Easy Ways To Win Blackjack

Blackjack can be beaten using a simple Plus Minus count. Casinos have known this for years, books have even been written to train people how to do it. But the game is still offered because not enough players take the time to learn how to play blackjack very well. 5 Best Tips for Winning at Blackjack Learn Basic Strategy and stick to it. The player should always assume that the card they can’t see is a 10 and statistically, the odds are high that it is. How to make money playing blackjack how to win at the casino every time how to win money at the casino how.

• They sell 'systems to win at Blackjack' to people who would spend a fortune to find an easy way to win. Too bad none of those revolutionary and proven Blackjack winning system work, though. The game of Blackjack is based on probability, meaning most of those systems are just plain nonsense.
• Counting cards is the most well-known technique to win at blackjack, but it can get you thrown out of the casino or even spend a night in jail (as many members of the MIT Blackjack Team found out!). But counting cards is not the only way to beat the casino at blackjack! An Alternative Scientific Theory for Blackjack.

One of the popular myths surrounding blackjack in casinos is that the average player can get an edge over the casino if he just plays his hands correctly. In other words, a lot of people think that you can win at blackjack just by mastering basic strategy.

But basic strategy isn’t enough to win at blackjack in most instances.

You need an additional strategy – an advantage technique – to get an actual edge over the casino in blackjack.

This might mean counting cards, but there are other ways, too. I’ve written extensively about counting cards in blackjack in the past.

But today I want to take a different approach.

Here’s how to win at blackjack WITHOUT counting cards.

The First Step to Winning at Blackjack Is Mastering Basic Strategy

In blackjack, you have a finite number of potential situations to deal with. The dealer can only have one of the following face-up cards: ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10.

And you can only have one of a handful of potential totals, starting with a total of 3 and going up to a total of 21.

And many of those situations offer obvious strategic decisions. You’d always stand with a total of 21, for example. It’s an automatic winner. You’ll also always stand with a total of 20. You have far too many ways to bust in this situation to ever make it worth your while to hit in that situation.

The same holds true for a lot of your smaller totals, too. Any hand totaling 11 or lower is impossible to bust, so you’ll always at least hit in that situation.

But for many hands, you must compare what you’re holding with the dealer’s face up card to determine the playing decision with the highest expected value. In a lot of these situations, your expected value is negative. Imagine having a hard total of 16 against a dealer’s face up 10, for example. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in that situation.

But, in those situations, some plays have a lower negative expectation than others. Your job is to make the play that loses the least amount of money in the long run.

Luckily, basic strategy is easy to memorize and implement. When you use basic strategy for every blackjack decision, you reduce the house edge to its theoretically lowest possible number. In most casinos and under most rules, this means that the basic strategy player faces a house edge of 1% or less.

You still can’t win in the long run with a house edge of 1% or even 0.5%.

But your probability of being a winner in the short run improve dramatically.

An average blackjack player with no knowledge of basic strategy is probably giving up between 2% and 4% of their house edge.

Advantage Play Techniques and Blackjack

An advantage play technique is a way of playing a casino game that gives you an edge over the casino. The most common advantage play technique is counting cards, but that’s not your only option. You can win at blackjack without counting cards, even though it’s probably the easiest way to get an edge.

How does card counting in blackjack work?

Counting cards is just a means of roughly tracking the ratio of high cards (aces and 10s) to low cards in the deck. When the deck has a higher proportion of high cards, the player is more likely to get a blackjack. That’s a 2-card hand that totals 21, and players love this hand because it pays off at 3 to 2 odds.

Bet $100 on a hand of blackjack, get dealt a natural, and you’ll get a payout of $150.

Card counters raise the size of their bets when their probability of getting a blackjack goes up based on the count.

And counting cards isn’t hard, either.

You just subtract 1 from the count every time you see a 10 or an ace.
You add 1 to the count every time you see a card worth between 2 and 6 points.

If you’re playing in a game with multiple decks, you adjust that running count to account for the extra decks of cards in play. That’s as simple as estimating how many decks are still in the shoe and dividing the running count by that number.

For example, if the running count is +8, and you estimate that there are 4 decks left in the shoe, the true count is only +2.

Why does this matter?

Because you raise your bets proportionally related to the count. You’ll bet more when the count is +8 than you would if the count was +4.

Not everyone wants to learn how to count cards, though.

You Can Win at Blackjack Without Counting Cards by Getting Lucky

The house edge in blackjack is a long-term phenomenon. In other words, your short-term results might look like anything. You’re mathematically expected to lose between 0.5% and 1% of your action at
the table in the long run.

But, in the short run, anything can happen.

So, one way to win at blackjack without counting cards is to keep your session short and walk away when you’ve won a specific amount of money. This is called having a “win goal.”

Most gamblers who use win goals set a win goal based on a percentage of their bankroll. For example, you might sit down at a $10 blackjack table with a $200 bankroll for the session. Your win goal might be 50% of that $200 – or $100. In that case, if you ever get to a point where you have $300 or more in chips, you walk away from the table and book your win.

Since blackjack is a negative expectation game, you’ll have more losing sessions than winning sessions over time.

But, unless something weird happens, you WILL inevitably have some winning sessions.

Another Way to Win Is to Bet Really Big and Negotiate Better Rules
Don Johnson is a living example of a blackjack player who won really big at the game without counting cards. He won over $6 million on blackjack in a single evening. Here’s how he did it:

To start with, he had mastered basic strategy. Everyone who’s ever been interviewed about him said that he played perfect cards. If you want to duplicate Johnson’s success, start with mastering basic strategy.

The next thing he did was negotiate with the casino. High rollers like Johnson, who bet $10,000 or more per hand, don’t have to play by the same rules as the average casino-goer.

It’s common for high rollers to get loss rebates. This means that the casino offers a player a discount on his losses. For example, if the casino is offering a 10% discount on your losses, and you lose $100,000, you only really lose $90,000 because of the rebate.

Some casinos also give high rollers bonus money to gamble with up front just to get them started gambling. Online casinos do this all the time, but brick and mortar casinos save this kind of treatment for their higher rollers.

Don Johnson negotiated a 20% loss rebate on his action the night he won all that money in Atlantic City.

On top of that, he negotiated specific blackjack rules that reduced the house edge to a tiny percentage. They played with a hand-shuffled, 6-deck show, and the dealer was forced to stand (rather than hit) a total of soft 17.

In total, all the rules changes wound up making this blackjack game a game with a house edge of only 0.25% — making it almost an even money game.

But on top of that, because of his loss rebate/discount, he was only risking 80 cents for every dollar he stood to win.

He had to buy in for a million dollars, but he was guaranteed a 20% discount on his first $500,000 in losses. Also, he wasn’t required to lose the entire million. He could lose the $500,000, quit, and get his $100,000 rebate – leaving him with “only” a $400,000 loss.

On the other hand, if he started winning – which he did – he could just keep playing.

And that’s how he won over $6 million without counting cards.

Other Advantage Techniques in Blackjack

Counting cards isn’t the only strategy for getting an edge at the game of blackjack. Advantage players use other techniques, some of which are well-known.

Dealer tells is one of these techniques. This describes the tendency that a dealer has to give some kind of physical clue after looking at his or her down card. The savvy blackjack player can then adjust his decisions based on the information he gleaned from the dealer tell.

Shuffle tracking is another advantage technique. The idea is that even though decks of cards get shuffled and randomized, they don’t get completely randomized.

If you can keep up with clusters of cards that are heavy with 10s and aces, you can raise the size of your bets when the dealer gets close to using those cards.

Hole carding is similar to dealer tells. It’s when a dealer accidentally reveals his actual down card when he looks at it to check for blackjack. The advantage of knowing which 2 cards the dealer has is obvious from a strategic perspective.

Other advantage play techniques exist that advantage players don’t share in public, too.

Conclusion

Counting cards is definitely the easiest way to win at blackjack, but you can without this technique. It’s harder to do, though, and I recommend learning to count cards if you’re serious about becoming a blackjack winner.

Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

Dec 30, 2014

Are you struggling to win at blackjack on a consistent basis? These simple card counting systems can provide the solution.

Basic blackjack strategy is fairly simple. Anyone armed with a strategy card and enough motivation to memorize it can effectively apply basic strategy in any situation. But more experienced players know that winning at blackjack on a consistent basis requires digging deeper.

It requires you to learn how to count cards. The ability to count means that you can predict with reasonable accuracy when a ten-value card is or isn’t going to be dealt, so you know when to bet big and when to stay put. Counting is to only way to maintain a mathematical advantage over the house, which is the reason that EVERY PROFESSIONAL BLACKJACK PLAYER ON EARTH COUNTS CARDS!

If you’re still relatively new to blackjack, the thought of learning a card counting system may be daunting. “It requires brilliant math skills and countless hours of practice,” you may be telling yourself. Check that negativity at the door, because it isn’t as difficult as you think. Here are three card counting systems tailor made for beginners:

#1: The OPP Card Counting System

The OPP is arguably the easiest system out there, and is a perfect stepping stone on your way to blackjack greatness. You only need to keep track of low cards (which make the count positive) and there is no need to convert a running count into a true count. Here’s how it works:

When the shoe begins you start with a count of +6. You should subtract one for every hand in play (including the dealer). So if there are two other players at the table besides you, subtract 4 from the count, giving yourself a +2.

Once play begins, simply add 1 for every low card dealt (2,3,4,5 or 6). There is no need to concern yourself with high cards. Simply re-subtract the number of hands from the count each time a new round begins. There you have it, you’re using a card counting system!

OPP is an unbalanced system, meaning that the count will not be zero at the end of each hand. The count tends to trend upward, meaning that you’ll need to consider the number of decks in the shoe when determining when to increase your bet.

#2: The Red Seven

Red Seven is a simpler system originally pioneered by Blackjack Hall of Fame member and best-selling author Arnold Snyder. Snyder touts his system as both accurate and easy to use:

The easy Red Seven Count gets 80% of the potential gain available from the Hi-Lo Count and other counts that are significantly more difficult to learn and use. It is the strongest professional-level card counting system ever devised for its level of simplicity and ease of use.

The Red Seven is simple in that the player isn’t required to convert the running count into a true count. Because the running count is unbalanced (adding up to +2 at the conclusion of each deck), the amount of decks in the shoe are already factored in.

This card counting system requires the player to pay special attention to each Seven dealt from the deck. Sevens are neutral in most systems—including Hi-Lo and OPP—but in Red Seven those with a red suit are given a count of +1. Low cards are also given a +1 while high cards (8-Ace) have a value of -1.

#3: Knock-Out Blackjack

“KO” has been trumpeted as the “easiest card-counting system ever devised.” While that may be an excessively bold statement, it is an effective blackjack strategy that is certainly simpler than Hi-Lo.

The only real difference between KO and other systems is that Seven is a low card instead of a neutral one, so it always receives a +1. This means that the count is unbalanced (similar to Red Seven) and each deck will conclude with a count of +4.

There is no need to convert this number into a true count. But because the count will be always be a bit higher than it would be with a balanced system, how do you know when the time is right to increase your wager?

The standard equation used is +2 times the amount of decks in the shoe. Assuming that you’re playing at a six-deck table, you should increase your wager only when the count is +12 or higher. You may need to play through a few decks to get to this number, so be patient.

Final Verdict

Each system mentioned here is both simple and effective. But which is the most effective? The OPP is the simplest of the three but is generally considered the least accurate. Arnold Snyder actually performed a comprehensive comparison of Red Seven and Knock-Out, and found the end result to be strikingly similar.

His statistical model found that in a six-deck game KO carried a player edge of .62, just a hair above the .61 for Red Seven. Considering that KO is slightly easier to use than Red Seven, one can conclude that it’s a better option.

Tags: Arnold Snyder, Blackjack, Blackjack Hall of Fame, blackjack strategy, Card counting, card counting system, counting cards, easiest card-counting system ever devised, easy to learn card counting systems, Knock-Out Blackjack, OPP Card Counting System, Red Seven

Easy Ways To Win Blackjack Real Money

Easy Ways To Win Blackjack Slot Machines

Related posts:

Easy Way To Win Blackjack

• Card counters’ days are numbered
  The end may be near for those blackjack enthusiasts who count cards in order to...
• New Comic Shows How MIT Blackjack Team Got Rich With Power
  MIT Blackjack Team’s story serves as main source of inspiration of “Brilliant”, the latest comic...
• Modern Technology and the Blackjack Table: 4 Great New Casino Inventions
  Casinos need to remain vigilant when it comes to cheats; using technology to detect and...
• Blackjack Players Prefer Gambling in Pennsylvania over Atlantic City
  Atlantic City is resorting to strange promotions in order to attract blackjack gamblers who now...
• Blackjack Card Counting Teams Rape Atlantic City Casinos for Millions
  In an epic attack upon the beleaguered Atlantic City casinos, multiple blackjack card counting teams...