Blackjack
Blackjack started out in modest French casinos in the early years of the eighteenth century. From those lowly roots, the game has developed into the most celebrated casino card game on the planet today. Blackjack is among the rare casino games that require a measure of skill as well as luck, which is a major ingredient to its expanding popularity. However, fortunate novices have been known to run into a lucky streak and take home the big money.
The fundamentals
The object of Blackjack is to hold a hand as near to the value of twenty-one points as you can without going over that total. You can determine the point value of a hand by adding up the point value of each of the cards in your hand together. For cards with the numbers two through ten, the point value equals the number on the card. For "face cards" (Jack, Queen, and King), the point value is always ten. For an Ace, the point value can be either one or eleven.
Before every Blackjack hand, the dealer gives each player two cards, face up, and two for himself, one face down, and one face up. The first two cards are the player's starting hand. At this point, the player can either choose to "hit" (take another card) or "stand" (keep their hand as it is). Once the player’s hand totals over twenty-one points, that player “busts”, losing the hand and their bet.
For instance, a player may have looked at an opening hand of 47, giving them a total score of eleven. The player would in all likelihood choose to hit, since he has eleven points and since the deck has so many cards worth ten points, he would have a strong chance of getting to twenty-one.
Now let’s look at another player. This player had the opening hand of Q8, for a total score of eighteen. The only cards in the deck that could possibly help this player's hand would be the Ace, 2, and 3. In this situation, the player would likely prefer to stand, since more than three-quarters of the cards left in the deck would make his score go over twenty-one.
By this point, you may be questioning what exactly is a blackjack. A blackjack is a starting hand that already totals twenty-one. A blackjack has an ace and a ten-value card. In most casinos, when a player gets this hand, he gets 3:2 on the original bet instead of the normal even money win. Still, if the dealer gets a blackjack, all players at the table lose. If both the dealer and the player have blackjack, the hand is a "push" (tie) and the player neither wins nor loses.
In Blackjack games, each player plays against the dealer. In many cases, several players will be at the same table, but the players do not vie against each other. The only play that counts is outscoring the dealer. In almost all casinos, the dealer has established rules that he must obey. Typically, the dealer will hit on any “soft” seventeen hand, but will stand on a "soft" eighteen or better. A soft hand is a hand with an ace in it where the other cards do not total to ten. In those hands, the ace is worth eleven points. Thus, a hand of A52 would be a soft eighteen, and the dealer would stand.
Once you understand what the dealer has to do with their cards in order to win, you can help yourself by making the best decisions. For instance, whenever the dealer’s face up card is a five, which makes his most plausible hand a fifteen, which implies that the dealer must hit his hand. If he has fifteen, then only six cards are left in the deck that can prevent him from busting. With these odds, the dealer will bust more than half the time.
Whenever you have a marginal hand, such as fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen, you should stand, and wait for the dealer to bust, instead of taking a risk and hitting your hand. Then again, if the dealer has an upcard between seven and ten, you may be forced to hit with those marginal hands, since the dealer could already have outscored your hand.
With these basic rules and simple strategies in mind, it’s your turn to take home some serious cash at the blackjack tables and playing blackjack online.
