Card Counting - Countermeasures

Countermeasures

Casinos have spent a great amount of effort and money in trying to thwart card counters. Countermeasures used to prevent card counters from profiting at blackjack include:

• Harassment of suspected card counters by casino staff. This may be as simple as engaging a suspected card counter in a conversation to break their concentration.
• Decreasing penetration, the percentage of the cards dealt before a shuffle. This reduces the ability of a counter to take advantage of a high count that has developed.
• Card-counter identification, using books of photos and facial recognition systems to "blacklist" known counters.
• Computerized scanners in blackjack tables that can identify counting systems when in use (such as MindPlay).
• Heuristic systems that keep a count and track players' bets, looking for increases/decreases matching rises and falls in the count.
• Computer systems used in surveillance rooms that surveillance staff use to target suspect players to quantify their threat to the house.
• Shuffling when a player increases their wager.
• Changing rules for splitting, doubling down, or playing multiple hands. This also includes changing a table's stakes.
• Flat betting a player or making it so they cannot change the amount they bet during a shoe.

Some jurisdictions (Nevada) have no legal restrictions placed on these countermeasures. Other jurisdictions such as New Jersey limit the countermeasures a casino can take against skilled players. In the past, casinos would sometimes resort to harsher methods (up to and including physical assault) to deter card counters – today the need to maintain good public relations and the likelihood of legal action dissuade casinos in most jurisdictions from such tactics.

Some of these countermeasures have a downside for the casino as well. Frequent shuffling, for example, reduces the amount of time that the non-counting players are playing and consequently reduces the house's winnings. Some casinos now use automatic shuffling machines to compensate for this, with some models of machines shuffling one set of cards while another is in play. Others, known as Continuous Shuffle Machines (CSMs), allow the dealer to simply return used cards to a single shoe to allow playing with no interruption. Because CSMs essentially force minimal penetration, they remove almost all possible advantage of traditional counting techniques. In most online casinos, the deck is shuffled at the start of each new round, ensuring the house always has the advantage.

A pit boss who determines that a player is a card-counter might either "back off" the player by inviting them to play any game other than blackjack, or will ban them from the casino itself. In jurisdictions where this is not legal, such as Atlantic City, a pit boss can require the player to flat-bet and disallow players from entering in the middle of a shoe. Such countermeasures effectively remove any chance of gaining an advantage from card counting in multi-deck games. The player's name and photo (from surveillance cameras) may also be shared with other casinos and added to a database of card counters and cheaters (note: card counting is not cheating, but casinos still associate the two groups together) run for the benefit of casino operators. One such blacklist was known as the Griffin Book, and was maintained by a company called Griffin Investigations. However, Griffin Investigations was forced into bankruptcy in 2005 after losing a libel lawsuit filed by professional gamblers.