Blackjack iPhone App

The Application

This Blackjack application can be used on the Apple iPhone and Apple iPod Touch and assists a player in counting cards. There are four card counting strategies you can choose to use with this app: High-Low, Hi-Opt I, Hi-Opt II, and Omega 2. You merely touch the right button for every card that is dealt in order to input the right value and the app calculates the true count for you while also displaying the running count. You needn’t even take your iPhone out of your pocket while counting. The app can be run in stealth mode, in which the screen is switched off. Using High-Low for instance, tap the right side of the screen for tens and aces, and the left side for cards valued 2-6. You don’t need to visually check the true count, because the app will cause the phone to vibrate when it’s time to bet aggressively.

Using this App

Although you wouldn’t want to get caught doing it, card counting itself is not illegal. However, the use of devices to calculate odds while gambling is considered a felony in most offline casinos and can lead to expulsion or even arrest. The iPhone card counting application can help you arrive at a more accurate true count than when counting manually. While it could get you into more trouble than it’s worth in an offline casino, you can still have a lot of fun with it, practicing your card counting skills or pulling a prank on some friends who haven’t come across this app yet.

The application can be found and downloaded via iTunes.

Using Devices

The history of the use of wearable and handheld calculating devices in casinos again begins with Edward Thorp who took the roulette calculator he invented with his friend and fellow mathematician Claude Shannon to Las Vegas after testing the cigarette packet-sized device repeatedly in Shannon’s lab, and published about their findings some time afterward. They also considered creating a blackjack device, but decided not to since Thorp preferred counting mentally. The inventor Keith Taft did create such a device, however, and in 1985 a devices law was first signed in Nevada to ban such devices from casinos.