• Free House Of Blackjack
• 4 Tips To Improve Your Blackjack Skills Without Losing Big
• Blackjack How To Bet
• Best Way To Win At Blackjack
• Reference

I analyze all sorts of blackjack strategies and rank them for your fun and profit.

In every single movie about Las Vegas and the gangsters that run it, some character says to another character, “The house always wins.”

Yet that doesn’t stop all of us from trying to beat the casino. Specifically blackjack. We all think we’re better than blackjack.

1. Too much emphasis has been placed on the rules of blackjack. These state, to win you must beat the dealer. You can do this by getting a natural blackjack or if the dealer busts. You can also win the game if you get closer to 21 than the dealer without going over. So what players usually do is memorize the basic blackjack strategy.
2. The advanced advantage player comes with a full arsenal of methods, ready to beat the house with whichever opportunity is the most profitable at the casino he is visiting. While blackjack and baccarat are the mainstay of most casinos internationally, the advanced advantage player views every wager as a potential opportunity.

We’re not, of course. But we think we are. I compiled this list of 11 popular strategies for beating blackjack and ranked them here, starting with the least effective and building toward the most effective.

11 Superstitions

Played well, blackjack becomes a game of skill in a casino full of games of chance. Studies of millions of computer-generated hands have yielded a strategy for when to hit, when to stand, when to double, when to split. This strategy can take the house edge down to about 0.5 percent in a six-deck game - and lower in games with fewer decks.

I’ve seen tons of blackjack superstitions. None of these actually do anything — but either do lucky shirts, avoiding black cats, turning off the light switch three times to keep Charlie from dying, or any of the other day-to-day superstitions people swear by.

So it’s not going to change your blackjack fortunes if you violate your superstitions — even if you let new players enter during a shoe… you don’t bother saying “Nice hit” to someone who gets a six on a 15… you wish yourself good luck on your first-card ace… you tap twice instead of scratching the felt to hit… or forget your lucky cowboy hat. Gamblor is immune to superstition.

10 Gut feelings

It seems that most people who sit down at a blackjack table have a rough understanding of textbook blackjack strategy. At least on the most basic level. The “gut feelings” strategy is a mix of playing with basic blackjack strategy but also having feelings. For example: “I’m going to stay on this 16, I just know the next card is a 10.” (I’ve seen my friend Bruce almost attack people for that statement. More than once.)

The problem here, from a mathematical perspective — aka my favorite perspective — is that blackjack strategy is constructed to give you an edge if you adhere to it without deviation and play for a long, long time. It’s like a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters — eventually they’re going to write A Tale of Two Cities. But as soon as you deviate from the strategy for a gut feeling, that’s like telling your monkeys that they’re now trying to accidentally write Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life.

9 Easy card counting

I have three different levels of card counting on this list, because not all card counting is created equal. Some methods are so basic that you can learn them in 15 minutes. Some take months or years of practice.

Easy card counting might give you a small bump. One strategy like this is called ace/five — that’s where you start with the number zero, add one for every five dealt and subtract one for every ace. If the count is more than two, you double your previous bet. If the count is less than two, you bet the minimum. It’s simple, and marginally effective across a large data set.

Another easy card counting style is the famed “I feel like I’ve seen a lot of big cards” strategy. This is the one where you’re paying like 80 percent attention, but you feel like you’ve seen a lot of big cards come out already so you scale back your bets. This somewhat resembles wearing shorts outside in February because you feel like there have been so many snowy days that some sun is due.

8 Avoiding elderly female Korean dealers

This isn’t necessarily a winning strategy but more of an “avoid losing” strategy. Simply put: If you stand up and walk away every time there’s a dealer switch and an elderly female Korean assassin takes over your table, it will probably save you thousands of dollars in your lifetime.

7 Bet incrementing

Bet incrementing is like card counting without the card counting. It’s more like streak counting. There are different systems but they all basically come down to this: If you’re winning, keep increasing your bet; if you’re losing, don’t increase your bet.

This certainly helps avoid the break-even rut that blackjack can fall into — where you sit there for hours and never swing more than 25 percent or so from your buy-in. With incrementing, you’re either blowing money quickly or raking it in quickly.

But it’s not really a system to beat the house… just one to help you channel your luck. Incrementing coupled with counting can actually increase your winning percentage (or, more accurately, shave a small amount off the house edge). But incrementing without counting is like having sexual relations with multiple people and eschewing condoms until you catch an STD, then going back to condoms again.

6 Cheating

I put this in the middle of the list because it can go either way. If you spend hours going from casino to casino searching for a rookie dealer who might occasionally expose the very bottom burn card, that’s ineffective and inefficient cheating.

If you hide cards in your sleeve or try to subtlety double your bet when you get a good hand, those are more effective cheating strategies. Sure, you’ll end up getting dragged into a windowless room in the bowels of the casino and getting beat — fittingly — with a blackjack. But you’ll win some serious cash in the process.

5 Shuffle Tracking

In most of the big Vegas casinos you can’t do this anymore — the dealer doesn’t shuffle, he just puts the cards in a machine that automatically shuffles them. (Or, if you’re more of a conspiracy theorist, that sequences them to make sure you all get screwed.)

But if you’re playing blackjack and the dealer is manually shuffling, this actually can be moderately effective. You have to pay detailed attention to the sequence that the cards come out, because you’re looking for clusters. Maybe you try to remember the number and suit of the two cards that lead up to every ace. You expect that, during a human shuffle, some of those clusters will stay together — and you might have a little edge in knowing when the aces are coming.

It requires a lot of concentration, but might actually help you make a better decision on one or two hands every two or three shoes. It’s a long-term play. Continuing the analogy motif of this list, it’s like getting three green shells on the first lap in Mario Kart 64 and holding them indefinitely, hoping that you’ll be in a situation eventually where they’ll benefit you.

4 Basic strategy and time

Basic strategy is the calling card of blackjack — if you play with proper strategy, blackjack gives you the best odds in the casino over time. (People forget the “over time” aspect. We’re a culture that freaks out over small sample sizes. They’re the only thing keeping Around the Horn on the air.)

And over time, basic strategy really can make a difference — infinite computer simulations have proven it. But you need to have the discipline to hit 12 and 13 against a 2… hit soft 18 against a 9, 10 or ace… split 8s against a 10 even if you’re on a cold streak… and refuse to take even money for blackjacks. Every single time you play, with no exceptions, for your entire life.

3 Medium-difficulty card counting

This is the kind of card counting that the common man can learn and try to employ. You don’t need an entire team of MIT-educated math geniuses to work as spotters and helpers and trainers to make it work. (It’d be hard to get that team together anyway, what with them knowing they’d be whitewashed if a movie was made about your adventures.)

These medium strategies are more advanced than the counting strategies I talked about earlier. Here you might try something like the current “hot” counting style, called the Zen Count. (You subtract one for an ace; add one for a 2, 3 or 7; add two for a 4, 5 or 6; and subtract two for a ten.) This requires practice and concentration, *might* get you kicked out of a casino but probably not, and will give you more of an advantage than you’re used to.

Of course, if you’re doing this, you can’t really drink — so that’s a $6-$32 per hour loss, depending on the efficiency of your waitress and your willingness to consume Long Island iced teas in the middle of the afternoon. So make sure to factor that in.

2 Hard card counting team effort

These are the card counting systems you would see in movies like 21 and others. (No, I can’t actually name others, I just assume there are others.) Basically, you and your genius friends develop an advanced card counting strategy. Then you all watch and card count different tables and signal each other when a table is about to start paying off. The money guy goes to that table, bets a ton, then gets the hell out as soon as the pit bosses start whispering to each other and casting furtive glances in your direction.

On the downside, this is the kind of thing that casinos are on the lookout for and that might only exist in fantasy at this point. On the upside, if you do choose this method, you get to wear cool disguises and play different characters at the table! So if you and your friends from differential calculus class started an improv troupe, you were born for this.

(Side note: I bet that improv troupe would have a kitschy name like “RDRR” or “Nothing Derivative” or “Kristen Cavalieri’s Principle.”)

1 Autistic brother

Show me the money! Feel the need for speed! I want the truth! You’re glib!

—

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Most people who have been reading about casino gambling for any length of time already know that blackjack is one of the only opportunities you have to get a mathematical edge over the casino.

Not everyone understand exactly why this is, though, so the purpose of this post is to explain why you can beat blackjack – even though most casino games are unbeatable.

Understand that All Casino Games Have a House Edge

Casinos stay in business because they offer games to the gambling public where they have a mathematical advantage. Every casino game has this advantage, and, in the parlance of our times, this advantage is called “the house edge.”

How does the house edge work?

It’s just the difference between the odds of winning and the payout odds for the bet.

The easiest example to understand is in roulette.

If you place a single-number bet in roulette, your odds of winning are 37 to 1. You have 37 ways to lose that bet and only one way to win that bet.

When you do win, the payout on that bet is 35 to 1. The payout is lower than the odds of winning, so that difference – the difference between 37 to 1 and 35 to 1 is the house edge.

When you convert that to a percentage, it’s 5.26%, which is the average amount of each bet the casino expects to win from you in the long run.

With all casino games, the casino has a single subtle rule that creates this edge. In roulette, that rule is the one that puts a green 0 and a green 00 on the roulette wheel.

In real money blackjack, the house gets its edge by making you play your hand before the dealer finishes her hand.

It’s that simple. If you bust before the dealer plays her hand, you lose your bet immediately. The dealer is as likely to bust as you are, by the way.

But if the dealer busts, too, it’s not a tie.

You lost that bet when you busted, regardless of what happens later in the hand.

You can still beat blackjack, though.

Blackjack Isn’t Really a Game of Independent Events

When you play roulette, the odds are the same every time you place a bet. No matter what, the same 38 numbers are on the wheel, and you have the same 1/38 probability of a ball landing on a specific number.

But let’s consider a hypothetical:

What if the number got eliminated from the roulette wheel after it had been hit?NNN

Do you see how this would change every probability in the game?

Free House Of Blackjack

Here’s an example:

Suppose you bet on the number 5, and it hits. You win your bet, which is cool, but that ball stays in that spot for now – which changes the probability of hitting a 5 on the next spin. What was a 1/38 probability has changed to a 0 probability.

But all the other probabilities have changed, too – now you only have 37 numbers on the roulette wheel, so the probability of winning a single number bet now has changed from 1/38 to 1/37.

Now suppose five numbers in a row have hit, and they’ve all been filled in.

Now you have a 1/33 probability of winning a single number bet.

If that bet continues to pay off at 35 to 1, you have a clear mathematical advantage over the casino.

Of course, that’s never going to happen, because the casino doesn’t eliminate numbers from the wheel as you play. That’s why I said to think about this hypothetically.

But guess what happens when you play blackjack?

In most blackjack games, the casino doesn’t shuffle the deck after every hand. Any cards that have been dealt are eliminated from the deck, which changes the probability of getting certain outcomes.

That’s a big part of why blackjack is a beatable game.

Taking Advantage of a Gambling Game that Has a Memory

The house advantage in blackjack is notoriously low to begin with if you know how to play correctly. And playing correctly is as easy as memorizing a basic strategy table. I’ve written about basic strategy in multiple previous posts, but to make my point here, you need to understand this:

The house edge for a blackjack game when played with basic strategy is usually only 0.5% or so.

That’s dramatically different from the 5.26% advantage that the casino has when you play roulette.

And you saw how easy it was to turn the casino’s advantage to a player’s advantage in a roulette game just by removing some numbers from the wheel after they hit.

Now, think about the implications in a blackjack game.

4 Tips To Improve Your Blackjack Skills Without Losing Big

Most blackjack wins pay off at even money, but when you get a natural, you get 3 to 2 on your bet.

And, of course, the only way to get a blackjack is with a 10 and an ace.

If you’re playing in a single-deck game where all the aces have already been dealt, your probability of getting a blackjack have dropped to 0. It’s impossible to get a blackjack without aces in the deck.

And every 10 that gets dealt also decreases your probability of getting a natural.

But the good news is this – every time a lower value card gets dealt, your probability of getting a blackjack increases.

Since the cards have been randomized, sometimes the deck will have proportionally more high cards (aces and 10s). Other times, it will have the proportion of high cards to low cards you’d expect. Still other times, the deck will have a higher proportion of low cards to high cards.

If you could raise the size of your bets when you’re likelier to get a natural and lower the size of your bets when you’re less likely to get a blackjack, you could get a mathematical edge over the casino.

And that’s why blackjack is beatable.

I’ll explain the how of it soon, but first, let’s talk about how big an edge you can get and what that means for your wallet.

How Much Money Can a Card Counter Realistically Make in the Long Run?

The best estimates I’ve seen for the kind of edge you can get by counting cards in blackjack is about 1% over the house.

What does this mean in dollars and cents?

Let’s assume you’re able to get in 75 hands per hour and average $10 per bet. That’s $750/hour in action, and if you win 1% of that in the long run, you’re looking at earning $7.50 per hour for your efforts.

That’s right.

If you’re a low stakes card counter, you could probably make more money by getting a job at a fast food restaurant.

But there’s a solution:

Increase your average bet size. If you’re averaging $100 per hand, your hourly “wage” increases to $75 per hour.

That’s more like it.

Just keep this in mind – to avoid going broke, you need a big enough bankroll that you won’t be hurt during your inevitable losing streaks. If you have $500 and are betting $100 per hand, you won’t last long as a card counter.

On the other hand, if you have a bankroll of $100,000, you’re unlikely to go broke betting $100 per hand. It could happen, but the probability drops dramatically. In fact, if you’re comfortable with a higher risk of going broke, you can get by with a bankroll of $40,000 or $50,000.

Isn’t Counting Cards Illegal, Though?

Counting cards is entirely legal. You’re just thinking about the game you’re playing. They can’t outlaw that.

Casinos can restrict you from playing blackjack, though, and they can even trespass you from their property altogether.

How to Learn Card Counting

Learning to count cards is easier than you think. Basically, you’re going to assign a value (usually +1 or -1) to the low cards and the high cards. Your running count then estimates the ratio of high cards to low cards in the deck.

The most important thing about learning how to count cards is to practice at home until you’re so proficient at it that you can do it effortlessly. You must be able to count cards without moving your lips or even looking like you’re concentrating at all.

You don’t want the casinos to know what you’re up to.

Conclusion

Blackjack How To Bet

Are you up for the challenge of learning how to beat blackjack?

Frankly, most people aren’t.

I know how to count cards, and I’ve won some money doing so.

But it’s not a regular activity for me.

Best Way To Win At Blackjack

Don’t feel like that just because the game can be beaten you must be the one to beat it. It’s all right to be a recreational blackjack player who loses less money than the average player.

Reference

What’s not all right with me – and I don’t think it should be okay with you, either – is to ignore basic strategy while you play. I don’t see any reason to give the casino more of a mathematical edge than they already have.