The Fundamental Rules of Blackjack

The objective of Blackjack is very easy to understand: You have to achieve a total larger than the dealer’s total without exceeding 21. You are playing directly against the dealer and the other players at the table play no part in your game.

You have relatively few decisions to make when you play Blackjack. All you have to think about are your cards and the cards of the dealer. If you exceed 21 you bust and busting means you have lost.

This is how a typical game goes:

• A card is dealt face up to each participant and then the dealer gets one. However, the dealer gets his card face down and this is known as the hole card.
• Each player is now dealt a second card face up.
• Each player in turn, beginning from the dealer’s left, has to decide whether another card is worth drawing.
• The dealer continues to draw cards to complete his hand after all the players have completed their hands.

You will win the game provided that:

• Your total is greater than the dealer’s total number
• The dealer exceeds 21 and goes bust

If you and the dealer end up with the same total then the hand is called a stand-off and you neither win nor lose. You do lose, however, if you ‘bust’ or exceed 21, or the dealer’s total is higher than yours, but is 21 or less.

Fundamental Strategy

The fundamental Blackjack strategy is knowing when to take out insurance, give up, double down, split, stand or hit. This strategy is based on a set of rules arrived at by statistical analysis, so despite the name, there’s nothing too fundamental involved. In each card combination, the fundamental strategy offers, over a long playing period, the move to make which will result in the optimal possibility of achieving a win.

If you play strictly to the rules you will find that the fundamental strategy is at its most effective. For example, to hit and stand is just as vital in the game as to split and double down. But in your strategy, the most vital decisive aspect in any given hand is to first look at the dealer’s up card.

Any hand can take a hit securely, without the worry of busting, if it holds eleven points or under. Therefore any hand with eleven points or under should always be hit. However, you should also occasionally double down or split on these hands.

Remember that if you are dealt an Ace, it can be counted either as a one or as an eleven value card and during the course of the game it can change from one to eleven as you choose.

A hand totaling seventeen points or more should never be hit. A soft 17, meaning that it includes an ace card, and for the total it has been considered an eleven, is the only exception to this rule.

When to Hit and when to Stand

The following is the fundamental hit and stand strategy:

• Anything under twelve, hit.
• Anything above sixteen, stand.

Assuming you hold twelve or sixteen one of the two following moves should be made:

• If the dealer’s card lies between seven and Ace (eleven), then hit.
• I the dealer’s up card is under seven, then stand.

Soft totals: To hit and stand:

• An Ace and another value card comprise soft totals. Remember that an Ace can be considered an eleven or one.

If you don’t hold a ten value card but you do have an Ace, then:

• If the soft total totals seventeen or under, then hit.
• If the soft total totals seventeen or under and the dealer holds a four or five, then double.
• If the soft total is nineteen or twenty, then stand.

When to double down:
In the above section, we discussed the strategy for doubling down for a soft total. Deciding to double down should be based on the following strategy:

• If your hand has a total below eight, then never double down.
• If you hold an eleven, then always double down.
• When the dealer has cards between two to nine and you have a ten, then double down.

When to split:
If you wish to split, base it on the following rudimentary rules:

• With eights and Aces, always split.
• With fours, fives and ten value cards, never split.

The Reasons for Playing Blackjack

Why play blackjack and not other casino games? What makes blackjack different from other games played in a casino?

Clearly, the aim of the owners of casino games is to make money out of them. In order to ensure that this does happen, online casinos provide random based games played according to “independent trial processes”, in mathematical jargon. The idea behind this is that the odds for any wager stay the same independent of anything which may have happened in the dice’s previous rolls or spins.

Roulette is a good example. The odds against any number winning are thirty-seven to one. Let us assume that number seven has just come up. The next spin of the wheel still keeps the odds of winning on number seven at thirty-seven to one. The fact is that even if the number seven did turn up winning even two, three or four times in a row, the odds that the next wheel spin would win with a seven are still thirty-seven to one.

Why? The ball in the roulette wheel has no memory at all. The ball simply is not aware that the last winning number was seven. There is no such thing as a number being ‘about to win’ because each spin is a stand-alone independent event. Notwithstanding anything that has happened on previous spins of the wheel, the number seven retains the identical chance of winning on the next spin as any other number.

Armed with this information the casino owners and the game’s developers understood how to keep the edge against the form of online betting. In fact it is simple. Winning wagers are paid at odds that are a little smaller than the permanent odds that gamblers are faced with when any number is bet on. The odds against number seven, or any other number in fact, being able to win, are permanently thirty-seven to one. You get paid by the casino on the assumption you will win thirty five dollars for each dollar wagered.

The permanent winning odds of winning a wager, namely, thirty-seven to one, is different from the casino payoff odds, namely, thirty-five to one, by the casino’s edge. Out of every thirty-eight chips in the instance of roulette, the casino is likely to make a winning of two chips, which is placed by the participant, or in other words, the casino has a 5.26 percent mathematical edge.

Independent trial procedures of casino games all have one attribute in common, that is, from a mathematical point of view, in a fair game, the casino’s advantage in the game cannot be beaten by any online gambling or playing system. Over the long term, a participant will end up losing more cash than winning, which is constantly a negative anticipation.

What was not so simple to calculate was how to give the casino an edge when blackjack was being invented. No computers were around at that time to make an analysis of each hand’s precise percentages.

So the rules for playing were instituted and developed by trial and error and these were integrated with the dexterity or lack of players’ playing skills. The results were established over the course of time to make sure the casino had a winning money game. Much more precise than the player’s insights was the advent of computer-analyzed playing strategies.

Any astute blackjack player has the ability to knock down the casino’s advantage to about half a percent by applying these precise playing strategies. It indicates that for every blackjack hundred dollars wagered, a player is about to make a loss of only fifty cents. In my opinion it was not the aim of the best online casinos to get that close.

Blackjack differs from other casino games by the fact that dependent trial procedures provide the base for blackjack. This means that moving from one hand to the next does not provide any constant. Depending on the card played in former rounds, they change. Assuming your game was a single pack game and you played four aces, what is the chance of getting online blackjack on the following hand? As there are no longer any aces remaining to be dealt from the pack, it must be zero. However, if you did observe that no aces were actually played in the first hands, the chance of obtaining blackjack rises, as among the cards still to be dealt are the four aces. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that in contrast to the dice or roulette ball, the cards maintain a recall and the odds from one hand to the next are not the same.

There is another element that distinguishes blackjack from other casino games: it is the participants who have to decide about playing after they have made their bet. Making this decision either raises or diminishes the winning hand’s probability. Thus, the standard of a blackjack player’s playing skill definitely influences his or her winning chances.

So why play blackjack at all? The answer is that you can win because of the reasons given above and because this game gives the skilled player a good shot at winning.

Doubling Down

The majority of hands you get dealt in blackjack are losing hands – eventually you will have to face this fact. On an average, you are targeted to win only forty-seven hands out of every hundred and thus lose fifty-three hands you play. So how do you win if those are the odds facing you as a blackjack player?

One way to contend with the casino’s edge in blackjack is to get to know when it is worth doubling down. This playing possibility was actually introduced into the game as a way for participants to reduce the casino’s advantage. But it is the player who has to decide when, and most crucially, when not to use the doubling down strategy.

To be able to use the right double down playing strategy allows a blackjack player either to convert a hand loss into a complete winner or to reduce the loss in a situation where he is losing. It may seem rather complicated, but these are two significant aspects that blackjack participants should try and understand so that you can recognize when pair splitting and doubling down can be used to your advantage to help you win.