Can You Count Cards in Games Other Than Blackjack?
Updated
Counting the way blackjack players count needs three things to line up at once, and almost nothing else in the casino has all three. Poker rewards a different skill entirely. Baccarat has one narrow exception buried in a side bet. Spanish 21 is genuinely countable and genuinely hard. Everything else on the floor shuffles too often, pays too flat, or gives you nowhere to put the money.
- Counting needs a depleting shoe, a house edge worth flipping, and room to raise your bet.
- Poker is not counting against a house. It is odds and opponents.
- Baccarat is close to a dead end, except for a couple of side bets.
- Spanish 21 works, with its own system and its own headaches.
- Edge sorting is not counting, and courts have treated it very differently.
The three conditions counting needs
Work through these before you wonder about any specific game.
- The shoe has to deplete. Cards that have already been dealt must stay out until the shuffle. If the game reshuffles every hand, there is nothing to track.
- The composition has to matter. Removing a five from the shoe must actually change your expected value on the next hand. In blackjack it does, a lot, because tens make dealers bust and make naturals.
- You have to be able to bet into it. Knowing the shoe is rich means nothing if you cannot put more money out when it is.
Blackjack clears all three by a wide margin. That is not a coincidence of history. It is why counting became a blackjack thing and stayed one.
Poker
Not in the blackjack sense, no. You are not playing against a house with a fixed edge, you are playing against the other people at the table, and the deck gets shuffled every hand.
What poker players call counting is a different discipline: counting outs, working pot odds, and putting opponents on ranges. It is a real skill and it is worth learning. It has essentially nothing in common with keeping a Hi‑Lo count against a dealer.
Baccarat
Baccarat looks like a perfect target. Real shoe, real cut card, six or eight decks, no decisions to make. It has been analyzed to death for exactly that reason, and the conclusion has held up for decades.
The problem is condition two. Baccarat draws by fixed rule, so the composition of the shoe barely moves the banker and player bets at all. Counts that do favor you show up rarely, late in the shoe, and are worth a fraction of a percent when they arrive. By the time the count says bet, the dealer is shuffling.
The real exception lives in the side bets. Wagers such as the Dragon 7 in EZ Baccarat depend heavily on specific ranks remaining, and those are countable with a purpose-built system. They also pay rarely enough that the swings are brutal. There is more on the base game in our guide to baccarat.
Spanish 21
This one is real. Spanish 21 strips all the tens out of the deck, leaving 48 cards, and compensates with generous rules: late surrender, doubling after splitting, rescue on a double, and bonus payouts on 21s made from five or more cards.
Because the deck is different, the Hi‑Lo tags are wrong for it and you need a system built for the game. Counters who do that work can reach an edge above what a comparable blackjack game offers, at good penetration.
The catches are practical. Spanish 21 tables are scarce, the strategy chart is significantly larger than blackjack's, and running the wrong count on it is worse than not counting at all.
Three Card Poker, Ultimate Texas Hold'em, Casino War
These fail on condition one before you get anywhere near the math. Nearly all of them run on continuous shufflers or get shuffled by hand between every round, which means the deck resets constantly.
Casino War in particular gets asked about because the game is so simple. Simple is not the same as countable. The house edge sits in the tie rules, and the shuffle wipes any information you gathered.
Hearts, gin, spades, and the rest
Tracking what has been played in a home card game is just good play. Remembering that all the spades are gone, or that your opponent picked up two discards, wins games.
It is not card counting in the sense this site uses, because there is no house edge to overturn and no bet to raise. It is memory and inference, which is a fine thing to be good at and a different thing entirely.
Edge sorting is not counting
Worth a clear warning, because the two get lumped together and they land in very different places legally.
Edge sorting exploits tiny asymmetries in the pattern printed on the backs of cards. A player who can spot which way a card is oriented, and who can get the dealer to rotate certain cards, effectively knows something about the next card before it is turned over.
Counting uses only information the casino shows everyone. Edge sorting depends on getting the house to handle the cards a particular way on your behalf, and courts on both sides of the Atlantic have sided with the casinos on it, most famously in the litigation over Phil Ivey's baccarat wins. Casinos have refused to pay and been upheld.
Which movie is the card counting one?
21 (2008), loosely based on the MIT blackjack teams who took real money out of real casinos through the 1980s and 1990s. Rain Man (1988) has the other famous casino scene, though what it depicts is closer to total recall than to a counting system.
Both compress years into minutes. The real version is slower, streakier, and involves long stretches where a correctly played edge loses anyway. We lay out what the arithmetic actually promises in how card counting works.
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By Martin Kosek · every number on this site is computed by us, not copied.
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