Blackjack Tips for Beginners
A lot of blackjack tips pages don’t account for the skill level of the reader. You’ll find people suggesting that you learn to count cards or that you practice shuffle tracking.
Such advice is fine, for the most part, but it’s not suitable for most blackjack beginners.
This post consists of my seven best blackjack tips for beginners. To become a better blackjack player, keep reading below and start applying the following strategies and tips.
Master Basic Strategy
Honestly, if you ignored all the other tips on this list and just mastered basic strategy, you’d be way ahead of most other blackjack players.
What’s basic strategy? Well, it’s the mathematically optimal play in every blackjack situation.
You have the following information during each blackjack hand:
You know what total you have.
You know one of the dealer’s two cards.
A basic strategy table compares your total with the dealer’s face-up card to give you the mathematically best play.
In some situations, the mathematically correct decision is the one that loses the least amount of money over time. In others, the mathematically correct decision is the one that wins the most money over time.
Never Take Insurance
The only time that taking insurance is mathematically correct is if you’re counting cards. Since this is a list of blackjack tips for the beginner, that doesn’t apply to you.
Insurance is a side bet that the dealer has a 10 in the hole. It pays off at 2:1. The casino calls it “Sa Gaming,” but the truth is, the house has a high edge on the insurance bet.
FOR EXAMPLE:
Let’s assume you’re playing in a single-deck game, and the dealer has an ace showing. You have two cards, too, and neither of them is a 10. This means you have 49 cards that aren’t accounted for in the deck. Of those, 16 of them are worth 10—all the jacks, queens, kings, and 10s.
So, you have 33 ways to lose the insurance bet compared to 16 ways to win. The bet pays off at 2:1, which is the same as 32:16. That’s one extra way that the casino has to win means that the casino has an edge, but how much of an edge?
Let’s say you bet $100 on insurance 49 times. You’d win $200 on 16 of those bets, for total winnings of $3,200. But you’d also lose $100 on 33 of those bets, for total losses of $,3300.
That’s a net loss of $100 on 49 bets, or an average loss of $2.04 per hand. This means the house edge for the insurance bet is at least 2.04%. And that edge goes up if you have a card worth 10 in your hand, because you have more ways to lose.
It’s crazy to make a bet with a house edge of 2% in a game where the house edge is only 0.5%. Insurance is a sucker bet. Just don’t take it.
