Online Blackjack Tips: What You’ll Learn
- Optimal Surrender Strategies: Learn when to surrender based on the dealer’s face-up card to minimize losses, factoring in the number of decks and specific house rules.
- Understanding Insurance Bets: Discover why taking insurance is usually not advisable and how to assess its value depending on the composition of the remaining deck.
- Evaluating Promotions: Gain insights into how casino promotions like loss rebates and golden card offers can impact your winnings and strategies for maximizing their benefits.
- Leveraging Dealer Rules: Understand the implications of house rules like the dealer hitting on a soft 17 and how they affect the overall house edge in a game.
- Navigating Bonus Terms: Learn how to effectively navigate the terms and conditions of deposit bonuses, ensuring you understand wagering requirements and their potential impact on your Blackjack strategy.
Blackjack differs from many other casino games in that the skilled player will win in the long term. Nobody has been banned from playing roulette or baccarat but many players have been excluded from playing blackjack at both “land-based” casinos and “online” casinos. This article will substantially increase your chances of being a winner.
The Basics
You will need to know basic blackjack strategy before you start. There are charts available for all types of games and the chart at the end combines many games and gives all the exceptions. In particular, when to double down and when to split will vary according to the rules of the particular game you choose to play.
It is important to use the right chart. If you follow this chart and do nothing else, you will get a return of 99.5%, which is more than any other casino game. By comparison, roulette only gives you a return of 97.3% per bet.
Splitting and Doubling
You need to be sure of the rules and have the right charts for splitting and doubling These will vary when the Hilo Count is high or low. There are charts available for all games on the Internet and you need to print out the one applicable to your game and have it by your side.
Online v Land-Based
There are significant advantages in playing online casinos as opposed to land-based casinos. You can do any calculations you need with a calculator and this would not be allowed when sitting at a casino table. More importantly, you can skip hands when the odds are against you without being asked to give up your seat.
There are many games, in particular One Blackjack and Infinite Blackjack, where there is only one seat but hundreds of players and you can choose to skip as many hands as you want. Finally, you can keep a count of cards that have gone using pencil and paper, and you would be asked to leave if you did this under the eye of a pit boss.
The Hilo Count
This is the bread and butter of most professional players, who know that you at least break even when the Hilo Count is greater than +1. You add the number of twos, threes, fours, fives and sixes, which count as +1, and subtract the number of tens (including court cards) and aces, which count as -1.
The sevens, eights and nines are ignored. You then divide by the number of decks remaining to get a true count. This is not a perfect measure, but without computer assistance is about the best you can do. Let us see a graph of the advantage for the player:
So there is an advantage when the Hilo Count is greater than +1, but not a huge advantage. The downside of only betting when the Hilo Count is above +1 is that your behavior is transparent to the casino and they may close your account if you are betting significant amounts. The other factor is that betting with only a 1% advantage at best is unlikely to make you a mint.
If you can afford to bet £1000 a hand with a small advantage then you probably don’t need to win at Blackjack!
And if you do play for high stakes and win, you may get an email from the casino. “We have decided to limit your blackjack betting to a maximum of £5. You can play roulette for any stakes you want. This was a commercial decision and cannot be challenged.”
777 Bets
The Crazy Sevens Bet is one of the best opportunities to win big for a small stake that one can find on the Internet. It is offered by several providers in a different guise. You bet on your first three cards and if you get three sevens, suited, you can win 2000 times your stake! And, with a maximum bet of £25, you can win a cool £50,000.
The simplest bet is offered by Pragmatic Play, called Crazy Sevens, and is offered by many of the sites recommended on here, with both Lucky Bird Casino and Crown Coins, two of the top-rated sites on Casino.org, offering the game. The payouts are as below
Top Tip 1
Play this only in a shoe game, or you will have to beat an RTP of 94.26% which is very hard to do in the long term if there is a shuffle after every hand. All you need to do is to keep track of the sevens that have gone as a percentage of cards that have been dealt. Pencil and paper and simple math.
Let us look at the return on the bet when the percentage of sevens remaining goes up. Usually of course the percentage does not offer any advantage, but sometimes it does.
There are 32 sevens in a shoe of 416 cards and that is 7.7%. When the percentage goes over 8%, the player has a small advantage, and when it is over 10%, that advantage is very significant and a curve:
So, the cut off point for making the bet is when the percentage of sevens is above 8%. It will take you a bit of practice to work out the percentage of sevens remaining, but you can usually see at a glance if it is not high enough.
So, if eight sevens have gone and 120 cards have been dealt, then there are 24/296 remaining, which is a little over 0.08 and worth a bet of 1. If it is 0.09, then bet 2, 0.1 you can bet 3 etc. Add 1 for each percent advantage you have.
Buster or Bust it
This is offered by several providers and narrowly the best is the one offered by Evolution. It does have a high house take h, but it can be beaten if you keep track of the small cards that have gone.
The reason these are important is that there is a high payout when the dealer busts with more than five cards, as shown by the following table again from Pub Casino:
The return to player on the first hand of the shoe is correctly stated to be 94.12% and therefore you should wait until there are a lot of small cards remaining. Count the percentage of 2s, 3s and 4s that have gone. The graph of the RTP for the number of these is as follows:
So, if more than 26% of the cards remaining are 2s, 3s or 4s, the Bust It bet has an advantage. You need to have a sharp calculating brain, however, to keep track of these.
Super Boost Blackjack
This game from Stakelogic is another opportunity for the skilled player to win big and to have an advantage. The player has to bet an additional quarter of his stake on a “Super Boost” which only pays out on the third consecutive win. The boost is stated to go from x2 to x100, at random, but Stakelogic, who produce the game, would not disclose the distribution of the multiplier.
I played the game for a few hours on Casino Click, the top-rated casino on Casino.org as I write, and the average multiplier was 3.75 over a sample of 100 multipliers. The typical minimum bet is £20 or $20 and one has to add a boost bet of £5 or $5 each time, so this game is more expensive to play than regular games.
The player is only paid on the main bet, but if she wins two consecutive games, then, if the player wins her third game, she gets her winnings boosted by the multiplier.
This game has some interesting changes to basic strategy because the main aim is to win the hand, not to get the highest payout. The chart below is the change to basic strategy when you are playing Super Boost Blackjack.
I included the basic strategy chart in my earlier article in casino.org. and you should have that by your side whenever you play Blackjack online.