Blackjack is one of the most popular games with gamblers “in the know”. No wonder since – if played right – it is the casino game with the lowest house edge. Players have a certain control over the advantage of the house in this game, and thus, it is very attractive to most who know a thing or two about gambling. The house edge on the game of blackjack isn’t big to start with. Compared to games like keno (where the house edge can be as high as 60%), or roulette, it is a lucrative game as it is. Even if you know nothing about the game but the basic rules, you’ll still enjoy it and not have to sell your house to pay for it. Whether you’ll win money or not, is an altogether different matter The house edge makes its influence felt over the long-run. This isn’t poker, sports betting or some other positive expected value gambling, where the longer you play the better the odds are in your favor. This is negative EV play no matter how you look at it, and as such, over the long-run it is a bad investment.

Certainly, one can hope to make money by taking advantage of the variance (get lucky on a big hand then leave with the money) but that is not one of the better ways to take advantage of live casino blackjack.

Learning basic strategy is the first step you need to take towards reducing the house edge. Basic strategy comes in the shape of charts which tell you what to do, based on the cards that you get and on the dealer’s showing card. Certainly, you’re not going to walk around the casino with charts in your pocket, but if you catch on to what exactly it is that the charts are meant to accomplish, you’ll do OK without them as well. In order to further refine your approach, and to further reduce the house-edge, you need to do some basic card counting. By using a simple system of allotting values of 1, -1 and 0 to different cards, you’ll be able to keep track of how many cards of certain value have left the deck. If there are many more low cards out on the table than high ones, you’re enjoying a theoretic advantage. Whenever play happens on a deck rich in high-cards players are supposed to have an advantage. This is card-counting, but it’s still not a very efficient way of squeezing as much juice as possible out of your game. There are other, more efficient card counting methods that you will be forced to apply, simply because no casino will ever allow you to play blackjack with a single deck at any of their tables. Counting cards over multiple decks is a much more intricate process, yet is it not impossible to learn and execute. It’s all that you’ll be able to rely on once at the table, as Blackjack offers no off-table advantages (like poker rakeback or table selection).

It’s all fine and achievable in live blackjack though. What about online blackjack? After all, every online casino offers such games for their patrons. Lately some online poker rooms also feature it as an alternative for those who get fed up with Texas Holdem or Omaha, and ever blackjack-holdem hybrids have surfaced, just to up the ante a tad. The good news is, basic blackjack strategy should work fine in online casinos, as long as it’s a fair piece of software people play against. The bad news is, counting cards is no longer possible. Certainly, you can still keep track of how many cards have left the deck (s), but there’s no telling how many decks the RNG (random number generator) uses and how many times it shuffles them. It could reshuffle all its decks after every single hand played, since it doesn’t take longer than a few fractions of a second for the computer to do it, and it wouldn’t be unfair towards the players either. Bottom line: online blackjack will probably always hold a tiny edge on you, no matter what you do.