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When it comes to blackjack tournaments there are completely different strategies involved compared to table blackjack games. The recent popularization of shows like The World Series of Blackjack, Celebrity Blackjack and The Ultimate Blackjack Tour blackjack tournaments are likely to gain a bigger popularity, and there will be a need in new strategies to succeed.
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Once you’ve learned the basic rules of blackjack and gotten a basic strategy chart, you are equipped to handle basic strategies of standing or hitting. However, what do you do when you get a pair of something dealt to you. That question takes us into some more in depth strategies.
There are basically three choices you have when the dealer deals you a pair of cards. You can hit or stand as you can with any other hand dealt to you. But most casinos and online casinos allow you to split on that pair as well.
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Ken Uston became popular as a blackjack player when his team used card counting techniques to beat the Resorts International in Atlantic City. Ken and and team he assembled won $145,000 at the Resorts International. The feat took just 91 ½ days earning them $1584.70 per day.
Uston was introduced to the game of blackjack by Edward Thorp, a mathematics professor, and Lawrence Revere, a casino pit boss and professional blackjack player. Thorp’s book Beat the Dealer is widely considered the original book on card counting. Revere developed the Revere Point count strategy, of which Uston became a master before developing his own card counting systems.
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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.
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California has more bizarre variations of casino blackjack than any other state in the U.S. Incredibly, this is due to a state law that was passed a century ago. In an attempt to shut down the wild gambling saloons that had flourished in San Francisco’s lawless Barbary Coast district since the Gold Rush, the state legislature made many games, including twenty-one and all house-banked casino-style games, illegal.
Flash forward a hundred years and you have all kinds of unusual card games being offered in California’s poker rooms and Indian reservation casinos where the target total is 22 instead of 21, where other traditional features of blackjack have been altered so as to skirt the law, where games are being banked by players, by syndicates of players, by player “pools,” where jokers are added to the shoes, etc., etc.
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We describe here the basic srtategy for Spanish 21 pseudo-blackjack game. Keep it in your mind, it’s always preferred that you play regular blackjack instead of Spanish 21, which gives greater advantage to the house. Nevertheless, If you feel like trying a new game, you should follow the quidelines, described below.
Depending on the exact set of rules and the number of decks (six or eight), the house edge at Spanish 21 is not that dissimilar from traditional blackjack for a basic strategy player. It ranges from about 0.4 percent to 0.8 percent. In Atlantic City, where dealers stand on soft 17, it’s only about 0.4 percent. In Nevada, where dealers usually hit soft 17, it’s more like 0.8 percent. If the redoubling option is allowed, then even the hit soft 17 game has an edge of only about 0.4 percent. But these house edges are assuming that you learn perfect basic strategy for the game, not the fifteen rules above. And that basic strategy is so much more difficult than the basic strategy for regular blackjack.
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Now let’s talk about the I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-blackjack games. For convenience, let’s just call these games “pseudo-blackjack.” They look like blackjack. They feel like blackjack. They play like blackjack. They’re not blackjack.
The Big Trick
Every pseudo-blackjack game has a big trick to it - something the house did to fundamentally change the game that is not immediately apparent to the players, but that is very apparent to the house in their bottom-line profits. With Spanish 21, the big trick is the removal of all the pip tens. All of the jacks, queens, and kings are there, but the actual tens, the ones with ten pips (diamonds, hearts, clubs, or spades) on them, are nowhere to be found. You may know that the tens atr the most important denomination. You may also recall that “all modem card-counting systems today are based on Ed Thorp’s Ten-Count”. For blackjack players who are attempting to beat the house, cardcounting strategies are based primarily on the tens. It is the presence of excess tens in the deck that provide us with our strongest advantages.
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In 1985, the state of Nevada passed its first “anti-device” law, making computer play, hidden video camera play, etc., illegal for blackjack players. This law was immediately criticized by attorneys as being unconstitutional due to its “vagueness.”
When a blackjack player by the name of Philip Anderson was busted for using a concealed computer in a Las Vegas casino shortly after the anti-device law went into effect, the law was challenged in court. And it was challenged on the basis of its being unconstitutional precisely because it was too vague. To no one’s surprise, the player won his case. The judge acknowledged that the law was simply too vague to be legitimate.
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On April Fools Day, 1984, two players in Las Vegas were arrested at the Marina Casino for using a concealed video camera to peek at the dealer’s hole card. This device was yet another of Keith Taft’s inventions. One player, Keith’s brother Ted, wore the miniature camera in his belt buckle, while the other player, Rodney Weatherford, a Lockheed Engineer, sat in the casino parking lot in the cab of a dump truck that had been fitted with a satellite receiving dish. Rodney’s job was to watch the video images picked up by the table-top-Ievel camera, in order to electronically signal Ted at the table with the value of the dealer’s hole card.
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To the public at large, one of the most incomprehensible things about professional blackjack strategies is hole-card play. Hole-card play is not a single strategy, but a whole range of strategies. The one feature that can be found in all of these strategies is that the player either knows the dealer’s hole card, or has valuable information about that hole card, whether it’s a paint or not. To most casual blackjack players, this seems absolutely incredible and impossible, unless there is some sort of cheating going on. But it’s not impossible, and in fact, most hole-card strategies are perfectly legal.
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