Good and Bad Strategies for Winning at Blackjack

Blackjack is well-known as one of the best games for the player in the casino. Not everyone understands exactly what this means, though.

When someone who knows what he’s talking about says that blackjack is the best game in the casino, he usually means that it has the lowest “house edge.”

That’s a number that represents the casino’s mathematical advantage over the player. It’s expressed as a percentage, and the higher that percentage is, the more of an advantage the casino has.

Games like slot machines generally have a house edge of 6% or higher, and roulette has a house edge of 5.26%.

Blackjack, when played with perfect basic strategy, has a house edge of less than 1%.

But not every strategy works when it comes to winning at blackjack.


This post – the first in a series – looks at some of the good and bad strategies for winning at blackjack.

Using Basic Strategy Is a Good Approach to Winning at Blackjack

Casino games can be categorized in different ways, but one of my favorite ways to categorize these games is by whether your decisions matter.

When you’re playing roulette or a slot machine, you don’t make any playing decisions that matter. You place your bet and hope for the best.

But, in real money blackjack, you have to decide how to play your hand. You decide whether to hit, stand, double down, split, and/or surrender.

You might not believe this, but there’s a mathematically optimal decision for every situation in blackjack.

And it’s not a matter of intuition or premonitions, either. It’s solely a matter of probability.

Basic strategy lists the mathematically optimal moves for every possible situation in blackjack.

There’s a Mathematically Optimal Move in Every Blackjack Situation

Think about this:

Let’s say you’re playing blackjack with someone who believes in premonitions and hunches. And let’s also say that this player has the same hunch every time he gets a specific hand.

Every time he has a hand with a total of 19, he has a hunch that the next card will be a 2, giving him a 21, so he always hits in that situation.


Here’s the deal, though.

You have the following possible values for the cards in the deck:

• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10

You only have 4 cards that are worth 2 points. Every other card – all 48 of them – will bust your hand.

Of course, you know which 2 cards you have showing, and you also know one of the dealer’s cards.

This still means that you have 45 possible cards that will hurt you and 4 possible cards that will help you.

The right play is evident here.

And if that’s true, then it’s obvious that there’s a mathematically optimal play for every other situation in blackjack, too.

The Bottom Line Regarding Basic Strategy in Blackjack

The bottom line is that you should always use basic strategy in blackjack. Most players don’t know basic strategy entirely, and even some of the players who do will deviate from it based on a hunch.

What does this mean to the casino and to the player?

If you’re an average basic strategy player betting $10 per hand and playing 100 hands per hour, you’re putting $1000 per hour into action.

If you’re playing with perfect basic strategy, and the game conditions are such that basic strategy provides the house with an edge of 0.5%, you’re going to average losing $5 per hour.

The average blackjack player, though, deviates from basic strategy so much that the house has an effective edge of 4%. That’s still better than roulette, but compared to the house edge you face when using perfect basic strategy, it’s terrible.

Instead of averaging a $5 loss per hour, you’re now facing an average loss of $40 per hour.

Winning gamblers are those who buck statistical trends, but ask yourself this:

Is it easier to buck a $5 per hour losing trend or a $40 per hour losing trend?

Money Management Techniques Are a Bad Strategy

A money management technique doesn’t have anything to do with how you decide to play the cards in blackjack. It only concerns itself with how much money you have budgeted to play with, how much you’re willing to lose before calling it quits, and how much of a win is big enough to call it a day.

These aren’t bad things. They’re just not going to help you win.

The first factor of a money management strategy is deciding on the size of your bankroll for the session. This is essentially just an amount of money you’ve set aside for gambling during that session. You should always set this budget based on how much money you can afford to lose.

The other 2 factors in a money management strategy are stop-loss limits and win goals. A stop-loss limit is an amount that, once you’ve lost it, signifies that it’s time to quit your session. A win goal is just the opposite. It’s an amount that, once you’ve won it, signifies that it’s time to quit.

Most money management gamblers set their win goals and stop-loss limits based on a percentage of their session bankroll.

They might have a 20% win goal and a 40% loss limit, for example. A player with a $100 bankroll and those limits would quit once he got up to $120 or once he got down to $60.

The reason these money management techniques don’t change the odds is because they’re just arbitrary stopping points in the lifelong gambling session that they’re engaged in.

The law of large numbers still applies, no matter when you stop – unless you stop forever.

Most blackjack players don’t stop gambling forever just because they won $20.

Counting Cards Is a Good Blackjack Strategy

The only time you should deviate from basic strategy is when you’re counting cards, and the count is such that deviating from basic strategy is the mathematically correct move.

And, unlike many people think, you don’t have to memorize the deck to count cards (although you can.)

Counting cards has more to do with keeping a general accounting of how many low cards have been played versus how many high cards have been played.

Having low cards in the deck is bad for the player, but having high cards in the deck is good for the player.

Here’s why:

The high cards are the aces and 10s. These are the only cards that can result in a blackjack (a “natural.”) While most blackjack hands pay off at even money when you win, a blackjack pays off at 3 to 2 odds.

Bet $10 on a hand of blackjack and get a 2-card total of 21, and you’ll win $15 instead of $10.

If the deck has a higher proportion of 10s and aces in it than low cards, your probability of getting a bigger payout increases. If you bet more when you’re more likely to get a bigger payout, you’ll get a mathematical edge over the casino.

Don’t believe me?

Think about it from this perspective:

Suppose you took every card out of the deck beside the aces and 10s.

Would you be more likely or less likely to get a blackjack in that situation?

To keep up with that total, you assign values to the cards based on how high or low they are.

The most basic counting system, the Hi-Lo System, uses values of +1 and -1, so it’s easy to use.

The low cards are good to see come out of the deck, so you count each of those as +1.

The high cards are bad to see come out of the deck, so those count as -1.

When the count is positive, you raise the size of your bets. The higher the count, the bigger your wagers should be.

Is Cheating at Blackjack an Effective Strategy?

Casinos will love it if you believe that counting cards is cheating.


But think about that for a minute.

Why would anyone think that thinking about the game you’re playing – even if you’re thinking about it intently – is cheating?

You wouldn’t accuse an expert chess player of cheating just because he was thinking about the game he was playing, would you?

The truth is that counting cards isn’t cheating, but casinos will back you off from the blackjack tables if they think you’re counting.

But enlisting the help of the dealer by paying them to signal you about their hole card gives you information the other players at the table don’t have. This is really cheating, and it’s illegal. You can your blackjack dealer buddy face possible jail time with this strategy.

That’s a bad strategy.

You’d have to win a lot more money at the blackjack table than you probably will to make it worth spending any time at all in jail.

Conclusion

When writing about good and bad gambling strategies, blackjack is one of the best games to discuss. It’s a game where your decisions matter so much that you can even get a mathematical edge over the casino if you make enough good decisions.