Blackjack: Now you REALLY can’t win March 26
It seems that the casinos are just not satisfied with winning at blackjack almost all the time. According to a recent LA Times article the casinos have been slowly altering the rules of blackjack over the past few years to skew the game even further in their favor. What’s the big deal? Well, everyone knows (at least I HOPE you know) that all games you find in a casino have a house edge built into them (it’s how casinos make money…well, that and charging $30 for a crappy buffet). Slots has one of the highest house edges (have you ever REALLY won at slots? What if you calculate your total life time slot profit vs how much you have pumped into those machines? Yea, that’s what I thought), while blackjack is has classically been one of the lowest. Using classic rules on a one deck game of blackjack the house edge was is a tiny .18%. What that means is that for every hundred dollars you wager, you should only lose 18 cents. Of course it has been nearly impossible to find a single deck game of blackjack for some time (because card counters figured out how to beat the casino and skew the odds in their favor), but now it seems casinos have been further altering the rules to put the game more squarely in their favor.
Some of the changes include:
- • Cutting the payout for hitting blackjack from 3:2 to 6:5
• Requiring the dealer to hit and not stand on a “soft 17″
• Limiting players’ rights to double-down
• Increasing the number of decks in the shoe
If you have no idea what the above things mean that is fine… the moral of the story is *stay away from gambling* It might feel like gambling for you but it is most certainly NOT for the casino. They will always win in the end.
If you want to see a great documentary about some people that actually did beat the Casinos, then check out Making Millions the Easy Way for free on Google Video. This is a documentary about blackjack, card counting , and the team of MIT card counters that took Las Vegas for millions of dollars. For a great book on the subject, I highly recommend “Bringing Down the House” by Ben Mezrich. You can check it out using the link below.
