hi and welcome to our series of educational videos
that are designed to make you a smarter gambler. My name is Steve Bourie and
I'm the author of the American casino guide which is the number one
bestselling book in the US on the subject
of casino gambling and travel and the only book that comes with more than one
thousand dollars in casino coupon
If you want to know more about me or my book
be sure to visit my website at americancasinoguide.com
In this video we'll be hearing from casino gambling expert henry Tamburin
and answering some of the most common questions that players have about
blackjack.
Henry has written several books on casino gambling including Blackjack take
the money and run
He also teaches instructional classes on how to be a card counter in blackjack
and he has a website at bjinsider.com
where he publishes a monthly newsletter all about the game of
blackjack. I'm sure you'll learn some great tips from Henry on the basics of
blackjack
and how to be a better player now here's Henry Tamburin
A lot of players ask me
if they can win playing blackjack, the answer is yes
but you have to use the right strategies. The first thing that an average player
needs to do is to learn the basic playing strategy
and that will allow you to reduce the house edge to less than
1 percent, which is still not a winning player
what you have to do next is take the second step
and you have to learn a simple card counting system. So if you use basic
strategy
and you learn card counting you can have the edge on your side and you can be a
long-term winning player.
A lot of players ask me
if the game of blackjack is the same from one casino
to another. Years ago that was the case,
if you came to Las Vegas for example you'd find the same blackjack games within the
casino and also from one casino to the next nowadays
that's not true you'll find some casinos that use two decks of cards
some use 6 some use 8 and some casinos the dealer will stand on soft seventeen
and others they'll hit soft 17, some casinos will restrict
the hands that you can double down on some offer surrender, some don't
and you even have to watch out for the payoffs for a blackjack
so it's very important that before you play blackjack
you go to the casino and you look
at the blackjack table and make sure you understand what are the playing rules
and what are the payoffs for blackjack for this particular table that you want
to sit and play.
In the game of blackjack the rules
will affect the house edge against the player
and there are good rules and there are not so good
rules. The good rules for players the ones you need to look for
are for example the dealer standing on soft 17
rather than hitting soft 17 it's much better for a player if the dealer stands
on soft seventeen.
You also want to make sure that you don't have any restrictions as I said
earlier on doubling down
ideally you'd like to be able to double down after pair splitting
it'd be nice if they offered you a surrender option
and most importantly you wanna look at the payoffs for a blackjack
you want to make sure that if you were to get a blackjack that you'd get paid
3-2 and not 6-5 or even money.
So it's this mix of rules which is going to determine the house edge against
the player.
Another thing that players ask me are which blackjack games should they avoid
I think the first thing you you definitely need to avoid
is any blackjack game that pays 6-5 for blackjack
and normally you'll see a 6-5 blackjack payoff
on single deck games the come-on is of course the fact that the casinos
offering
a single deck game, which is usually a better game for a player
when they throw in the 6-5 odds it makes a good game
into a very poor game. Another kind of
blackjack game that you should avoid are the ones that use a continuous
shuffling machine.
You'll know that the automatic shuffler is a continuous shuffling machine
when you simply watch what the dealer does with the discards
In a normal game of blackjack the dealer will take the discards and put them in
a discard tray,
but with a continuous shuffler after every round is done the dealer will take
the discards
and she will place them back into the continuous shuffling machine
and normally these machines hold from four to five decks
of cards so when you think about it when you're playing with a
continuous shuffling machine the cards are going around and around from the table
back into the machine and then they come back out again
and it just keeps cycling and when you're playing with a CSM
there's never a pause in the action because the dealer doesn't have to do
any shuffling doesn't have to change out shoes doesn't have to change out cards
so what that does is it exposes your
bankroll to the house edge 20 percent more per hour
and therefore a player's theoretical
hourly loss is going to increase by 20 percent
Everybody asks me what's the biggest mistake that blackjack players make
I think the number one mistake is they either
do not use the basic playing strategy
but instead use some kind of a faulty playing strategy
and by faulty there are all different types and kinds
probably the most common is a lot of players like to follow the strategy of the
dealer
where they would always hit if they have 16 or less and stand on 17 or more
just like the dealer does and that's a strategy that's gonna doom you to lose.
So you want to use the right strategy which is the basic playing strategy
the second biggest mistake that players make is they use
a progressive betting system believing that that's going to be the
key to unlock the vault so to speak
Unfortunately progressive betting systems do not work
there's never any correlation that says
if you lose or win the previous hand that's gonna increase or decrease your
odds of winning the next hand in blackjack
so progressive betting systems don't work it's not going to change the odds
A lot of players asked me about card counting and specifically what is it
because there's a misconception that if you're a card counter you're gonna memorize
every card that's played
and that's not how card counting works
Card counting is simply watching the cards on the table
so that by seeing these cards you'll have some information
as to what the mix of cards are
in the un played cards sitting in the shoes that are gonna come out in the
next round
and I'll give a simple example, let's take a look at a single deck game
you sit at a table and a dealer shuffles the cards
cards come out on the first round you're an observant blackjack player so you
look at the cards
and you see that there are four aces on the layout
maybe you have an ace, two other players have second and third ace so maybe the
dealer has the fourth ace.
Now the dealer picks up those cards puts them in the discard tray
and now she's ready to deal the second round, what are your chances of getting a
blackjack on the second round?
Well your chance is 0 because
you were an observant player
you saw that all four aces were removed
therefore you have the knowledge from what you saw
that they're not going to be any blackjacks on the next round
So if you're smart bettor in that game you're not going to make a very large
bet in that second round
Now card counting is not illegal
the last time I looked using your brain when you play blackjack is certainly
not an illegal activity and that's all you do when you card count
you're using your brain. Now there's a misconception that a lot of players
mistakenly believe that in order to be a card counter
they're going to have to study for months and months and be like the MIT
guys that
a lot of players saw in the movie 21
That's certainly not the case anybody with average intelligence can learn
card counting
Now some card counting systems do take a little bit more time to learn
but there are simple ones like speedcount which can be learned in less than half
an hour by the average person
Besides playing blackjack in casinos there's
also another option and that's to play tournament blackjack
Tournament blackjack is a little bit different than playing
blackjack at a table because when you're playing in a tournament
you're not only playing against the dealer but you're competing against
other players
and the way tournaments work is quite simple you have a table of say six or
seven players you all start out with the same number of
chips you all play the same number of hands, usually it's 25 to 30 hands
and at the end of say the thirty hands whichever players have the most chips
is declared the table winner and they get advanced to
play other table winners. So in tournament
play the key is to end up
with more chips than your opponents on the table
The question I get asked most often is what is my
best advice that I can offer someone that wants to learn
how to play and win at blackjack. The best advice I can offer players first
and foremost
you must learn the basic playing strategy
and even if you have trouble learning it, you can always take a strategy card
with you to the casino
and refer to it in order to play your hands accurately
The second thing is you wanna scout the games
you want to go in a casino and make sure that the game you're playing has fair
rules
has a fair payout, a 3-2 blackjack payout
and the third thing is you wanna learn a simple card counting system
something that will allow you to get the edge in blackjack
If you do those three things then you can be a long-term winner playing the game.
If you wanna know more about me I host two web sites one is smartgaming.com
and that's a website where I post a lot of the articles
that I've written on all of the casino games so that includes blackjack and
video poker and craps and slots and the other side that I host
is bjinsider.com
and on that site I post my Blackjack
insider newsletter and that's a newsletter that is
published every month and it contains mostly articles
on blackjack although we do cover video poker and other games
if you'd like a free three-month subscription
to the Blackjack Insider newsletter you simply have to go through this
special URL and its
bjinsider.com/freetrial
and if you just enter your
name and your email address we'll send you out the next
three issues for free. Don't forget that you can see more of our educational
gaming videos on our YouTube channel
just go to youtube.com/americancasinoguide