The Surprisingly Obvious Reasons You Cannot Win at Blackjack (Without Having To Count Cards, Too)
Some people insist that the house edge at blackjack isn’t actually there; that is, you can’t actually beat the casino with any strategies known to man. Sure, you can get the house edge down to about 0.7% online, but you can see that they still get eventually come out to behind you. However, if you’re like me, I’m sure that everybody knows that the house edge can be brought down as low as 0.25% if all you do is bet basic strategy correctly. Because of the way that the house works, the casino collects a commission called a “rake” for each hand that you play. Simply, the more you play, the more you pay rake, so-called “the house edge.”
I’m sure that you’re struggling at this very moment to understand how the game of blackjack works, and whether or not the concept of the house edge really means that you have less of an advantage than when you started. Let me answer: yes it does. But here’s the thing. This is actually the very reason why casinos are so profitable: because the dealer has some kind of advantage over the player, whether or not you are aware of it or not.
The fact is that the dealer has a better chance of breaking on the next card than the player does. Simple statistics. Some people argue that because the player has some kind of an advantage, the casino has some kind of an advantage as well, and therefore you should just take the easy money and give up trying to figure out what is going on. I call this the faulty basis upon which rationale is built. Let’s examine both parts of this argument one by one.
Let’s start with the faulty basis. The premise that the casino has a larger edge comes from the fact that players see some cards before the dealer does. This gives the perception that there is more skill going on in the hands that are being played than maybe there actually is. Here’s a quick reality check on blackjack odds for those of you wondering, it’s really not that complicated. Let’s say that you are holding a notion that your hand will not be beaten even if the dealer hits his hand the third time. Then you can add the laws of probability into your mental poker odds formula and you will see that you will definitely lose money over time, even if you are nice and tight. The reason is simple, with only one chance to hit, the house has an even better of a chance of breaking a hand than a player does. They have just one opportunity, and you do not.
The house edge comes from the fact that people who don’t know what they are doing get the advantage over those who do. The only way you are going to beat the house is to be dumb and follow the rules, not the ordinary human emotions. Let’s say that you are a baseball player with a terrific hitting streak. You see a home run occasionally on the horizon. You give your hitting coach a hit along the bat, and suddenly you fl stat a six home run game. More than likely you’ll still get some hits, but there will be no follow up hit after your big game. Baseball is a game of opportunity.
In Vodka138, on the other hand, you can flop a nice quadruple, and not even need a half variation of that to be a monster hand. Say you have a marginal hand, say middle pair or something, and you call in early position at the low end of the sportsbook. You, and your partner, push the small blind and everyone folds. You, with the betting history of the other players, know that your Partner has a winning history of 63% with Atlanta and the bookmaker is offering 11 to 10 on the odds that you will win. Of course you are going to win this hand, but if you decide to test the table by going for it, the 11 to 10 will give the other players the worse of a chance that you will win.
Hand after hand of this nature, with the average winning hand being something like a high card or sometimes an over card, will result in the player receiving a substantially smaller return on a bet than would a more typical straight play would. While the expectation is always for the worst, because the odds are so long against them, the rewards received by winning hands are quite small. This Motivation Effect is the reason that most gamblers eventually go broke. The Guarantee soon disappears when the opponent aware of the strategy appears. Accept it or not, the opponent will always have the better hand, and therefore will always be profitable.
Therefore a sure fire method is to implement a technique of deepthinking to determine your positional advantage at the table.
