Counting Cards

On my way out of Harrah's casino in Atlantic City the much too friendly security guard gave me a deck of used cards. These are Aristocrat brand made by the U.S. Playing card company. These appear to be paper cards, which is odd because in the poker room they use plastic cards made by Gemanco.

The is a hole drilled in them slightly off center. If you ever get a chance to buy used casino cards, get corner cut, not drilled cards. The drilled hole cause the edges to raise and makes it hard to shuffle the cards. I'm a collector of junk, especially swag junk, so I've made these into my practice cards for counting cards for black jack.

A single deck will have a full count of zero. When I received these cards, I had never managed to properly count a deck to get zero. I'm always off by one or two. So now a week later I'm getting a count of zero on better than half of my attempts. As I have read, counting cards is harder than it looks.

I now count a deck in about one minute, twenty seconds with reasonable accuracy. I sometimes can count the deck in one minute nine seconds. My goal is to count the deck in 25 seconds. Once I can correctly count the deck 50 times in 25 seconds, I'll feel I'm ready for the next step in training.

For now, I'll stick to poker.