Can you win at blackjack at an online casino?
Blackjack is a simple, dynamic, and captivating card game that is undoubtedly one of the most popular in the card world. The origins of the game may be traced all the way back to nineteenth-century France. Almost every gambling institution in Paris at the time used to play “vingt-et-un,” which is French for “twenty-one.”
But can you really win when you play blackjack at an online casino? Let’s talk about the maths of blackjack with BestAuCasinosOnline.
Blackjack win-loss ratio
If you don’t count the 9% of games that end in a draw, you’ll be:
- losing 52% of the time;
- winning 48 rounds out of 100.
As you can see, the odds are stacked against the casino. Not sure how you can keep the house advantage to a minimum and even tip the scales in the player’s favour?
Here’s the thing: If you lose, you only lose one bet. But you can win one and a half (with blackjack) or two (with double) bets. Accordingly, with an equal number of successful and unsuccessful hands, your total winnings may be greater than your total losses.
Frequency of blackjack formation by player and dealer
Do you know how often a player following the basic strategy recommendations gets blackjack? On average, he gets lucky once out of twenty-one hands. That’s pretty symbolic, isn’t it? Twenty-one blackjack points and twenty-one blackjack hands.
If you play a strictly optimal strategy, you’ll score more than twenty-one points about once in every six rounds. To be exact, overcalls occur in about 16% of games.
On the other hand, the dealer fails much more often, twice in seven rounds, or 28% of the game rounds.
But don’t get too excited about this high figure, because it’s theoretical and based on all of the dealer’s first possible cards. In practice, many of the hands in which the dealer should have over-carded turn out to be winners, because the customers who acted first have already got out of the game.
You’ll also be interested to know that with an open five or six, the dealer overcalls 42% of the time. That’s why the basic strategy on these cards by the dealer recommends stopping at twelve to sixteen points.
The basics of blackjack card counting
You can only start learning how to count cards once you’ve got the basics down pat:
- Learn basic blackjack strategy;
- Learn how to find the most profitable rules;
- You must be able to adapt the system to any changing conditions and so on.
You should be able to play correctly in any situation, even if outside circumstances are against you.
Please keep in mind that counting cards is only justified at offline gambling clubs, because at online blackjack Australia all the decks are shuffled before each hand (single deck multi-hand blackjack being the exception).
Many establishments try to protect themselves from professionals through various measures like cutting off a large portion of the decks, surprise shuffles, and so on. It’s very likely that you simply can’t find a casino in your area where it makes sense to count cards, and long trips involve significant incidental costs.
Also keep in mind that you’ll have to hide your skills, as pit bosses will often kick players out on the slightest suspicion that they’re counters.
A few more blackjack facts
Finally, here are a few more interesting facts about blackjack, which will shed some light on some aspects of the game:
A user has a 14% chance of losing three hands in a row (assuming you follow the basic strategy), so you should be prepared to be in trouble a lot. There is a 43% chance of getting a “hard” twelve to seventeen hand, which is not good, because 85% of bad draws occur on such cards.
If the dealer has an ace open, there’s a 31% chance of getting a blackjack, or four times out of thirteen. So should you insure against them? For example, the amount of insurance will be $1. Accordingly, for four dealer’s blackjacks you will win $8, and in other cases you will lose $9. Now do you understand why insurance is not necessary?
Always think the dealer is holding a ten. Because this has the highest probability, every fundamental blackjack strategy is built around it. If the dealer has an open card of 6 or below, you should expect he’ll burn because gaining 21 points will be incredibly tough.
In fact, the basic strategy is all based on mathematical calculations like these. The best thing you can do is to stick to its recommendations. Just remember to use your strategy specifically for each variant of blackjack.
We also review online blackjack casinos for players from Canada, so you can check BestAuCasinosOnline.
Theoretical winnings on card counting
So, by learning a simple card counting system and finding a blackjack game with pretty sensible rules, you can expect to gain a casino advantage of around 0.75%. There are several important factors affecting this figure, so don’t take it literally, although you’re unlikely to get much better results.
Next, it all depends on your playing speed and betting size. You should find a table that has a betting range of at least seven units (say five to thirty-five dollars), so you can play low when the score is negative and raise as soon as it changes in your favour.
A fast dealer can deal cards at a rate of about four hundred hands an hour.
Suppose you play two hundred hands in an hour and the average bet is ten dollars. That means you’ll be putting two thousand on the line. With the 0.75% advantage over the casino specified earlier, you would theoretically win fifteen dollars (2000×0.75=15).
Another very important point is the amount of money you allocate to the game. The bigger your bankroll, the less likely you are to blow it all during a prolonged blackout.