something that when done properly shouldn’t even be an option for any other player……and that is to see your hand.

So in blackjack, if you purposely go out of your way to create dealer errors and to see exposed cards in the shoe before they are dealt then can this be said to be ethical or unethical? This is a grey area and one would argue that it is manipulation of a dealer and maybe it is but these are blackjack techniques that are being executed all over the world by opportunists and weak dealers.