Blackjack is one casino game where the house doesn’t always win. This card game requires equal helpings of skill and luck, with a healthy dose of patience thrown in, and it offers the chance for experienced players to make slow and steady profits. Hollywood films such as Rain Man and 21 tell how blackjack players with superhuman memories manage to erode the casino’s house edge, and there are plenty of real-life examples of talented people walking away from the card table thousands of dollars richer.
Now I don’t know about you, but my memory is terrible, and I struggle to remember my own phone number sometimes. Fortunately for those of us with poor memories, there are now a couple of online tools and downloadable apps which we can use to work out our next move at the card table. Although land-based casinos won’t let you use these tools in their establishments, the online world is a different story. Here you can easily take full advantage of software to help you make better decisions, and that’s what I do. Let’s have a look at these two tools in some depth, and see how we can use them to become real-life blackjack ninjas.
The first tool is a simple online blackjack strategy calculator created by the team at John Slots. I like this tool as it is free and blazingly fast, and does an excellent job of telling me whether I should hit or stand, based on a simple probability table. I just enter the dealer’s card number, as well as my 1st, 2nd and 3rd card numbers, click the calculate button and it tells me what to do next. The trickiest part is following the tool’s advice, but it helps to know that the table of probabilities is based on hard statistics. Best of all, there is no typing involved in this tool, which means everything is done with just mouse clicks, so I can be chatting away on the chat feature without worrying I will accidentally tell my opponents which cards I am holding.
The second tool is a suite of downloadable Windows apps from QFit, which help you perform card-counting for Blackjack. The apps are not free, but are fully comprehensive, offering 150,000 high-speed Blackjack card counting canned simulations and training drills. There is a calculator included, but unlike the first tool, you do have to manually enter the card numbers, so you need to be careful if you are playing online and in chat mode. But this is a minor criticism, and if you are serious about improving your blackjack skills, or in card-counting in general, then you should really invest in this these apps.
I personally have used both these tools while playing blackjack online and found they have improved my performance massively. I like to combine them, using the QFit software to train offline, and then when I play with real money at the online casino, I open the John Slots calculator in a separate (minimized) window to enter the card numbers and learn about my best move. As an impulsive card player who tends to make decisions based on hunches, it’s great to have a cold analytical tool on hand which decides on the best course of action with no emotional involvement.
Before I started using these tools I would wipe out my bankroll every month, but this year I am running a small profit. It should be pointed out that these tools are not a complete solution, as bluffing is still a large part of blackjack, and you need to learn ways to spot this (yes, there are way to do this online too). But any card player who isn’t blessed with a super memory can use these tools to compete against even the best card counters and, with practice, have a chance of becoming a true blackjack ninja. Do you use any tools to help in your card games? Let me know in the comments.
