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• Good Betting Strategy For Blackjack Games

I’ve written a few articles in the past that included advice that said you should never take insurance when you play blackjack. I stand by this advice because, for over 90% of the players who read my articles, the advice is 100% correct.

But I also need to present the other side of the argument to give you a complete understanding of insurance. The truth is that insurance is the correct play in a few specific situations. Most of these situations only become apparent to professional card counters, and because counting pros spend most of their time beating the casinos and not reading my articles, my advice of never taking insurance is correct for everyone else.

There are two main types of betting systems for blackjack or any casino game—positive progressions and negative progressions. With a positive progression, the general theory is that you raise your bets after wins, which means that your bigger bets are primarily funded by money won. For the bet to be fair, the chances of the dealer having a blackjack need to be the same as the payout. The payout of 2 to 1 means that the percentage chance of the dealer having a blackjack needs to be 33.33%. In any situation where the chance the dealer has a blackjack is over 33.33%, the insurance wager is a good bet.

Blackjack betting systems are used to avoid heated betting decisions at the table by following a system that dictates how to bet each time. Types of Blackjack Betting Strategies Most Blackjack betting strategies are progressive betting systems.

So why am I writing an article about taking insurance?

As you’re getting ready to learn, there are a few situations while playing blackjack when clearly it seems that taking insurance is a good bet. The odds are good that these situations are going to surprise you because they’re not why most players take insurance.

The Argument Against Insurance

The reason why taking insurance is a bad decision most of the time can be explained using simple math. But, as you’re going to see in the next section, this same simple math is used to show in a few situations that insurance is a good bet.

When the dealer has an ace, he or she offers insurance to the payers at the table. Insurance costs half of your original wager and pays 2 to 1 when the dealer has a natural blackjack. The only way the dealer has a natural blackjack is when his or her down card is worth 10 points.

The odds of the face down card being worth 10 points are 9 to 4 against. This is a percentage chance of 30.77% that the dealer has a blackjack. The reason why the odds are 9 to 4 is because of the 13 total card ranks, four of them are worth 10 points, and the other nine aren’t. The four 10-point value ranks are the face cards and the 10s.

When you compare 9 to 4 against the payout of 2 to 1, the casino has an edge. For the bet to be fair, the chances of the dealer having a blackjack need to be the same as the payout. The payout of 2 to 1 means that the percentage chance of the dealer having a blackjack needs to be 33.33%.

In any situation where the chance the dealer has a blackjack is over 33.33%, the insurance wager is a good bet.

The problem is that most of the time, the dealer doesn’t have a 33.33% or higher chance to have a blackjack. This goes back to how you compute the dealer’s percentage, or odds, based on the normal makeup of a deck of cards.

Determining the odds or percentages based on a normal distribution of cards in the deck sounds correct, but it assumes you don’t know the value of any cards. This is the safe way to do it, especially in a shoe game because a single card doesn’t change the odds or percentages much.

But what happens if you take the knowledge of cards played and remaining available in the deck or shoe into account?

Is there a way to use this information to determine when taking insurance is a good bet?

When You Should Take Insurance

Now that you understand how the math behind the insurance bet works, let’s look at a specific example where the bet changes from bad to good.

You’re playing in a single deck blackjack game.

• On the first round of hands, you see the value of 14 cards. Only one of them is worth 10 points, so the remaining cards have 15 cards valued at 10. With 14 cards played, the deck has a total of 38 cards.
• The second round of hands is dealt, and the dealer has an ace face up. You haven’t seen the value of the other player’s cards at this point, and you have a king in your hand. Now you’ve seen the values of 17 cards when you include the two in your hand and the dealer’s ace.
• The remaining unseen cards total 35 and 14 of them are worth 10 points. This means that the odds of the dealer having a 10-point value down card are 21 to 14 or 3 to 2 against. In other words, 40% of the time the dealer is going to have a natural blackjack.

A winning insurance wager pays 2 to 1, so the odds are better than that in this hand. The 2 to 1 payout means that the chance of a dealer blackjack needs to be at least 33.3%, and in this example, the chance is 40%.

While this example is an extreme one to show when insurance is a good bet, you can also learn something from it. Now that you know that the chances of the dealer having a natural blackjack need to be 33.3% or higher, you can use this information in any single deck blackjack game. You can even use it in a double deck game if you do a good job of tracking cards.

This is much like card counting in that you don’t have to memorize every single card that’s been played. All you need to do is keep track of the ratio of total cards played to 10-point value cards. This even works in shoe games, but the truth is if you’re able to keep track of this ratio in shoe games, you should be counting cards.

How Important Is This Knowledge?

While it’s important to recognize and use every small advantage you can find, the truth is that the opportunity to take insurance with an edge is rare. If you play in single and double deck games often, it’s something that you should watch for.

But you should only concern yourself with profitable insurance opportunities after you do a few other things to lower the house edge. The first thing you should do is find blackjack games with good rules. The next thing every blackjack player should do is use basic strategy. It’s a waste of time and energy to worry about insurance before you do these two things.

Once you learn about the rules and learn how to use perfect strategy, then you can start looking for opportunities to take advantage of insurance. But even in this situation, I recommend looking for insurance opportunities as an introduction to learning more about counting cards.

When you start tracking card ratios, which is at the heart of determining when taking insurance is a good bet, you’re starting to use the same techniques card counters use. And the fact is that most popular card counting systems include a breakpoint where players start taking insurance.

If you’re looking for every possible edge at the blackjack table, understanding how insurance works and when you should take it is important. But if you don’t want to do the extra work, then stick with good rules and proper strategy. By declining insurance every time, you’re not going to make a mistake often. When you do, it’s only going to cost you a small amount over time.

It’s a much more costly mistake to take insurance when you shouldn’t than to miss an opportunity to take insurance every once in a while, when it’s the correct play.

Conclusion

Taking insurance at the blackjack table is a bad bet most of the time. If you’re a basic strategy player or a seat of your pants player and don’t count cards, your best play is to always decline blackjack insurance. But as you can see from the numbers included in this article, there are certain situations when insurance goes from a bad bet to a good one.

Once you master basic blackjack strategy, start looking for opportunities where insurance is a good bet. When you start recognizing these opportunities, it’s a good sign that you’re ready to investigate card counting. It’s a small step from understanding and using what you learned above to become a successful card counter.

Blackjack is well-known as one of the best games for the player in the casino. Not everyone understands exactly what this means, though.

When someone who knows what he’s talking about says that blackjack is the best game in the casino, he usually means that it has the lowest “house edge.”

That’s a number that represents the casino’s mathematical advantage over the player. It’s expressed as a percentage, and the higher that percentage is, the more of an advantage the casino has.

Games like slot machines generally have a house edge of 6% or higher, and roulette has a house edge of 5.26%.

Blackjack, when played with perfect basic strategy, has a house edge of less than 1%.

But not every strategy works when it comes to winning at blackjack.
This post – the first in a series – looks at some of the good and bad strategies for winning at blackjack.

Using Basic Strategy Is a Good Approach to Winning at Blackjack

Casino games can be categorized in different ways, but one of my favorite ways to categorize these games is by whether your decisions matter.

When you’re playing roulette or a slot machine, you don’t make any playing decisions that matter. You place your bet and hope for the best.

But, in real money blackjack, you have to decide how to play your hand. You decide whether to hit, stand, double down, split, and/or surrender.

You might not believe this, but there’s a mathematically optimal decision for every situation in blackjack.

And it’s not a matter of intuition or premonitions, either. It’s solely a matter of probability.

Basic strategy lists the mathematically optimal moves for every possible situation in blackjack.

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There’s a Mathematically Optimal Move in Every Blackjack Situation

Think about this:

Let’s say you’re playing blackjack with someone who believes in premonitions and hunches. And let’s also say that this player has the same hunch every time he gets a specific hand.

Every time he has a hand with a total of 19, he has a hunch that the next card will be a 2, giving him a 21, so he always hits in that situation.
Here’s the deal, though.

You have the following possible values for the cards in the deck:

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• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10

You only have 4 cards that are worth 2 points. Every other card – all 48 of them – will bust your hand.

Of course, you know which 2 cards you have showing, and you also know one of the dealer’s cards.

This still means that you have 45 possible cards that will hurt you and 4 possible cards that will help you.

The right play is evident here.

And if that’s true, then it’s obvious that there’s a mathematically optimal play for every other situation in blackjack, too.

The Bottom Line Regarding Basic Strategy in Blackjack

The bottom line is that you should always use basic strategy in blackjack. Most players don’t know basic strategy entirely, and even some of the players who do will deviate from it based on a hunch.

What does this mean to the casino and to the player?

If you’re an average basic strategy player betting $10 per hand and playing 100 hands per hour, you’re putting $1000 per hour into action.

If you’re playing with perfect basic strategy, and the game conditions are such that basic strategy provides the house with an edge of 0.5%, you’re going to average losing $5 per hour.

The average blackjack player, though, deviates from basic strategy so much that the house has an effective edge of 4%. That’s still better than roulette, but compared to the house edge you face when using perfect basic strategy, it’s terrible.

Instead of averaging a $5 loss per hour, you’re now facing an average loss of $40 per hour.

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Winning gamblers are those who buck statistical trends, but ask yourself this:

Is it easier to buck a $5 per hour losing trend or a $40 per hour losing trend?

Money Management Techniques Are a Bad Strategy

A money management technique doesn’t have anything to do with how you decide to play the cards in blackjack. It only concerns itself with how much money you have budgeted to play with, how much you’re willing to lose before calling it quits, and how much of a win is big enough to call it a day.

These aren’t bad things. They’re just not going to help you win.

The first factor of a money management strategy is deciding on the size of your bankroll for the session. This is essentially just an amount of money you’ve set aside for gambling during that session. You should always set this budget based on how much money you can afford to lose.

The other 2 factors in a money management strategy are stop-loss limits and win goals. A stop-loss limit is an amount that, once you’ve lost it, signifies that it’s time to quit your session. A win goal is just the opposite. It’s an amount that, once you’ve won it, signifies that it’s time to quit.

Most money management gamblers set their win goals and stop-loss limits based on a percentage of their session bankroll.

They might have a 20% win goal and a 40% loss limit, for example. A player with a $100 bankroll and those limits would quit once he got up to $120 or once he got down to $60.

The reason these money management techniques don’t change the odds is because they’re just arbitrary stopping points in the lifelong gambling session that they’re engaged in.

The law of large numbers still applies, no matter when you stop – unless you stop forever.

Most blackjack players don’t stop gambling forever just because they won $20.

Counting Cards Is a Good Blackjack Strategy

The only time you should deviate from basic strategy is when you’re counting cards, and the count is such that deviating from basic strategy is the mathematically correct move.

And, unlike many people think, you don’t have to memorize the deck to count cards (although you can.)

Counting cards has more to do with keeping a general accounting of how many low cards have been played versus how many high cards have been played.

Having low cards in the deck is bad for the player, but having high cards in the deck is good for the player.

Here’s why:

The high cards are the aces and 10s. These are the only cards that can result in a blackjack (a “natural.”) While most blackjack hands pay off at even money when you win, a blackjack pays off at 3 to 2 odds.

Bet $10 on a hand of blackjack and get a 2-card total of 21, and you’ll win $15 instead of $10.

If the deck has a higher proportion of 10s and aces in it than low cards, your probability of getting a bigger payout increases. If you bet more when you’re more likely to get a bigger payout, you’ll get a mathematical edge over the casino.

Don’t believe me?

Think about it from this perspective:

Suppose you took every card out of the deck beside the aces and 10s.

Would you be more likely or less likely to get a blackjack in that situation?

To keep up with that total, you assign values to the cards based on how high or low they are.

The most basic counting system, the Hi-Lo System, uses values of +1 and -1, so it’s easy to use.

The low cards are good to see come out of the deck, so you count each of those as +1.

The high cards are bad to see come out of the deck, so those count as -1.

When the count is positive, you raise the size of your bets. The higher the count, the bigger your wagers should be.

Is Cheating at Blackjack an Effective Strategy?

Casinos will love it if you believe that counting cards is cheating.
But think about that for a minute.

Why would anyone think that thinking about the game you’re playing – even if you’re thinking about it intently – is cheating?

You wouldn’t accuse an expert chess player of cheating just because he was thinking about the game he was playing, would you?

The truth is that counting cards isn’t cheating, but casinos will back you off from the blackjack tables if they think you’re counting.

But enlisting the help of the dealer by paying them to signal you about their hole card gives you information the other players at the table don’t have. This is really cheating, and it’s illegal. You can your blackjack dealer buddy face possible jail time with this strategy.

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That’s a bad strategy.

You’d have to win a lot more money at the blackjack table than you probably will to make it worth spending any time at all in jail.

Conclusion

Betting Strategies For Blackjack Card Counting

When writing about good and bad gambling strategies, blackjack is one of the best games to discuss. It’s a game where your decisions matter so much that you can even get a mathematical edge over the casino if you make enough good decisions.

Good Betting Strategy For Blackjack Games