This morning I started in on how it is time to go back to the basics of blackjack. Basics are important. Think of them as the foundation for your blackjack strategy. And basic strategy should be the basis of all of your blackjack strategy.
Also this morning I talked about basic strategy. I said that it was only effective in lowering the house edge to 0.5% if you played it perfectly. But I never said why.
Basic strategy is usually shown in a chart. All of the dealer
Between the news, the blackjack apps and my thoughts on blackjack misconceptions, I have been rather neglectful of blackjack strategy. And we cannot have that now can we?
I figured the best way to jump back into blackjack strategy was to look at the basics again. Even experienced blackjack players should go back and look at the basics. For one thing it never hurts to see where you came from. Who knows, maybe you forgot something. And keeping firm on the basics helps to keep your more advanced strategies solid.
In other life, as I like to put it, I worked in retail and a lot of our training was
In the game of blackjack there are three types of hands: hard hands, soft hands and pairs. Each of these types of blackjack hands has a different type of strategy. This is because each type of hand has something about it that makes it different.
Hence, different types.
Moving on, we are going to look at hard hands and blackjack strategy for hard hands today.
In blackjack, hard hands are the most basic of hands. The two cards that make them up are not worth the same value each and neither card has a flexible value. Because of those simple little facts, hard hands are the easiest hands to play
Okay, this is more about a play used in blackjack rather than some romantical notion of giving in to desires hidden beneath the surface.
Players in blackjack have one of the most awesome ways to exit a round of blackjack in which the odds are just too high against them to win: surrender. Sometimes the underdog stays under. And if it looks like a round is just not in your favor, you need to get out.
With this blackjack rule, players can give up half of their original wager, keep the other half and exit the round. There is no other cost for exiting a round other than that half of your original wager.
Not too bad considering blackjack and poker are the only casino games that give players a way out of an unfavorable round
Blackjack players, you are in luck. You are the players of the one casino game in which players have the best shot at meeting, it not over-coming, the house edge.
Congratulations to you and your blackjack strategy.
The reason for this is because this is the one casino game whose strategy can truly fight the house edge. In fact, there are two main pieces of strategy that players can use to bring that house edge down: basic strategy and card counting.
Basic strategy can be used in casino blackjack and online blackjack. This piece of strategy comes to players in the form of a chart with the all of the dealer
Some players think that working in games that allow the dealer to hit a soft 17 is good for their blackjack strategy.
They would be mistaken.
Sure, on the surface a dealer hitting a soft 17 sounds like a good thing. Players might think that the dealer has a better shot of busting because he is so close to 21. But what these players are forgetting is that Ace. The Ace that makes that soft 17 soft can be reduced to a 1 if the dealer hits and receives a card that would cause him to bust.
Because of that Ace, dealers can actually reduce that 17 to an 8 and hit to rebuild a stronger hand. He might then wind up with a hard 17 or higher that stands a shot of beating the player. Just like how an Ace can benefit a player, so too can it benefit the dealer. A soft 17 can be rebuilt whereas a hard 17 has a better shot of being beat by the player.
With that ability to rebuild his soft 17, the house
Sure a 2 does not seem like that big of a threat. It is a tiny card, the tiniest card in a game of blackjack. But when facing down a dealer
This morning I talked about a house rule to work into your blackjack strategy in which the house rule actually favors the player. Well, there is another one. This particular house rules allows players to double down after they have they have split a pair.
The step by step breakdown of how this house rule works goes like this:
First you have to be dealt a pair. You then choose to split that pair and up your wager accordingly. Let
This is the last of the pair splitting post, I swear. But what would a mutli-part discussion on pair splitting blackjack strategy be without a post devoted to pairs of 8s? It would be incomplete, that is what. So here it is blackjack strategy meets a pair of 8s.
Unlike pairs of 5s and 10s, and like a pair of Aces, a pair of 8s should always be split.
Why do you not split a pair of 8s?
Let me ask you what is 8 + 8? The answer is 16. So a pair of 8s is the same thing as a hard 16. And we all know how much we hate that hand. Nothing worse than a stiff hand, and a hard 16 is the worst. It is not high enough to win with, and it is also too high to hit.
In my opinion a hard 16 is the worst hand to have in blackjack. The only way you can win with it is if the dealer busts because there are five totals that are higher than your 16, all of which the dealer can stand on.
If that alone is not enough to convince you not to split your pair of 8s, ask yourself which you would rather have: one 16 that does not have a decent shot at winning. Or would you rather have two hands that each start with 8?
You should have said two hands that start with 8. This is because, while the chances are not stellar, you do have a better chance of building a stronger hand by starting each hand with an 8 than you do of winning with a hard 16.
Splitting a pair of 8s is on a basic strategy chart, which is legal to use in brick and mortar casinos and in online blackjack. But you have to use it, to make it a part of your blackjack strategy, in order for it to be effective. That includes splitting a pair of 8s when it tells you to. And besides it is just good blackjack strategy to split 8s.
I was thinking some more about commonly made blackjack mistakes, and I got to thinking more about pair splitting and blackjack strategy. I know I mentioned how some pairs should be split and some should not, that is just how blackjack strategy is supposed to be.
Blackjack players just do not seem to apply any blackjack strategy to their game when it comes to pairs. They can usually be divided into two ways of dealing with pairs: they either split everything just for the sake of splitting a pair, or they play their pairs like hard hands. And both ways are wrong and not good blackjack strategy. Not to mention it hurts a player