Can You Count Cards to Win in Online Blackjack?

Counting cards when playing blackjack at land-based casinos is frowned upon. But what about online – when you’re playing online blackjack on your own, behind a screen, and nobody knows what you’re up to? Let’s dive into the topic and see if it’s possible to do it.

If you don’t have time to read the rest of the article because you – like many of us – have a short attention span, the quick answer is “yes.” Most blackjack games don’t count you down, so you can sit there and take your sweet time to make every decision. You can sit with an Excel sheet if you like and tick off the cards that come through.

So yes, you can do it. But obviously, it’s never just as easy and straightforward as that, is it? There’s more to the story as online casinos obviously don’t want you to have an edge on the house, so let’s see how they combat this practice.

The first thing you’ll want to figure out is how many decks are being used in your game of blackjack. Some casinos will make it easy for you to find out; some will make you reach out to customer service or even the game provider to get the answer.

In other words, they won’t always be forthright or know the answer themselves. The reason? It’s simply better for the casino if nobody knows.

Tracking online blackjack probabilities

When you’re counting cards, you’d ideally be playing a game of single-deck blackjack. Then it becomes very easy to count. If you start a fresh deck and the dealer gets an ace, and you get an ace in your hand, you know there are only two more in the entire deck. Then you can do the math and play the probabilities.

But what if there are two decks, or four decks, or six? Then not only does the math change, but it becomes much harder to figure out what’s what.

It’s hard to track the numbers (since there are 24 aces in a six-deck game), and the probabilities shift as well—minimizing the impact of card counting. In these cases, relying on a blackjack strategy chart becomes a smarter way to optimize your play without having to keep count.

A huge challenge for card counting the online version of the game is that those games don’t always play through the deck as they would at a land-based (or live dealer) game.

In other words, in a real-life game, if there is a 52-card deck and four cards are dealt, there are only 48 left. In some online versions, they reshuffle the deck after every hand, so that there’s 52 again (if it’s single-deck blackjack) – and so on.

Beware of random number generators

Some blackjack games will solely rely on RNGs (random number generators) and completely digital cards, so the deck doesn’t exactly decrease in cards each time. On top of that, the deck is reshuffled every time too. If that sounds a bit confusing, just realize that card counting has no impact on these types of games.

In the end, it’s a cool strategy to keep in mind and it might work in rare instances, but for the most part, card counting in online blackjack is relatively ineffective. In most cases, online casinos have already thought about this and use tactics like digital cards, reshuffling, cut cards, and many decks to make sure that you can’t count the cards effectively.

If there is an opportunity for a player to get an edge, they don’t want that, because they’re not in the business of losing money. If you’re curious about the mechanics, a quick look at how to play blackjack online can shed light on the differences between live and digital games.

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