Most casino games tend to rely on little more than sheer luck, even if they sometimes tend to mask that fact. At the end of the day, whether you bet on black or white, it’s the roulette wheel that decides whether you’ll win or lose.
You can have the perfect craps strategy and you won’t win a penny if the dice don’t smile at you. It’s the casinos’ way of keeping things fair, and, more importantly, ensuring that they ultimately come out on top. When you tilt the scales to one side by adding a little house edge, that side will always end up with more profits than losses.
The big, glaring exception to this philosophy, at least regarding traditional casino games (and not competitive ones, like poker), is blackjack. Sure, there’s luck involved in blackjack, and it’s undeniable that casinos have done their best to increase the randomness of the game. However, the fact remains that, even with multiple decks, whether you win or lose is ultimately up to you and your skills rather than Lady Luck’s draw. And, of course, where there’s skill involved, there’s strategy, with literally millions of gamblers throughout the last two centuries trying to come up with the “winning formula” for blackjack. Over the years, one of these has risen above the others in terms of both its simplicity and its odds of success, earning the name “the blackjack basic strategy”.
What is the basic strategy?
The basic strategy uses odds and probabilities to tell you exactly how to play every single possible hand in blackjack – where to stand, where to hit, when to double down. This might seem like an impossible amount of information to memorize, but keep in mind that while there’s a lot of different combinations in blackjack, for the most part, you’ll be interested in the cards’ values rather than what they are. There are certain exceptions, of course, but for the most part, getting a 20 from two queens should be treated the same as getting it with two 10s.
It’s very important to note that the basic strategy does not, in fact, give you the odds of winnings. It doesn’t tell you: “Oh if you have a 16 you should stand because you’re most likely to bust if you hit”. Instead, it tells you the mathematically correct decision to make in order to win the most money possible while losing the least amount of money possible.
Sometimes these even flies in the face of odds – in the example above, the basic strategy would actually tell you to hit on a 16 because the small chance of increasing your card value without busting is better than the absolutely minuscule chance that the dealer will go bust before going over 16. As such, it’s very important to follow the basic strategy to the letter rather than relying on your gut or even on odds. The “mathematically correct decision” won’t mean you win 100% of the time, but it will mean that you win more often than you lose.
How to profit from the basic strategy chart
Well, the trick to doing well in blackjack is the same as the trick to doing well in school – lots of studying and memorization! The first step is finding a great blackjack basic strategy chart to follow. After that, it’s a matter of memorization. If you’re playing blackjack at an online casino, then you don’t really need to memorize it, simply having it open to reference while you place bets will be more than enough. However, if you’re planning on impressing your friends and winning a lot in a physical, land-based casino, or even at an online live casino, then memorization is your best bet. Cue cards simply won’t help you here, even if they were allowed. Memorizing the chart isn’t actually impossible, or even difficult, it is simply annoying and time-consuming.
Most blackjack experts recommend NOT deviating from the chart and only memorizing some of it, as the basic blackjack strategy relies on making you more money long-term rather than hand to hand. Doubling down and splitting at the most mathematically opportune times is just as important as knowing when to hit and when to stand. So, if you only memorized the “most important” parts and then guessed on the rest, you might end up in an unlucky situation where you end the night with less money than you started, and obviously, that’s not ideal. Granted, there is no guarantee that the basic strategy will prevent that from happening anyway, but it’s designed in such a way as to mathematically ensure that you will beat the odds by the end of the night.
Blackjack is one of the very few casino games that’s skill-based rather than luck-based – and the basic strategy ensures that you, or any other player, can exploit that fact for their own benefit in order to beat the casino at their own game. Whoever said math isn’t cool?
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