Blackjack is one of the only casino games where players have a fair chance against the house, due to strategy based on probability instead of pure luck. It’s a game that can be beaten, but it takes a lot of hard work to beat the house edge and learn basic strategy. It also helps to know some history of the game and how it evolved.
The objective of the game is to beat the dealer by getting a hand value of 21 or higher on your first two cards. Players can hit, stand, double down or surrender. If a player’s hand totals 21, it wins and is paid out at 1:1 odds. A player can also win by making a poker hand with the dealer’s up card, betting on whether the dealer will bust or not, and placing side bets such as insurance or even money.
A blackjack player should always hit when they have a hand of 10 or 12-16 and stand on anything over 17. It’s important to remember that your odds don’t change when you win or lose streaks, so it’s best to keep your bet value consistent and avoid progressive increases in bet size.
When a player has two cards of equal value, they can choose to split them. This means they make a second bet the same amount and then play each card as a separate hand. The dealer will then deal each hand a new card. When a pair of twos are split, they are played as two separate hands and can only be hit once. It is generally good practice to split aces and eights, and some players even recommend splitting nines, sevens, sixes and threes.
Blackjack has seen many changes over its long and provocative history. Some of these changes are subtle while others are significant and can significantly impact the game’s house edge. The history of the game includes a lot of controversial and influential players, such as Jess Marcum who was kicked out of numerous casinos and was the inspiration for the movie “System Smitty”.
In the last few decades, Blackjack has seen the introduction of side bets. These are wagers that can be placed at the same time as the player’s main bet and cover a variety of scenarios such as a pair, if the dealer has blackjack, etc. Some of these side bets have a negative effect on the house edge while others can be beneficial to the player.
The most effective way to reduce the house edge in Blackjack is to master basic strategy and a card counting system. There are many different card counting systems, but the Hi-Lo method is one of the most popular. These methods assign point values to the cards, which allows the player to predict the probability of hitting certain hands over others. The more the player knows about the cards, the better they can be at predicting which ones to hit and when to double down.