I took a course in probability a few years ago and have not made my fortune in the casino yet. This program can help to count cards in single-deck blackjack and determine the odds of going bust based on your hand. The interface is quite crude :)

This is certainly not as cool as a system which is easy to memorize, but I think it's kindof cool. Here goes:
#!/usr/bin/perl ## # # Card Counter : This is a basic single-deck blackjack card counter. + It calculates the probability # of going bust based on the cards which have been pla +yed. I'd love to generalize # this some more as there are 5^12 possible states for + the deck when playing # from a single deck, and this is too much for me to m +emorize. # # Rohit Kumar Mehta # # 2003.07.17 # ## use strict; my @deck; my $num; sub showdeckstats { my @deck=@_; my $totalcards=0; my @prob; print "\t\t+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+\n"; print "card key\t| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10| 11| 1 +2|\n"; print "\t\t+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+\n"; print "card value\t| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10| J | Q | K | + A |\n"; print "\t\t+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+===+\n"; print "# in deck\t"; for (my $count=0; $count<=12; $count++) { print "| $deck[$count] "; $totalcards += $deck[$count]; } print "|\n\t\t+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+\ +n"; print "\n\t\t\t+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+\n"; print "value of your hand\t| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | + 20 |\n"; print "\t\t\t+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+====+\n"; print "prob bust next hit\t|"; for (my $val=12; $val<21; $val++) { my $bust=0; my $nobust=0; for (my $card=0; $card<=12; $card++) { my $cardval; if ($card == 12) { $cardval=1; } elsif ($card >7) { $cardval=10; } else { $cardval = $card +2 } if ( ($val + $cardval) > 21 ) { $bust=$bust+$deck[$card]; } else { $nobust=$nobust+$deck[$card]; } } my $prob; $prob = $bust/($bust+$nobust); printf ("%1.2f|",$prob); } print "\n\t\t\t+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+----+\n"; } ##### # # initialize cards # ##### for (my $card = 0; $card <=12; $card++) { $deck[$card]=4; } while (1) { showdeckstats(@deck); print "\nenter the key number of the card you wish to subtract: "; $num=<stdin>; chomp $num; $deck[$num]--; }

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Re: blackjack card counter
by SyN/AcK (Scribe) on Jul 18, 2003 at 04:21 UTC
    Thanks! This is a cool script!