Dave Ashley's Notes on Blackjack
Overview
Blackjack is an attractive casino game for two reasons:
- When played properly according to basic strategy, the house advantage is so slight that
a player, armed with only a basic strategy reference card,
can win often. This makes the game fun, even for an unskilled player.
- Unlike nearly all other casino games, the probability of winning and the best playing
strategy can vary as the game is played (depending on the
cards remaining in the shoe). This aspect of the game
lends itself to skillful play and also provides a mechanism to
lessen the house advantage or even to provide an advantage to
the player.
After about a year of playing Blackjack, and despite the
availability of basic strategy cards and books on card counting, the
following questions about Blackjack were unanswered:
- Many players claim that Blackjack reference cards are produced by the casinos
and don't represent the best playing strategy. This claim never seemed credible to me
(because of the widespread availability of computers), but investigating
it required that I verify basic strategy cards through simulation.
- It was generally unclear which card counting strategy is the best in terms of
rate of return for play under a specific set of playing rules.
I did find some analyses of which strategies have the
best betting accuracy or playing accuracy; but this doesn't always directly
translate to best rate of return. The choice of card counting strategy is
an important one, because learning a specific card counting strategy
represents a substantial investment of time, so one
should learn the best one the first time.
- For a given card counting strategy used for play under a specific set of rules,
it isn't easy to find an analysis of the expected value of a wager as a function
of the card count.
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