The rules of blackjack vary from country to country, state to state, city to city, casino to casino, and sometimes even from table to table within a casino, This was not always the case. When Nevada began offering the only legal blackjack games in the U.S. when the state legalized gambling in 1931, for about thirty years there were only two common sets of rules - Las Vegas rules and Reno rules. In both towns, the standard game was dealt from a single deck of cards, from which the dealer typically dealt out fifty of the fifty-two cards. The top card was burned, or turned over, onto the bottom of the deck, and the bottom card itself was never played. If the dealer ran out of cards in the middle of a round, he simply reshuffled the discard and continued play. (more…)