Can a Smartphone App Make You a Blackjack King?

Bill Weir, C. Michael Kim, David Miller, Justin Bare & Mark Monroy

Blackjack often ranks as the most popular table game at your local casino, because of all the options available on the casino floor, Blackjack is the one that gives the house the smallest advantage over the gambler - especially if the gambler is employing proper strategy. And if the gambler knows how to count cards?

Movies such as Rain Man, The Hangover and 21 have introduced the concept of card counting to the world, a strategy often cited as being developed by Dr. Edward O. Thorp in the early 1960s. The concept is simple, even if the details are not. By employing various strategies of tracking which cards are dealt during the game, and adjusting your bets accordingly to the shifting odds, a player is theoretically able to eliminate the house advantage and rack up a tidy profit.

Nowadays, there are several smartphone apps that claim to teach a user how to employ these card counting strategies to become a Blackjack King. The tagline for the popular app BlackJack Domination is "It's Not Gambling If You Know You're Going to Win." Heady words. We decided to test the app ourselves, in an improvised casino on the ABC News floor, and spoke to Mike Aponte and Andy Bloch, former members of the infamous MIT Blackjack Team, to get their thoughts on the efficacy of a smartphone app in the quest to improve your odds and become a winning Blackjack player.