Blackjack Strategy
Posted on November 26, 2007
Filed Under Blackjack Strategy, Blackjack Tips
Blackjack is one of the most well-known card games in the world. The ultra-popular game of twenty-one allows the advanced player room for aggressive moves and subtle strategy plays that have been shown to give the informed player a huge leap up in winning percentages, in some cases actually trumping the built-in house edge that casinos utilize. In order for players to efficiently play the game of Blackjack, ChessandPoker.com realized the need to compile a complete Blackjack strategy guide for all plays and betting considerations you will ever face in the game. The first component of our extremely powerful strategy guide is taming the somewhat intimidating factor that is the heart of all professional Blackjack playing strategy, how to count cards.
For the game of Blackjack, there are essentially two types of players: Those who count cards while they play, and those that don’t. When utilizing a blackjack strategy for a serious game there is really no reason not to count the cards. Using the counting system below, which was originally developed by Harvey Dubner, a player can achieve a betting correlation (how accurate the counting system is when used to determine the size of a players bet) of 97%, or almost perfect. It is very simple to learn and implement, and also very potent. Let’s have a look at it.
Blackjack Card Counting System
To use this blackjack counting system, you must start out with a count of zero in your head (for some of us, this is quite easy). Then everytime you see a 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 come out of the deck in any players hand, including the dealers, you mentally add “+1″ to the count in your head for each one of these cards you see. But whenever you see a T, J, Q, K, or Ace in any players hand, you subtract one (-1) from the count in your head. This ongoing total in your head is called the “running count”.
| Values 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are counted as +1 | Values T, J, Q, K, and Ace are counted as -1 |
Whenever the running count is positive, it is said that the player has an advantage. When negative, however, the player is at an disadvantage. The larger (or smaller) the running count, the more pronounced the advantage (disadvantage) is for the player. As we have now seen, card counting is in fact not that hard at all, and will quickly become second nature. The next step is to use this newfound talent to determine your bet on any given hand.
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