About This Project
Updated
What this site is
Owl Count is an educational tool for anyone curious about the mathematics behind blackjack. It shows how the best-known counting system, Hi‑Lo, actually works. How you keep a running count. How a true count comes out of it. How penetration and the cut card change your advantage, and what bet sizing follows from that.
The aim is to explain the principle clearly and honestly, including the part where no strategy guarantees a win and blackjack remains a gambling game. This is not a guide to beating the casino. It is a way to understand probability using a game that happens to be a very good example.
Who runs it
Owl Count is run by Martin Kosek as an independent personal project. We are not a casino, a sportsbook, or an affiliate, and we have no commercial relationship with any gambling operator that could shape what is written here.
Why trust the numbers
The counter exists because I wanted one myself while playing live blackjack, and nothing available kept up with the pace of a real table.
Since then the rule has been simple: we compute the numbers rather than copy them. House edge figures, the strategy charts, side bet odds, and the cost of common mistakes are all calculated here from first principles. Every one is cross-checked against independent published work, such as Wizard of Odds, before it goes live. Where a figure comes from the literature rather than from us, the page says so.
That process has caught real errors, including in our own earlier work, and we would rather publish a correction than a confident wrong number. The method is documented in how we calculate.
Contact
Questions, corrections, bug reports, and privacy requests all go to the same place. If you think a number on this site is wrong, please say so and show your working. We will check it.
Email: [email protected]
How the site is funded
This is a non-commercial personal project and the running costs come out of my own pocket. There are no paid partnerships with casinos or sportsbooks, and nothing on this site is for sale. How we handle data is set out in the privacy policy and the cookie policy.