- How To Win At Blackjack — And Walk Out Of The Casino Alive ...
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- How To Win In Blackjack
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- How To Win At The Casino
One of the popular myths surrounding blackjack in casinos is that the average player can get an edge over the casino if he just plays his hands correctly. In other words, a lot of people think that you can win at blackjack just by mastering basic strategy.
Blackjack is a war. It is you versus the casino, either live or online. To win the war you must have a battle plan that covers all aspects of the battle: card counting, basic strategy, money management. In the blackjack world, we call this a system.
But basic strategy isn’t enough to win at blackjack in most instances.
You need an additional strategy – an advantage technique – to get an actual edge over the casino in blackjack.
- If the dealer does have blackjack, you will win your side bet but lose your original bet. This may get you back some money in the short-term, but long-term the bet makes the casino money. Beginner players have no way of knowing if the dealer has a card worth ten points face-down under an ace.
- The online casino industry is huge which provides various online casinos to win real money. You have become a member of these online Casino sectors to earn real amount. With no doubts, you will be able to part of these online casinos and start earning money through the Internet. So, you will be able to win money in the Blackjack game via Internet.
- The best method to figure out which version you prefer is to play both. You will find 2-deck blackjack referred to as “pitch blackjack”, and 6-deck blackjack as “shoe blackjack”. Blackjack Variations. Like other age-old table games, you’ll be able to find a plethora of blackjack variations at your online or live casino.
This might mean counting cards, but there are other ways, too. I’ve written extensively about counting cards in blackjack in the past.
But today I want to take a different approach.
Here’s how to win at blackjack WITHOUT counting cards.
The First Step to Winning at Blackjack Is Mastering Basic Strategy
In blackjack, you have a finite number of potential situations to deal with. The dealer can only have one of the following face-up cards: ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10.
And you can only have one of a handful of potential totals, starting with a total of 3 and going up to a total of 21.
And many of those situations offer obvious strategic decisions. You’d always stand with a total of 21, for example. It’s an automatic winner. You’ll also always stand with a total of 20. You have far too many ways to bust in this situation to ever make it worth your while to hit in that situation.
The same holds true for a lot of your smaller totals, too. Any hand totaling 11 or lower is impossible to bust, so you’ll always at least hit in that situation.
But for many hands, you must compare what you’re holding with the dealer’s face up card to determine the playing decision with the highest expected value. In a lot of these situations, your expected value is negative. Imagine having a hard total of 16 against a dealer’s face up 10, for example. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in that situation.
But, in those situations, some plays have a lower negative expectation than others. Your job is to make the play that loses the least amount of money in the long run.
Luckily, basic strategy is easy to memorize and implement. When you use basic strategy for every blackjack decision, you reduce the house edge to its theoretically lowest possible number. In most casinos and under most rules, this means that the basic strategy player faces a house edge of 1% or less.
You still can’t win in the long run with a house edge of 1% or even 0.5%.
But your probability of being a winner in the short run improve dramatically.
An average blackjack player with no knowledge of basic strategy is probably giving up between 2% and 4% of their house edge.
Advantage Play Techniques and Blackjack
An advantage play technique is a way of playing a casino game that gives you an edge over the casino. The most common advantage play technique is counting cards, but that’s not your only option. You can win at blackjack without counting cards, even though it’s probably the easiest way to get an edge.
How does card counting in blackjack work?
Counting cards is just a means of roughly tracking the ratio of high cards (aces and 10s) to low cards in the deck. When the deck has a higher proportion of high cards, the player is more likely to get a blackjack. That’s a 2-card hand that totals 21, and players love this hand because it pays off at 3 to 2 odds.
Bet $100 on a hand of blackjack, get dealt a natural, and you’ll get a payout of $150.
Card counters raise the size of their bets when their probability of getting a blackjack goes up based on the count.
And counting cards isn’t hard, either.
You just subtract 1 from the count every time you see a 10 or an ace.
You add 1 to the count every time you see a card worth between 2 and 6 points.
If you’re playing in a game with multiple decks, you adjust that running count to account for the extra decks of cards in play. That’s as simple as estimating how many decks are still in the shoe and dividing the running count by that number.
For example, if the running count is +8, and you estimate that there are 4 decks left in the shoe, the true count is only +2.
Why does this matter?
Because you raise your bets proportionally related to the count. You’ll bet more when the count is +8 than you would if the count was +4.
Not everyone wants to learn how to count cards, though.
You Can Win at Blackjack Without Counting Cards by Getting Lucky
The house edge in blackjack is a long-term phenomenon. In other words, your short-term results might look like anything. You’re mathematically expected to lose between 0.5% and 1% of your action at
the table in the long run.
But, in the short run, anything can happen.
So, one way to win at blackjack without counting cards is to keep your session short and walk away when you’ve won a specific amount of money. This is called having a “win goal.”
Most gamblers who use win goals set a win goal based on a percentage of their bankroll. For example, you might sit down at a $10 blackjack table with a $200 bankroll for the session. Your win goal might be 50% of that $200 – or $100. In that case, if you ever get to a point where you have $300 or more in chips, you walk away from the table and book your win.
Since blackjack is a negative expectation game, you’ll have more losing sessions than winning sessions over time.
But, unless something weird happens, you WILL inevitably have some winning sessions.
Another Way to Win Is to Bet Really Big and Negotiate Better Rules
Don Johnson is a living example of a blackjack player who won really big at the game without counting cards. He won over $6 million on blackjack in a single evening. Here’s how he did it:
To start with, he had mastered basic strategy. Everyone who’s ever been interviewed about him said that he played perfect cards. If you want to duplicate Johnson’s success, start with mastering basic strategy.
The next thing he did was negotiate with the casino. High rollers like Johnson, who bet $10,000 or more per hand, don’t have to play by the same rules as the average casino-goer.
It’s common for high rollers to get loss rebates. This means that the casino offers a player a discount on his losses. For example, if the casino is offering a 10% discount on your losses, and you lose $100,000, you only really lose $90,000 because of the rebate.
How To Win At Blackjack — And Walk Out Of The Casino Alive ...
Some casinos also give high rollers bonus money to gamble with up front just to get them started gambling. Online casinos do this all the time, but brick and mortar casinos save this kind of treatment for their higher rollers.
Don Johnson negotiated a 20% loss rebate on his action the night he won all that money in Atlantic City.
On top of that, he negotiated specific blackjack rules that reduced the house edge to a tiny percentage. They played with a hand-shuffled, 6-deck show, and the dealer was forced to stand (rather than hit) a total of soft 17.
In total, all the rules changes wound up making this blackjack game a game with a house edge of only 0.25% — making it almost an even money game.
But on top of that, because of his loss rebate/discount, he was only risking 80 cents for every dollar he stood to win.
He had to buy in for a million dollars, but he was guaranteed a 20% discount on his first $500,000 in losses. Also, he wasn’t required to lose the entire million. He could lose the $500,000, quit, and get his $100,000 rebate – leaving him with “only” a $400,000 loss.
How To Win At Blackjack - Win Playing Blackjack Without Card ...
On the other hand, if he started winning – which he did – he could just keep playing.
And that’s how he won over $6 million without counting cards.
Other Advantage Techniques in Blackjack
Counting cards isn’t the only strategy for getting an edge at the game of blackjack. Advantage players use other techniques, some of which are well-known.
Dealer tells is one of these techniques. This describes the tendency that a dealer has to give some kind of physical clue after looking at his or her down card. The savvy blackjack player can then adjust his decisions based on the information he gleaned from the dealer tell.
Shuffle tracking is another advantage technique. The idea is that even though decks of cards get shuffled and randomized, they don’t get completely randomized.
If you can keep up with clusters of cards that are heavy with 10s and aces, you can raise the size of your bets when the dealer gets close to using those cards.
Hole carding is similar to dealer tells. It’s when a dealer accidentally reveals his actual down card when he looks at it to check for blackjack. The advantage of knowing which 2 cards the dealer has is obvious from a strategic perspective.
Other advantage play techniques exist that advantage players don’t share in public, too.
Conclusion
Counting cards is definitely the easiest way to win at blackjack, but you can without this technique. It’s harder to do, though, and I recommend learning to count cards if you’re serious about becoming a blackjack winner.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.Blackjack is the most popular casino table game of all drawing in countless numbers of hungry players both in the brick and mortar casino, and in online casinos.
Are you a player who is knowledgeable about blackjack strategy? In this article, we detail the basic blackjack strategy charts and provide you with other handy tips to give you the best possible chance of leaving the casino – physical or virtual – in profit.
Basic Blackjack Terms
As with every classic casino table game, there is a lot of lingo thrown about which might sound double Dutch to novice blackjack players. What on earth does it all mean?
Ultimately, you will become more familiar with all the blackjack lingo as you develop your game, whether that is in the brick and mortar casino or at an online casino.
Nonetheless, we have listed some handy basic blackjack terminology below:
- Stand. The player stays with the cards they were dealt
- Hit. The player is dealt another card, and they can be dealt more if they wish. If the total of the cards exceeds 21 at any point, the player is bust and loses the hand
- Surrender. This is where the player gives up half his bet to forfeit the hand
- Double down. The player doubles their original bet and is dealt one more card, and it can only be one
- Split. If a player is dealt a pair (two 4s for example), or two ten-valued cards, such as a queen and a king, the player can split those cards into two different hands. The player is then dealt another card to each hand. The player must make a second bet of equal value to the first to use the split
- Hard hand. A hand without an ace
- Soft hand. A hand with an ace
Blackjack Strategy Chart
The first thing to get to grips with is ‘basic strategy’ which is probably the most essential ingredient of blackjack strategy.
The basic strategy detailed below is based on blackjack games played with 4 or more decks. Essentially, the basic strategy is a template which shows you the best course of action to take based on the cards dealt.
The below chart: Blackjack Basic Strategy Chart
More Blackjack Tips
The tables above are based on the standard blackjack rulesets. However, there are many different variations of blackjack both in physical casinos and in the online casino landscape.
These variations have different rulesets, so be mindful of the fact that some of the strategies above may not directly apply to the particular blackjack game you are playing.
In fact, the most useful thing you can do is check the specific ruleset of the blackjack game you are playing as soon as you sit down at the table.
Here are some general pointers and questions to keep in mind when playing your particular game of blackjack:
- How many decks are used?
- Are surrenders permitted and are they early or late ones?
- Are there any restrictions on double downs?
- Are there rules regarding splits?
- Is the dealer obliged to hit on a soft 17?
Here are some extra tips which relate to any blackjack game:
- Do not take on any side bets
- Don’t take insurance. This is a side bet which can be placed if the dealer’s face card is an Ace to ‘insure’ you against the dealer having a blackjack. In reality, the odds are stacked against you and it is not worth taking this bet up
- If it is not possible to split your pair, treat your pair as a hard hand
Basic Blackjack Strategy Guide
The charts above may look a bit intimidating and confusing if you are seeking a simple strategy to take to the blackjack table. However, there is a simpler method you can use to memorise the general points of the blackjack strategy above.
Also, you won’t be surprised to hear that in brick and mortar casinos you won’t exactly be welcomed with open arms into a casino if you rock up with these charts in hand.
The majority of casinos simply won’t allow you to enter with these kinds of guides. So, here are simplified guides of the charts above:
Player’s Hand Dealer’s Upfacing Card
HARD | 2 – 6 | 7 – A |
| 4 – 8 | H | H |
| 9 | D | H |
| 10 – 11 | D with more than dealer | D with more than dealer |
| 12 – 16 | S | H |
| 17 – 21 | S | S |
Player’s Hand Dealer’s Upfacing Card
SOFT | 2 – 6 | 7 – A |
| 13 – 15 | H | H |
| 16 – 18 | D | H |
| 19 – 21 | D | S |
Player’s Hand Dealer’s Upfacing Card
SPLITS | 2 – 6 | 7 – A |
| 22, 33, 66, 77, 99 | Split | Don’t split |
| 88, A | Split | Split |
| 44, 55, 1010 | Don’t Split | Don’t Split |
How To Win In Blackjack
Extra tips:
- Surrender 16 when the dealer has a 10
- If strategy says to double but it’s not permitted, hit. If you have a soft 18, stand
Are You Ready To Master Blackjack?
Blackjack strategy is all about being mindful of the best action to take. If you memorise the main points of the charts above, you will be well on your way to mastering the wonderful world of blackjack.
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There are advanced techniques which you can use, chief of which is blackjack card counting, which is essentially a method of tracking the cards which are dealt. However, this technique will not work with online blackjack games, as the virtual deck is shuffled for every single hand.
The best thing you can do to begin is to be fully aware of the specific ruleset relating to the blackjack game you are playing.
How To Win At The Casino
That being said, the majority, if not all, of the information in the charts will be applicable to any blackjack game. We are confident in saying that you will be thanking us for these magical blackjack charts!
Are you a blackjack buff? Are there any specific strategies which you use at the blackjack table? Comment below and let us know!