Blackjack is one of the casino classics with the most accessible rules and the lowest house edge. Still, it’s not the easiest game to win, so players use various methods and techniques to help their chances. While there are many legal blackjack strategies nowadays, this is not enough for some players. Certain blackjack players take it a step further, deciding to cheat.
To that end, we’re focusing on covering a couple of questions regarding cheating in blackjack in this article.
Stay with us if you’re interested in whether there’s a way to cheat in live dealer blackjack and get away with it, and if so, how players do it.
Is Cheating Possible in Live Dealer Blackjack?
The short answer is yes — cheaters exist even on the online blackjack gambling scene. New casinos are the most common target of cheaters. Players who cheat tend to take advantage of the lack of high-security measures on recently-launched online gambling sites.
On the other hand, cheating in large and reputable casinos is much rarer. Just like land-based casinos use advanced surveillance equipment, watchful employees, and radio-frequency identification chips, online gambling platforms rely on new means of protection. For instance, they use their databases to watch their players’ behavior.
Casino databases contain information on all their games’ results, and they compare current results with those from the past, lest anything out of the ordinary turns up. Although a player can win big by a stroke of luck, there are only so many times that they can luck out in a short period. If casino employees uncover something in a player’s past gambling activity that doesn’t quite add up, they investigate further.
Shift in Blackjack Cheating Techniques
Live dealer casino blackjack is an entirely different challenge when it comes to the use of cheating techniques, as well. The famous cheating methods like:
- Chip and card switching
- Card marking
- Various team strategies
Cannot be used in online casinos.
These methods depend on the players’ physical presence in the casino, so none are helpful in live dealer blackjack games. Since blackjack has entered the online gambling scene, cheating players have had to become creative and come up with entirely new methods.
Let’s look at what blackjack players can use to beat the dealer now.
Card Counting
This is probably the only technique that can be used in both online and brick-and-mortar casinos, and it’s also one of the most well-known cheating strategies in plenty of other games besides blackjack.
Card counting in blackjack is based on mathematics, and the strategy involves keeping track of the cards left in the deck. Rather than memorizing all the cards as they are dealt, card counters use a system that makes a note of the number of high-value cards remaining in the deck.
- Note: The more aces, kings, jacks, queens, and 10s are in the deck, the better the player’s situation.
There are several systems within the card counting strategy that players use.
Let’s look at how Hi-Lo, one of the most commonly used ones, works. To use Hi-Lo, you need to follow the cards being dealt and assign a value to each of them based on their value. Cards from 2 to 6 get a +1 and cards from 10 to ace a -1. Hi-Lo strategy users don’t add or subtract any value to or from 7- to 9-number cards.
The result of the running count can be positive — if more smaller-number cards have been dealt — or negative — if more bigger-number cards have left the deck. The odds favor the player if the running count in the deck is positive.
As you can guess, gambling platforms are not fans of card counting strategies like this. Casinos protect themselves from card counters in numerous ways. For example, they use a couple of decks in one blackjack game instead of one, and they shuffle the decks more often.
- Note: Casinos will ban or ask a player to leave the casino if they are discovered to have been card counting.
Blackjack Cheating Apps
You might have come across advertisements for various blackjack cheating tools in the form of apps around the internet. Not all of them are to be trusted — some make pie crust promises, and others contain nothing but outlines of a basic blackjack strategy.
Still, a few might come in useful. Apps that contain extensive information and instructions on different card counting methods give you the best chance of success. You might find:
- Hi-Lo, which we’ve discussed above
- Hi-Opt I
- Hi-Opt II
- Omega-based apps
They go into detail on a particular strategy and can provide you with enough helpful theoretical knowledge of blackjack card counting.
However, don’t expect them to do the job for you. You’ll be able to rely on the information these apps give you, but you’ll still have to do your own calculations. Card counting is not an easy technique to master — it takes time and a lot of practice. So, don’t be discouraged if you don’t get results immediately.
Moreover, keep in mind that card counting might not be very helpful in all situations. For example, card counting cannot do much for players in casinos where the RNG reshuffles the deck/s after each deal.
Blackjack Software and Bots
Some of the other tools that can help players in a live dealer blackjack game are software and bots.
Hypothetically speaking, players can use software to determine the random number generator results in a blackjack game. This is possible because RNG often loops a particular pattern of numbers rather than producing completely random results. Nevertheless, it’s very hard to make software so advanced that it can crack the code of an RNG that cycles through such a long list of numbers at an incredibly fast rate.
Players can use the blackjack bot, the other tool we mentioned, to create an optimal play in an online blackjack game. The bot gives you access to the best basic strategy for the game you’re playing by estimating the right time you should:
- Hit
- Split
- Stand
- Double
As a result, the house edge decreases to roughly 0.5%.
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