For one of the most straightforward and simplest casino games to pick up and learn, blackjack has a surprisingly rich and sophisticated history behind it. Then again, it makes perfect sense; in order for everyone to enjoy blackjack in its current form, it must went through a long history where it was able to develop as a more streamlined game while still retaining most of its charm and straightforwardness.
Playing blackjack doesn’t require a superhuman amount of skill, plus the rules are easy to learn and aren’t convoluted in any shape or form. It’s no wonder that it remains one of the topnotch and most popular casino games in existence. All the same, the details surrounding blackjack’s birth wasn’t very clear-cut. What is known is that it has some sort of tangential connection with the baccarat card game.
Baccarat, Ving-Et-Un, and Blackjack
The French Twenty-One (Vingt-Et-Un) is a more obvious forefather of the modern blackjack; it was a French card game that was frequently played in its country of origin before it was exported to the United States in the nineteenth century. During the time when Twenty-One became popular in the northern parts of America, a rule required that if you made twenty-one with a two-card hand containing a blackjack, you’ll be able to win ten times your original bet. Tragically, that feature was later removed.
Nowadays, the two-card twenty-one (blackjack) wins you about 3:2 regardless of what cards it contains for the sake of a more challenging and interesting game where you have to earn your keep to succeed. Moreover, compared to other casino games available, your best move isn’t always obvious in blackjack. More to the point, if you have a thirteen going up against a dealer’s eight, should you stand or hit? You’d have no idea save for prior experience, instinct, and guesswork.
The Basics of Beating Blackjack
The advent of using computer programs to calculate the correct decisions for you eventually led to the formulation of the perfect blackjack strategy; every possible hand match-up is accounted for via this high-tech method of blackjack success. With that said, Edward Thorp (a professor at MIT and blackjack expert extraordinaire) utilized a different tactic to beat the game of blackjack. He proved in his popular instructional book, “Beat the Dealer”, that by varying your bet sizes and counting cards, any player can beat the dealer and score big at blackjack, which made him arguably start a veritable war between casinos and gamers.
The effectiveness of card counting is based on the fact that your chances will slightly improve if you have a lot of high cards left in the deck because it will make the dealer bust more often. By betting small when the deck isn’t hot and betting big when it is, the house edge when it comes to blackjack games (by house edge, it means that the dealers by default have better odds of making you lose than you have of getting a win).
Blackjack Strategy Fundamentals
A lot of people are aware that the casino sports an automatic advantage on blackjack that’s simply unbeatable without some prior up-close study of the game. Going forth and playing a blackjack game without knowledge of this advantage will make you nothing more than just another victim of the house’s mandatory edge. There’s a way to beat this edge and manipulate it to your benefit that doesn’t involve advanced card-counting strategy (which is frowned upon by most casinos anyway), and it simply involves basic strategy.