Advanced Blackjack Strategy

How to Play Blackjack
Basic Blackjack Strategy
Advanced Blackjack Strategy
Blackjack Words

Best Blackjack

While it is difficult to accurately calculate the house advantage in a game of Blackjack it is thought to be 6% to 10% for a player using no strategy. A player using basic Blackjack strategy is thought to be able to improve the odds so that the house edge drops to less than 1%.

A Simplified Basic Blackjack Strategy.

With hard hands:
If you have 9 or less - Hit.
If you have 10 or 11 - Double down if your total is more than the dealer is showing - Otherwise hit.
If you 12 to 16 - Hit if the dealer is showing a 7 or higher card - Otherwise stand.
If you have more than 17 - Stand

With soft hands:
If you have 13 to 18 - Double down when the dealer is showing 5 or 6.
If you have 17 or less - Hit.
If you have 18 - Hit if the dealer is showing 6 or less - Otherwise stand.
If you have 19 or more - Stand.

With pairs:
Never split 10's, 4's or 5's.
Always split 8's or Aces.
Split other pairs only when the dealer is showing 6 or less.

Don't take insurance bets.

Some Advanced Strategies.
After you have learned the basic Blackjack strategies the house edge is less than 1%. To improve their odds there are three strategies that players use.

Money Management:
This is the easiest to understand and the hardest to follow. Good money management requires you to determine beforehand the amount you are willing to lose and the amount you will be satisfied with winning. You then divide the amount you are willing to lose into units (one easy method is to bet in units of 1% of the total you are prepared to lose) you always bet the same (one unit) amount. When you have won or lost your predetermined limit - quit for the day.

Betting Systems:
There are several betting systems that players use to win. They all have a couple of disadvantages:

You have to increase your bets with each loss in an attempt to recoup your losses. This might work but for table limits - when you hit the table limit you can't continue to increase your bets.
If you have a bad run you have to risk huge amounts of money for a modest return.

Card Counting:
This strategy works the best and in theory should give players an advantage over the house. The principle involved is that the player keeps track of the cards as they are played, when the deck contains more high value cards than low value cards you bet accordingly.

A simple card counting method is to start at zero then add +1 to cards valued 2 to 6, 0 to cards valued 7 to 9 and -1 to cards valued 10 and the Ace. You keep a running total, the higher the total the better your chances of winning are and the more you should bet.

Card counting works better when the remaining number of cards is small. To adjust for this a card counter needs to calculate a "true count" this is done by dividing the count by the number of decks remaining in the shoe (you estimate this by subtracting the estimated number of decks in the discard pile from the number of decks used at the start of the game).

Casinos don't like card counters and in an attempt to discourage them they use a large number of decks in the shoe and reshuffle often after playing only a about a decks worth of cards.

Card counting is hard work, is not liked by casinos and is not as rewarding as many players think (about 1% on average).