About Us

Card Counting Academy was built by two friends who happen to be data scientists. About five years ago we got curious about card counting, but we weren’t about to walk into a casino on faith alone. We wanted to prove it worked first.

So we spent a few weeks hacking together a crude Python simulator: basic strategy, Hi-Lo counting, millions of hands. Once we could reproduce the edges and true-count distributions that the published literature predicted, we were convinced enough to start practicing for real.

The duct-tape era

Our “training setup” was not glamorous. To check counting accuracy we’d either burn through a deck solo, hoping we hadn’t drifted if the running count landed back at zero, or deal to each other. The player would periodically write down their running count and true count on a scrap of paper and wedge it into the discard tray. After the shoe we’d go back through the discards and see how far off they were. It worked, but it was painfully slow.

We looked for an app that could replace this process. Everything we found was either overpriced, clunky, or both. And none of them answered the question we actually cared about: given how I’m actually betting and playing, what is my real edge? We wanted to know whether we were making too many mistakes to be profitable, and as far as we could tell no tool on the market could answer that with any reasonable confidence.

From the table to the app

Since then we’ve played at casinos across the United States and have been backed off and banned dozens of times. All of that table experience, combined with our software engineering and data science backgrounds, went into building the app we wished we’d had from the start.

Card Counting Academy is the result: a simulator backed by billions of hands of data, a trainer that adapts to your weaknesses, and most importantly, a tool that estimates your actual expected value from the way you play. No other app we’ve found does that.

If you have questions, feedback, or just want to talk blackjack, reach us at daniel@cardcountingacademy.com.