A question still regularly asked at casinos both online and offline is around the practice of card counting – it has been immortalized in film and there are many stories of celebrities who have a deft hand at card games and have been suspected of counting cards too. As the saying goes too, whilst card counting isn’t exactly illegal, it is heavily frowned upon and will get players ejected from most establishments. Many players often ask though, is it possible to card count at an online casino? And what measures have been made to ensure that it’s either impossible, or much more difficult.
Older and less evolved services in particular were a possibility, more reliant on set algorithms and more basic design, these types of games were more easily exploitable and things like card counting were more possible too – but these types are games are fewer and far between now as online casinos have modernized their options and the algorithms that run the games make services more favored towards the house rather than the player.
For more modern options, particularly with the likes of live dealer games which show the cards physically being drawn from a shoe, other changes have been made that include adding multiple decks to draw from which make it much harder to count cards too – some services may disclose how many decks are added but many won’t, and this makes it much harder and often impossible to count cards too.
Other than having additional decks in the shoe, some online services will also use algorithms that regularly shuffle the deck inside the shoe during play too and is another method that makes card counting very difficult, if not impossible when playing at an online casino too.
There may be some external services that offer the help here, but this would fall into the category of cheating by using external services to give an edge in the game and could lead to a ban from an online service. When playing offline, using external aids to help here can even lead to arrest in certain states and different countries.
Whilst it is still possible in some situations, it is being made more difficult with every advancement to online card games in particular in order to combat the practice, and these same methods are slowly being transferred to the offline environment too as brick-and-mortar casinos start to adjust their own practices to make things like card counting more difficult over time too.