Notes

Basic BlackJack Strategy
Contrary to what many gamblers may think blackjack isn't simply the game of guessing. A majority of casino games are guessing games. There are two ways to play blackjack. The basic strategy is the best strategy. A mathematically optimized strategy is the correct strategy. It will maximize your wins while minimizing your losses over time.

You might have noticed that many other popular games of cards do not have a basic strategy. For instance, there is no fundamental strategy for poker. Poker players play their hands according to whether or not he thinks that his opponent holds a strong hand or may be lying, and if the player himself has a strong hand or may decide to attempt to bluff.

A basic strategy cannot exist for any game of cards as long as your opponent has the ability to make decisions, regardless of whether those decisions are right or wrong in the way he plays his hand. There wasn't a blackjack strategy to be found for hundreds of years. Blackjack was not a game played in casinos that required the dealer to be obliged to display only one card and then play according to the house rules. It was more like playing poker, where both the dealer's and player's cards hidden. The dealer was able to play any way he wanted and players were able to try to bluff the dealer.

The time that the American casinos changed the rules of twenty-one to expose one of the dealer's decks and oblige the dealer to adhere to a strict hit/stand strategy, something significant happened. The game went from being a poker-style game which relied more on the psychology , to one that was purely mathematical.

The Basic Strategy that Works... read more "Odds", Why Basic Strategy Works

We'll assume that today's dealers are fair for our purposes. No sleight-of-hand, no chicanery. While we won't ignore the First Rule of Professional Gamblers we'll temporarily forget it so that we can understand the logic behind every game and discover the fundamental strategy that eliminates all of the house's mathematical edge. The fact is that most of the games played in casinos these days are dealt honestly and, if you run into games that aren't on the same level, you're not even trying to beat it.

For the honestly dealt game using high-speed computers, mathematicians have examined every hand that you could have against any possible dealer upcard in order to determine the most effective basic strategy for the game. One thing that probably stunned the first mathematicians to conduct these computer analyses was the fact that a nearly perfect basic strategy had actually already been figured out and released by four GIs who had desk jobs and plenty of time on their hands during the 1950s. Even though they did not have computers they had spent three years using mechanical add machines to calculate the various outcomes. It was possibly the most valuable value Uncle Sam ever obtained from the four GIs' pay!

We also know that some decent hints of the correct basic strategy had been figured out by a variety of professional gamblers in Nevada years before computers came on the scene. The method was devised by these guys playing hands on their kitchen tables. Certain decisions involved hundreds, thousands, or even thousands or even hundreds of thousands of hand. The guys, like the majority of professionals in the field they never published their strategies because they were professionals. Blackjack was their primary source of income, and they'd spent hundreds of hours researching it. What would they say to anyone else what they knew?

One thing is for certain that casinos did not know the correct strategy to play the game. This was also true for those who had read some of the most popular books on the matter. Many old Hoyle's guides recommended that players always keep their totals to 15 and 16, regardless of what the dealer's card was, to split tens and not to split nines, or to keep a the soft 17. The "smart" players at the time, which was players who had read any of these gambling books by some of these respected authorities, typically made all kinds of bets that we understand today to be very costly.

A lot of people aren't aware of the logic behind basic strategy. Let me offer an example. When my hand totals 14 and the dealer displays the 10 card, the blackjack strategy says to hit. That is the mathematically correct strategy. Sometimes you'll be lucky enough to hit the 14, and then draw an 8 9,, or 10, to stop. The dealer will then flip over his hole card, a 6, and you will realize that if you would have held your 14 the dealer would have needed to make his total 16 and he would have busted with that 10. The dealer lost a hand using the mathematically correct strategy.

Some players believe that there isn't a single strategy that is perfect all the times. Blackjack is, according to them an art of playing guesswork.


To grasp the fundamental strategy, you need to think like a professional gambler and that means you have be aware of "the blackjack odds."

Let best free to play games discuss the logic of basic strategy using a different example that illustrates how the mathematics of probability and statistics works. Let's imagine I have a jar that contains 100 marbles. 50 of them are white and fifty are black. You have to reach into a blindfolded and pull out one marble. However, before doing this you have to place a $ 1 bet on whether that marble you take out will be white or black. If you get the color you picked and win, you will be awarded $ 1 If you don't, you lose $ 1.

Are you playing a guessing game?

Absolutely. How can you be sure which color marble you're going to pull out in advance? It's luck should you be successful. If you lose, it's poor luck.

But what if visit this site know that ninety of those marbles are black, and only ten marbles are white? What if you were to bet on black or white prior to drawing? An intelligent person would choose black. Although play games is possible take out white marbles, you are much more likely to get a black marble. It's a guessing game , and you could still lose $1 when a white marble is pulled out. If you're betting on black, odds favor the black marble.

good games to play earn their money thinking in terms "the odds" making bets only when they are in his favor. This wager would have the gambler betting on black since the odds of winning are 9: 1. If you place your bet on white, odds are 9-1 against you.

You may lose If the dealer has an upcard of 10. However, the odds are not in your favor if the dealer shows the number 10.

There are chances to win some hands when you use your intuitions however, you'll be losing more at the final. There's only one right decision for any given play and it is solely based on mathematical calculations. The laws of probability will determine what your expectations are for each scenario.



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