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Hard Hands: A hand in which there are no aces, or if there are, the player exercises his option of counting each ace as 1 point. The following tactics are effective.
Doubling Down: Casinos vary in their permissiveness toward this play. Some allow it on any combination of the first two cards. Others allow it only on a count of 11, or of 10 or 11. Depending on the house rules, the best approach is to double the bet whenever holding 11. If holding 10 and the dealer shows neither a 10-count card nor an ace, double. With 9, double only if dealer shows 6 or less.
Splitting Pairs: Some houses allow only a one-card draw to a split pair. Regardless, aces and eights should always be split. And fives and tens should never be split. When to split other pairs is a question too complex for the casual player. Interested parties should consult Recommended Reading, below. Insurance: If the dealer shows an ace, many casinos solicit insurance bets, on which they pay 2—1 in the event that the dealer actually holds a natural blackjack count of 21. This is a miserably stupid bet tc make except for someone who has counted the preceding cards and is reasonably sure that the dealer has the natural. Otherwise, the 2—1 odds give the house a large edge.
RECOMMENDED READING—ADVANCED TACTICS
In 1962, Dr.
Edward 0. Thorp, an exuberant mathematician, revealed that he had figured out the game and had been taking casinos to the cleaners. Moreover, he published his strategies, which included tactics much more refined than those set forth above. Chief among the Thorpian sophistications were techniques for keeping track of the high-count cards and undermining the house percentage.
Thorp’s disclosures precipitated guerrilla conflict between the casinos and “casedown” players able to count the cards. Whenever the houses revised their dealing procedures and other rules to stay ahead of the card-counters, increasingly elaborate offensive techniques were proposed in book after book. As suggested earlier, the entire saga has its unseemly aspects and, besides, extremely few players are sufficiently motivated or sufficiently talented to learn these techniques.
Nevertheless, readers who feel equal to tactics more complicated than the basic ones described in these pages should read Thorp’s Beat the Dealer. Besides refining the instructions on what to hit and when to stand, the professor offers various card-counting systems, a general grasp of which may improve the reader’s game without provoking difficulties with casino managements.
