It's not impossible. Counting 6 deck shoes is how most people do it nowadays, because that's what most of the games are. I read a book teaching how to card count and the various strategies. I tried it a few times, but never noticed a big enough difference to make it worth the effort.

The way to count a 6 deck shoe is to practice with 6 decks at home, and essentially get good at looking at a stack of cards and being able to tell about how many decks are left (it's not as hard as you'd think). You then divide that number by your count and that's how you'd get the count. Although I always found it easier to just keep a true count, and not divide, just kind of look at the decks and keep in mind the count against the remaining cards.

The problem with doing it in 6 deck shoes is that very rarely does the count get high enough for a sustained amount of time to where you can bet big enough times in a row to get the advantage.

Also, it was alluded to on here earlier, the count is just about increasing your odds, and even the most sophisticated count only increases your odds to something like 53%. Your odds are 47% just by playing correct strategy and not counting.

As explained to me, if you're playing once every now and then, and you see maybe a few hundred hands every couple of months, it's just not worth it. The difference between 47% odds and 53% odds over something like 300 hands is going to be miniscule and not worth it. It's only worth it if you're grinding it out over time. Because that percent difference over the course of 10s of thousands of hands makes a difference.

So, unless you're prepared to sit at a casino for hours on end and days at a time, I wouldn't waste the time counting. Just learn the right strategy so when you do drunkenly go to the casino once in awhile, you know what you're doing.

This post was edited on 10/25/16 at 4:50 pm