[Iceman]

[ QUOTE ]
The other day I was having this conversation with my friend. I've always heard that it wasnt, he seemed to think that implementing a simple strategy could make you a winner. I argued that if it was simple everyone could make money off the casino. He isnt really knowledgable in areas of statistics, so I figure I'm right.

But why exactly is blackjack not beatable? Where is the casinos edge? What exactly is card counting, and how can it make you a winner?

[/ QUOTE ]

Blackjack is beatable...by less than 1% of the people who play it.

The casino's edge comes from the fact that if you bust and the dealer busts, the dealer wins. The player's many little advantages over the dealer don't make up for that fact: (1) winning 3-2 on player blackjacks but only losing 1-1 on dealer blackjacks, (2) you can stand on 12-16 and the dealer can't, (3) you get to factor the dealer's upcard into your decisions, and you can (4) double, (5) split, and (6) surrender. Still, blackjack has the smallest casino edge of any major casino game - less than one half of one percent with perfect play, much smaller than slots, roulette, Three Card Poker, or most bets on a craps table.

Since the dealer has to hit 12-16, high cards are bad for the dealer and good for you, while low cards are the opposite. When the remaining decks have many more high cards and/or many fewer low cards than normal, you can actually have the advantage over the dealer. What a card counter does is keep track of whether the high/low distribution is better or worse than normal (so you can identify your advantage), increase his bets substantially when he does have the advantage and either bet much less or leave the table when he doesn't, and make small changes in his playing strategy to reflect that high cards or low cards are more or less likely (e.g. you might not hit 16 against a 10 if the deck is full of high cards). Keeping track of more than one or two numbers is impossible for most people, so most counters use one plus/minus count (like +1 for 23456, -1 for TJQKA) and sometimes a sidecount (like how many aces). The tricky part is getting away with it - if a casino realizes that you're counting, they might shuffle the deck, ask you to leave, or even bar you. So you can't just bet $25 all the time and suddenly switch to $1000 on strongly positive counts. The higher you play, the more likely they are to watch you closely. As a result, many high-stakes counters pretend to be clueless gamblers who doesn't know what they're doing, make some small mistakes on purpose so that they will think that you're not counting and just getting lucky, and increase their bets slowly as the count increases rather than all at once. Those latter two adjustments can decrease your advantage substantially, but they might be necessary if the alternative is getting kicked out. Even under the best conditions, it's rare for a counter to have an advantage of more than 1%. Some blackjack games can't be beaten at all, or can't be beaten for much - like games with continuous shuffling machines, that don't allow you to enter in the middle of a shoe (so you can't sit there betting the minimum and when the count gets very high, you signal to your friend who sits down and starts betting huge amounts), or games that don't deal very far in the deck before shuffling (called "lousy penetration").