Blackjack Strategy

“Have you ever caught anyone card counting?” As a croupier, working in London’s high end casinos, this was one of the questions I was asked most – often by people who’d never been to a casino, who wouldn’t even know how to play blackjack. The notoriety of this form of cheating is probably due at least in part to Ben Mazrich’s bestselling account of a group of card counting students who won millions in Vegas.

When you are dealt a pair of 9s in blackjack you have two viable playing options:

In the previous article in this series about my personal experiences with blackjack, I explained how I first learned how to play blackjack, and how I mastered the basic strategy (circa 1969). In this second article, I’ll explain how I decided to become a card counter and how I learned to count.

In this article you will learn how to play a hard 16 when you play blackjack.

A hard 16 is a blackjack hand that contains either no Aces, or if an Ace is present, it counts as one. Some examples of hard 16 are:

I learned to play blackjack after I lost my meager bankroll in a casino on my very first trip to Las Vegas. Here’s how this happened.

Picture 44 electronic player terminals spread out in a stadium-configured arrangement in a casino. A live blackjack dealer stands in front of the stadium facing the players. Players (in this example, up to all 44) make their bets by touching the casino chips across the bottom of the screen on their interactive terminal. As soon as bets are made by the active players and a countdown timer reaches zero indicating that wagering is closed, a live dealer deals a single (common) hand of blackjack to all players, and deals one card to herself.

Ever since Ed Thorp published his book Beat the Dealer in 1962 it has been an accepted that the diligent player can beat the casino at blackjack. As a kneejerk reaction to this, the casino owners met and decided to implement a series of changes to the game.