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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how online casinos deal with card counters.

If we are talking about live dealer, they use bigger shoes (6+ decks) and they switch decks randomly around midway, making the counting techniques almost useless.

Online casinos can shuffle cards without having to use automated shuffling machines and set the cut card earlier[0], which makes it less profitable/ harder/ worthwhile to Card Count.

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-casinos-know-that-you_b_6...?

IIRC card counting relies on tracking which cards have been drawn and thus inferring which cards are remaining in the deck. Shuffling by hand is a tedious process, hence it is done only so often and this makes counting possible. With electric shuffling machines, shuffling becomes easier and is done more often. This, in turn, makes counting cards harder because the remaining deck never gets small enough for you to draw any useful conclusions about the remaining number of cards. In an online casino, you would have the same problem I guess ...

I often think, why don't online games deal from an 'infinite deck'? That is, every card is simply random from among 52 choices, regardless of the previous cards dealt. Then card-counting would be pointless.

I know - it would change the games entirely. So? The games are arbitrary. They would be new games, and it would defeat many modes of cheating.

I think the idea of games like Blackjack/Poker is that intuitively it feels like it's a skill game, rather than just a game of chance. It feels like if you played enough you'd get better - after all, with only 52 cards, how hard can it be to get an edge on the house?

This is different to a slot machine, where clearly it's just a game of chance.

In reality casino card games are 99.9% chance, but I think the infinite deck idea would remove the skill feeling and hence the attraction for many players.

Poker is somewhat a game of probabilities related to the 52-card deck. But any professional poker player would tell you, the big pots come from reading the other players. That wouldn't change.

It's so much harder to read a hand (and player) value when there are an infinite number of possible outcomes. If I have AA in a game of hold 'em with an A on the flop, I know there's no possibly way anyone else has AAA.

If there's an infinite deck, there's now no way of knowing if I'm tied for the best hand or not. How the hell can you read a player if you have no way to possibly peg him to a hand? The game would be unplayable with an infinite deck

That's also the reason that you can't play poker with multiple decks shuffled together, despite this being common in blackjack. The rules of hold 'em don't allow for the possibility of two players both having the nut flush, nor is there any concept of "five of a kind," which would of course at some point happen with multiple decks in play concurrently.

Two players having the same hand is no issue - just split the pot. This already happens when neither player can improve on the five community cards.

Adding five of a kind also seems like a pretty easy adjustment.

The most obvious difference is the possibility of cards matching both suit and rank. So if you have HA HK and the flop is HA HJ S2 you have both top pair and also a very strong flush draw (although HA HA would be better), a combo which is impossible on that board with a single deck.

Yes, the game can deal with these things. There's been wild card games forever and people like them just fine.

The issue is that this is a completely different game. It might be a fine game. People might like it (maybe even more than Texas Hold 'em). But this isn't the same game anymore. They're both played with the same 52 data points, but the frequency of those 52 data points makes these games and the skills needed to be good at them very different.

My previous comment of the game being "unplayable" might have been hyperbolic. The point I was trying to make is that it's not the same game when you change one of the rules so dramatically.

I'd venture that many modern players learned the game online. So future players can learn the new game online.

> In reality casino card games are 99.9% chance

Small nitpick: I'd argue that Blackjack is closer to 80% skill, and 20% chance, just based on the fact that if you don't play every Blackjack hand with the same statistically "correct" strategy [1], you will end up bleeding money well in excess of the house advantage.

I'd venture a guess that casinos make 80%+ of their profits from players that aren't playing with perfect Blackjack strategy (for example, not double down on an 11, or not splitting aces, or not remembering whether to hit or stand a 16, etc). When players aren't playing with perfect Blackjack strategy, the house edge isn't all that relevant.

The amount of money a player loses can be attributed to the "mistakes" an average player will make (that can be avoided by memorizing perfect blackjack strategy), rather than being attributed as much to chance. Someone playing perfect blackjack strategy will on average break pretty close to even, since the house edge for Blackjack is incredibly small.

> It feels like if you played enough you'd get better

From the perspective of a player learning perfect blackjack strategy, the truth is you do get better with practice :)

[1] Playing a perfect game of Blackjack requires memorizing charts like this: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/816DFf5i0EL...

They shuffle a lot. I've seen some online blackjack where it is possible to count cards, but they know this and the stakes are low enough and game speed slow enough it's just not worth the effort.

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