Spotting Blackjack Dealer Tells

When most people think of beating the casino in blackjack, visions of card counting pioneers like Edward Thorpe or the MIT blackjack team pop into their heads. After all, card counting is what we always see popularized in the movies and TV shows. Interestingly enough though, card counting isn’t the only piece of “legal” strategy that you can use to gain an advantage on the house. If you’re really observant, you can spot dealer tells in blackjack too, and here’s how to do this.

As an amateur blackjack player trying to spot dealer tells, you’re not looking for nervousness or fidgety motions because dealers don’t have an emotional attachment to hands; after all, their pay is not determined by winning percentage. Instead, you want to focus on two things - how they lift the card, and how long they look at the card.

The toughest cards for dealers to see are the smallest ones in 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. If you don’t believe so, then grab a deck and try to glance at the smaller cards like the casino dealers do; you’ll find that it’s tough to quickly glance at them. In any case, the difficulty that dealers have in looking at the small cards means they have to lift the hole card up higher and look longer. Some dealers are really obvious about this, which is definitely a tip-off that they have a smaller card.

When it comes to bigger cards that range from 7-A, casino dealers are able to see these much easier. This being the case, they won’t lift the hole card as high to see, and they will glance much quicker at the card’s value. Sure 7-A is a large range of cards for the dealer to have, but if you can differentiate between a small card and a bigger card, this helps out a lot!

As mentioned before, you shouldn’t be looking for emotional or nervous tells from a casino dealer. After all, these are really hard to spot in a dealer since many of them are merely going through the motions.

However, there are expert gamblers who have devised in-depth methods for reading dealers from a psychological or physical standpoint. If you’re interested in learning tells beyond how a dealer looks at their cards, “Read the Dealer” is a good book to check out. It’s written by Steve Forte, who provides advice to casinos/dealers on how they can catch card sharps and card counters.

Seeing as how there are people like Forte giving advice to casinos, most dealers are well aware of the possible tells that they could give off. In fact, most dealers go through lots of training so that they can avoid being obvious with their tells. But the thing to realize is that tells are subconscious gestures the dealers aren’t always aware of. All of the training in the world isn’t going to prevent a dealer from giving off a tell once and a while.

That being said, you should scout the casino for dealers who are prone to giving off tells every now and then. The great thing is that you don’t even have to sit down and bet any money; you can just pretend that you’re a casual observer, while secreting focusing on the dealers to see if anybody’s giving off tells. Assuming there are a few times when you can predict what range of cards the dealer has, you should sit down at the table and start playing.

Be realistic in the beginning though because spotting tells isn’t as easy as just reading about the subject. Like any other advanced gambling strategy, this process takes time and skill to become good at. Of course, if you do get good at spotting dealer tells, then the reward will huge since you’ll be able to guess what the casino dealer is holding. And if you’re able to do this, you could gain an edge on the house in blackjack!