As a beginning casino blackjack player then the first step that you must take in order to make yourself a better player is to learn basic strategy. That’s always important when you play casino games . This will elevate your game above and beyond the level of using gut instinct to base your decisions. If you have 15 against the dealer’s ace then you take a card irrespective of what you believe in your own mind that the next card may be.
Basic strategy decisions are arrived at by computer simulations of millions of hands in the exact same situation so the correct mathematical play can be calculated really well. Learning basic strategy is not as difficult as it sounds because most of the time, you will be playing correct blackjack anyway.
For example basic blackjack strategy says never to hit on nineteen but you would never do this anyway unless you had taken leave of your senses. Learning basic strategy involves learning nothing more than a few simple tables. There are actually far fewer decisions than you would expect and as I mentioned earlier, you will already be making around 75-80% of the plays anyway.
Basic strategy is actually far more complex than meets the eye as it can alter and differ depending on the rules variations. Some years ago, Stanford Wong published a very good book on the subject called Basic Blackjack which delved into the subject of learning basic more than any other book had ever done before or since.
You may have often heard how the casino edge at blackjack is only 0.5% and this may have prompted you to want to play the game. However this isn’t entirely accurate because that is the best case scenario as that house edge isn’t fixed. The extent of the house edge at blackjack is dependent on the skill of the player and the accuracy of their playing decisions.
So a really bad casino blackjack player who was making terrible decisions could be conceding an edge that was as great as or greater than the house edge on roulette. Basic strategy can be found everywhere these days on websites and in books so it is nothing to worry about if you do not know it already. Once you know and understand basic strategy and more importantly, why the decisions are what they are then your blackjack experience will be all the better for it.
Do not be swayed by using basic strategy and having losing sessions where you would have made different plays left to your own devices. You must remember that these are long run mathematical sequences and no empirical proof can be witnessed after just a few hands. In my experience back when I was in gaming, the vast majority of casino blackjack players do not use basic strategy.
Basically what this means is that by simply learning a few tables then you can elevate your game above nearly 99% of players who play the game. I have observed blackjack players who have played the game for years who still did not know basic strategy and that is criminal in my mind.
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