Things I’ve Learned From Playing Blackjack

Blackjack is no doubt a popular game for good reason: You can gain an advantage as a gambler. And it was the first gambling game I ever took seriously. The corporate attorney I worked with told me he was a card counter one week before he left for a trip to Louisiana to gamble.

I asked him if he thought I could learn how to count cards, and he said sure. I asked him to recommend a book, and he suggested I start with The World’s Greatest Blackjack Book by Lance Humble.

I’ve read at least a dozen books about blackjack since then, and I’ve played blackjack in casinos throughout the United States since then.

Here are seven things I’ve learned from my flirtations with blackjack gambling.

Blackjack Success Starts With Basic Strategy

The first time I ever played blackjack, I just figured that if I knew when to hit and when to stand, then I’d be okay.

But there’s a lot more to real money blackjack than that. You also need to know when to double down and split, which are options I didn’t learn when my mom taught me to play blackjack at our kitchen table.

Every hand of blackjack is like a math problem with one correct answer. The play with the best expected return is the correct answer.

Sometimes, you’ll be dealt a hand where you’re going to lose more money than you’ll win in the long run. Your goal is to lose the least amount of money over time.

And some hands are great, and they’ll win more money than they’ll lose over time. Your goal with those hands is to play them in a way that maximizes how much you’re going to win.

Basic Strategy Alone Won’t Make You a Winner

Don’t be that guy who downloads a basic strategy chart, plays blackjack for a few hours on his first visit to the casino, wins some money, and thinks he has it all figured out. It’s great to have a winning session, and when the house edge is less than 1%, it’s common.

After all, an average gambler might only play 500 hands of blackjack in a weekend at the casino. That’s a lot of hands, but that’s still nothing close to the number of hands you’d need to play to feel like you’d gotten into the long run.

In fact, if you take advantage of the casino’s rewards program, you might even be able to come out a little bit ahead of the casino in the long run by adding the value of the comps you’re getting to your overall return.

But to win consistently over the long run in blackjack, you need more than just basic strategy. You need to know how to count cards at a high level.

And that means more than just being able to keep count. You’ll also need to know how to convert a running count to a true count, manage a bankroll, and deviate from basic blackjack strategy based on the count.

Don’t Cheat at Blackjack

Contrary to what the casinos would like you to think, counting cards in blackjack isn’t cheating. Think about it. How could thinking about the game you’re playing be considered cheating?

The only time that counting cards at blackjack would be cheating were if you were using some kind of device or computer to help you keep up with the count.

But that’s hardly necessary since anyone with average intelligence and a little bit of work ethic can learn to count cards quite well without any kind of outside device.

Using a confederate to stack the deck or who will allow you to past post a bet, on the other hand, is cheating. It might even be profitable for a while.

Actual cheating at blackjack, though, comes with a big problem attached to it:

It’s illegal. You can go to jail. And in Nevada, it’s a felony.

I think casinos make enough money off the ignorant that they deserve what they get when it comes to cheating. But I don’t think it’s a risk worth taking, not when you have so many other ways to take the casinos’ money.

Luck Has More to Do With Your Results

When you’re playing a game with a house edge lower than 1%, you’re playing a practically even game. If you have a reasonably-sized bankroll, this means that over a weekend of play, you’re almost as likely to have a winning record as you are to have a losing weekend.

I went to Kansas City once and played blackjack at Harrah’s. I wasn’t counting cards, and I was just using basic strategy as well as I could, considering the amount of whiskey I had. Frankly, it wasn’t that much whiskey, anyway. At that time, the casinos in Kansas City throttled how much they’d serve you, and they’d throttle how much you could buy in for and how many times per hour.

I don’t know if that’s still the case there, but here’s what I saw for my blackjack results that weekend:

I’d brought about $1,000 with me to gamble with. And when we left, I’d won $400 playing blackjack. I was playing for $10 per hand, although I was also raising my bets up and down to try to convince the dealers and pit bosses to give me more comps. So, I was betting between $10 and $100 per hand.

I played for three or four hours that weekend, and I’m guessing that I got in about 100 hands per hour. The table wasn’t crowded, but I wasn’t alone there.

Mathematically, my expected loss was easy to calculate. My average bet was $20 or so per hand, and I got in 350 hands that weekend, at least. That’s $7,000 in action.

If you assume a 1% house edge, the expected loss was $70.

I just kept getting lucky that weekend. That’s how the short run variance in gambling works.

I’ve since had weekends where I’ve defied the expected results in the other direction, too. It’s not unusual for me to have lost $300 or $400 on that kind of action in a weekend, either.

How Long Is the “Long Term?”

Everyone always wants to know what the “long term” in blackjack really means. How many hands before you get into the long term? How many hours before you get into the long term?

Here’s the thing about that:

There is no pre-defined number that defines “the long run.”

It’s a relative thing.

The closer you get to an infinite number of trials, the closer you’re getting to the long run. Five hands isn’t the long run, but neither is 50, nor is 500.

But 500 is closer to the long term than 50 or 5.

The ultimate example of the short term is a single hand of blackjack. It’s impossible to lose 1% of your bet on a single hand of blackjack. You’ll either lose 100% of your bet, or you’ll win 100% of your bet. You might win 150% of your bet if you get a natural, and you might see some other results if you double down or split.

But none of those outcomes can ever possibly be 1%.

If you place 10 bets at $5 each, you could just as easily have lost $20 as anything else. You’ll almost never have lost just 50 cents on 10 hands, though, which is the expected loss.

Even once you’ve gotten into 1,000 hands, you’re still in the short run. You don’t really start seeing predictable results playing in the casino until you’ve gotten into the 100,000-hand territory.

Quitting While You’re Ahead Sounds Great in Principle

One of the truisms you’ll often hear from old blackjack gamblers is that the key to winning at blackjack is to quit while you’re ahead. This is true on the face of it, but it’s more complicated than that.

Of course, you’ll be a winner if you quit while you’re ahead.

The problem is that there’s no way to guarantee that you’ll ever be ahead. You could play one hand, but the probability of winning a single hand of blackjack is only 42%—46% if you don’t count ties.

You could, theoretically, do silly stuff like doubling the size of your bets until you get an inevitable win, but don’t get me started on how poorly that works in the long run.

The only way you could guarantee to quit while you’re ahead if you got ahead would be to quit when you hit a specific, small amount that you’re ahead.

If you did that during every blackjack session, you might have some small winning sessions where you walked away with a profit of a single bet.

But you’d eventually have a session where you lose so many times that you’ll wipe out your previous profits and then some.

That’s how negative expectation games work.

The Casino Does Sometimes Make Mistakes

Most people don’t give this much thought, but the table games (including blackjack) at the casinos are hosted and dealt by human beings. So, the casino will sometimes make mistakes. Sometimes, they’ll make mistakes in your favor. Other times, they’ll make mistakes in their own favor.

Here’s my suggestion:

If the casino makes a mistake in your favor, keep your mouth shut about it. The casinos are already offering you games with a mathematical edge. It’s not like they’re offering you a mathematically fair game.

If the casino makes a mistake in the casino’s favor, speak up. They’ll determine whether you’re right or not, and if you are right, you’ll get your money back.

In a game with a low enough house edge, like blackjack under the right conditions, this might be enough to tilt the odds slightly in your favor.

You can’t make a living this way, but you can probably gamble for almost free in the long run if you’re sticking with perfect basic strategy.

Conclusion

I’ve learned a lot about blackjack over the last couple of decades. This post only scratches the surface, but I think it covers the most important lessons related to blackjack that you need to succeed.