These days, it seems like regular online blackjack is being replaced in popularity by live dealer casino blackjack. With live dealer blackjack games, you have beautiful women dealing you the cards, and you get to interact with other players too. Essentially, this is the closest you’ll ever come to getting the live casino experience in your living room, which is more than alright with many people.
Besides the beautiful dealers and live blackjack atmosphere aspects, another reason why some people flock to live dealer tables is because they think it’s possible to count cards here. And this is definitely an interesting thought because there is a live dealer, and there’s no software shuffling the cards after every hand. That said, it’s worth a closer look to see if live dealer casino blackjack card counting is really possible.
Deck Penetration
We’ve discussed the concept of deck penetration before at BlackjackLife, and this merely refers to how far into a shoe the dealer is before they reshuffle cards. Additionally, this also refers to how deep into the shoe card counters can get before they have confidence in their count. Easily put, the more deck penetration a counter can get, the better chance they have of making profits with their bigger bets.
Relating this back to live dealer casino blackjack, the majority of online casinos instruct their dealers to shuffle the shoe after half of the decks have been dealt. So if it were an eight deck game of blackjack, the dealer would shuffle after around four decks have been dealt. Those who know card counting realize that 50% deck penetration isn’t nearly enough to get a confident count. And this means that profitable live dealer casino blackjack card counting isn’t possible at the vast majority of casinos. The only way it would be is if the dealer/casino messed up and forgot to reshuffle the shoe.
Is Live Dealer Casino Blackjack still worth it?
Seeing as how you can’t count cards at a live dealer casino, some players wonder whether it’s still worth it to play at these sites as a counter. After all, you can’t profitably count cards, so why not just go to a land-based casino?
But this doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy yourself at live dealer casinos while chatting with the hot dealers and fellow players. Furthermore, if you’re new to card counting, you can get some great practice in with live dealer games before the shoe is shuffled. In the end, it’s a nice way to get used to counting cards when a real dealer is dealing the cards.