Tuna Dave's Blackjack Diary

The Elements of My Blackjack Strategy

Over the past 10+ years, I have developed a multi-faceted strategy that has worked well for me. It is not a strategy for anyone who intends to make a profit playing blackjack. The only way to "beat" the game long-term is to learn how to count cards. And, although this will give you a positive expectation, your life expectancy as a player will be limited. Once casinos discover that you are a card-counter, they will ban you, regardless of whether you are winning or losing.

So, I developed a strategy for people like me who are recreational blackjack players. I have found that by following the strict rules I will set out, you will be in a position to come close to playing even over the long term. For a recreational player, this in and of itself is a "win" for two reasons: First, you will eliminate your concern about losing large sums of money playing blackjack. Second, once you become comfortable with the strategy and are willing to up your bets, you stand a better chance of taking advantage of the multitude of "comps" offered by casinos. So, with a combination of no loss or only a nominal loss and various comps, you will come out ahead and have a great time to boot.

There are six facets to my strategy. I will discuss each of them in detail in separate posts. However, as an introduction to the strategy, these are the six areas of concern:

1. Blackjack playing strategy
2. Betting strategy
3. Money management
4. Discipline
5. Setting stop-loss limits
6. Miscellaneous considerations

Check out future posts for detailed information about these areas.

Don't Play Single Deck 6:5 Blackjack

For those of you who missed my previous message, let me be very clear: Do not, under any circumstances, play at a single-deck blackjack table where the payout is 6:5 rather than the traditional 3:2.

For complete information why this is the case, check out the link to an article on BlackjackInfo.com.

The 10 Most Common Blackjack Mistakes

The following "Top 10" List was compiled by BlackjackInfo.com. The site has an e-mail signup for a periodic newsletter. This is an example of the information available from that site. I highly recommend the site to all blackjack players, both novice and experienced.

If you play blackjack for an hour or two, your results will be pretty unpredictable. You may win a lot, or you may lose a lot. Most of the time, you'll be somewhere in between. In the short-term, good luck or bad luck decides whether you'll be a net winner or loser. However, if you average out your results over many hours, it becomes clear that playing smarter will save you a lot of money.

A typical blackjack player loses 2% of his total bets to the casino over the course of many bets. That may not sound like much, but it is four times as expensive as it need be. A basic strategy player in a typical 6-deck game loses approximately 0.5%. Playing a 2-deck game instead cuts the house edge to about 0.2%, and a single-deck game with decent rules is basically a break-even game.

If you are a $10 bettor playing a typical 6-deck game as offered on the Las Vegas Strip, you can expect to put around $600 in action in an hour of play. An average player will lose 2% of this, or $12 an hour. A player using the correct basic strategy will lose 0.5% of $600 instead, or only $3.

What makes up this difference? What follows is a list of the most common errors I see made by blackjack players. The examples assume you are betting $10 per hand at a 6-deck game, where the dealer stands on all 17s and double after split is allowed.