Card Counting Trainer
You count in your head while the table plays itself. Enter your total at the end of the round.
This is practice, not teaching. A genuine round of blackjack runs in front of you: players hit, players double, players bust, and the dealer keeps a hole card. All you do is count, and at the end of the round you type in what you have. If you are only starting out, go through the counting course first.
The app opens across the whole page and can be expanded to full screen.
Still hesitating on the card values themselves? Go to the Fast Values drill first. A whole round gets counted wrong until the tags are automatic.
- A real round deals itself; you keep the count and type it in at the end.
- The running count must be exact. The true count is right within half a deck.
- Three difficulties (2, 6 and 8 decks) and four speeds, up to faster than any dealer.
- Adding players is the setting people underrate — more cards, less time.
- Free, nothing to install, no account.
How the trainer works
A round deals out at the speed you choose. Cards arrive in the order a real table produces them — two to each player, one up for the dealer, then hits and doubles and busts, and the dealer's hole card turned last of all. When the round ends, the trainer asks you for two numbers:
The running count, which has to be exact. There is no partial credit on this one, because at a table there is no partial credit either.
The true count, where landing within half a deck is treated as correct. Decks remaining are judged by eye from the discard tray, and nobody estimates them closer than that.
Play continues through the shoe until the cut card comes out. Then it shuffles, the running count goes back to zero, and you start again — which is itself worth practising, because the reset is where beginners most often carry a stale number forward.
What you can set
| Setting | Options | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Difficulty | Easy, Medium, Hard | Easy is two decks with the running count left on screen so you can watch it move. Medium is six decks. Hard is eight decks dealt deep. |
| Speed | Slow, Medium, Fast, Brutal | How fast the cards land. Brutal is faster than most dealers; if you can hold a count there, a real table feels slow. |
| Players | How many seats are filled | More players means more cards per round and less time between them. This is the setting people underrate. |
Start on Easy and Slow even if that feels insulting. The point of Easy is not that it is simple — it is that the running count stays visible, so when your number drifts you can see where it drifted rather than just that it did.
What to aim for
The bar that matters is not accuracy on its own. It is accuracy at speed, without visible effort. A count you can only hold by staring and moving your lips is a count that will fail you the moment a dealer talks to you or a cocktail waitress arrives.
A reasonable target before you take this anywhere near a casino: a full eight‑deck shoe at Fast, with a full table, running count exact every round. That is a much higher bar than most people set for themselves, and it is roughly what the shoe will actually demand.
It is also worth knowing what the skill is worth once you have it. The arithmetic is in what counting actually pays, and the answer depends far more on deck penetration than on how fast you can add.
Keep going
By Martin Kosek · every number on this site is computed by us, not copied.
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