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New rules to play blackjack

Blackjack being the most widely played table game in casinos all over the world has the lowest house edge that can be taken down even lower if employing card counting techniques. But if blackjack was a new game trying to make it to the casino tables in our days it would be very unlikely to get there. Blackjack players that use the basic strategy usually reduce the house advantage to 1,5%, which is two times less that is usually accepted in the casinos these days.

Back in 1963 Edward O Thorp, the author of Beat The Dealer, highlighted the fact that blackjack in essence could be easily beaten when using card counting and made even if the player used the basic strategy. Such revelations made a stir in the gambling world as many players jumped behind the tables with the hope to beat the game. The response of casino officials was very simple - they added more decks to the game, making car counting harder to use and apply. However, the basic strategy still gives the player a house edge of less than 1% even with more decks in the game.

But the reality is far less optimistic than most players think, as a little number of those who play blackjack devote much time to learning card counting to the extent that would allow them using the technique in a real life setting. And the number of those who actually manage to master the basic technique is even smaller. Of course, the calculated house advantage can be less than 1% but the vast majority of those who play blackjack have to deal with 2%.

Seeing how much people choose blackjack to play at both brick-and-mortar and online casinos, you may believe that the casino owners are happy with their incomes. However, the owners themselves have a different opinion. The last couple of years seem some changes introduced with the scope of maximizing the profits casinos gain from blackjack players. Some houses installed automatic shuffling machines for making the game even faster paced. Others changed the rules, increasing the house edge in general. However, some casinos on the Las Vegas Strip have introduced a change to the rules that delivered a very strong impact on the game in general.<

Now, instead of 3 to 2 paid for natural blackjacks these houses require 6 to 5. This means that if with previous rules you would get $15 dollars when betting $10 a hand, now you will only get $12 for a natural blackjack. And this leads to the house edge raised by 1.4%, leaving the player who's using the basic strategy with a 2% disadvantage.

To make things even worse, these casinos are advertising these new rules as an advantage to the player. And inexperienced players fall for such ads, not realizing that they get ripped off in comparison with typical blackjack. The best way to win at such games is to avoid them at all, as it's not the blackjack most people can win these days. Find a casino with a 3 to 3 blackjack payout and feel the difference.

Counting cards in blackjack

Travel back in time a few decades and you will find the source of many modern myths. The most interesting swirl around the group of professional gamblers who devised the so-called basic strategy and those people, blessed with a good memory, that can beat the House by counting cards. Today's wisdom says that putting the two together gives you the best chance of beating the house edge. There is some truth to this for those of you who go to real-world casinos. Indeed, many casinos actually sell small cards with the basic strategy printed in neat tables and charts. The original math wonks who crunched the numbers used to guard their knowledge and sell it only at high price. Today, the casinos effectively give it away. Why are the casinos so confident you will not break the bank?

For those of you who are serious about learning the game, sitting in front of a live dealer with the strategy cards as your reference point is a daunting prospect. You are surrounded by one-hundred-and-one distractions. You have an audience who immediately see you as a newbie and will enjoy watching you make the wrong decisions. Worse, you will play with the speed of a constipated snail. On tables with several players, there is an expected rhythm to the play. No-one wants to sit idly around while you run your finger up and down the rows and columns to decide which strategy to play given the combination of cards on display. The only place where you can "safely" learn the basic strategy is online. The animated dealer will sit patiently for minutes while you think.

Thanks to the success of the movie "21", the exploits of the MIT team are well-known. They won millions during the 1990's by counting the cards. Before you all rush off and start training your own team, you have to recognize the difficulty of the task. Every person has to be able to count and keep it up for hours at a time. You have to develop a system of signalling to other members of the team without the security staff noticing. Although card counting is not illegal, casinos ask counters to leave and blacklist them by sending photographs to all the other casinos. Being barred from one casino is being barred from all major casinos. This is not something you can put together in a few days. It will require months of training and planning. Even then, you are only shading the odds in your favor. You will need a bankroll. Unfortunately, this is one time the online casinos will not help you. The online backjack program uses a random number generator to determine the next card. Unlike the real-world stack of six decks where the order of the cards is fixed until the stack is emptied or changed, you cannot use counting to predict the probability of high/low cards when you play blackjack online. So all your practice will have to be in real time. Do you have that much dedication? Most do not and the majority of card counters play blackjack on their own. More importantly, they keep a very low profile to avoid detection by casino staff. That way, they can maintain a gentle accumulation of profit on their bankroll. It can be done. It just takes time, patience and skill.

Online gambling is coming to your life

Ever since the dawn of civilization, people have come together to play games for money. Gambling has a history spanning centuries. While no-one can doubt the lure of being able to win large amounts of money from relatively small stakes, a key element in the growth of gaming houses has been the sociable nature of the activity. People meet each other. Many just come to be seen. Others come to project an image, proving their wealth by appearing not to care if they lose big. Today, gambling is a major industry. Go to Vegas or Macao, and you find integrated resorts where every part of the social experience is structured to support the gamers and their families.

Every detail from the food on offer in the restaurants to the shops trading in the resorts is managed to maximize the chance of attracting the right people to play. Even more important is the need to encourage repeat business. The top spenders must not only generate good word-of-mouth among their circle of friends. They must also return to play as often as possible. The key to this process is making friends with you, the gamblers. Everyone from the bellhop to the croupiers to the hospitality management team must get to know you, make you feel good and build loyalty with comps and other inducements. The more you feel at home, you more you are likely to spend on the tables and machines.

Strip all this away and the glamour disappears. The magic spell is cast by the place and the people who work there. When you sit down in front of a PC in the comfort of your own home, the magic dies on the screen. No matter how well designed the graphics, no matter how smooth the animation, no matter how convincing the background noise may be, you cannot forget you are still in your own home. Yes, there is the convenience factor. Gone is the need to make the sometimes expensive journey to a distant casino. The next can of beer is only a few paces away in your kitchen. But the atmosphere and social benefits of meeting people is reduced to a live chat facility. On the positive side, technology never stands still and online casinos are evolving to meet more of your expectations. That way, you will spend more time playing and everyone wins.

To produce greater realism, the best online casinos now offer live dealers. This depends on the latest video streaming technology and whether you have enough bandwidth. Assuming you can accept the stream, you get a real person dealing live on a virtual table. Needless to say, the dealers are usually attractive young ladies and they deal blackjack and baccarat. Some casinos also provide live roulette. Up to now, this feature has been provided by casinos based outside the US. But November 2009 sees the launch of this service in the first online casino based in the US. JustBet Casino is offering live dealers for several hours every day. Now, people who play blackjack online have the chance to sit down with live feed from a US studio and enjoy their blackjack with a US dealer. This is not going to match the real world experience, but it's getting better.

Can the math help you win in online casinos

For the majority going through school, the math classes are a form of slow torture. All these tiresome problems to solve and never any obvious relevance to real-world situations. Except, of course, that the theory of probabilities gives you everything you need to know about how to bet effectively. Once you can work out the odds on any given event occurring, you are ahead of the game when it comes to winning. In a sense, gambling is the application of science. But this slightly breaks down because knowing the odds does not guarantee you will win. The actual result of the event is still determined by events outside your ability to control. Whether you win is a matter of luck. So we might conclude that gambling in general is a mixture of science and intangibles like intuition.

Why should this matter? Well, there's been an interesting case rumbling through the courts in Indiana. Back in 2006, the Grand Victoria Casino and Resort banned a player for counting cards. The gambler made no secret of his good memory and skill in converting the count into accurate predictions about how to bet. In the real world, casinos run card games from a shoe, i.e. they shuffle together multiple packs of cards and stack them into a container. The dealer then pulls the cards from the stack as they are required. This is the favored system because, once the cards have been placed in the shoe, the dealer cannot cheat by sharping cards from the pack or elsewhere. The order in which the cards will be played has been physically fixed. Thus, if someone with a good memory counts the cards as they come out, he or she can work out the probability of when cards of a given value will next come out of the shoe. This technique gives the people who play blackjack the chance to beat the House edge. The combination of the optimal strategy and counting gives the player the edge. For this reason, casinos routinely throw counters out and ban them from ever playing again. Casinos prefer the House edge to remain in place. Well, that's all going to change now because a three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals said the casino had no legal right to exclude the gambler.

This victory for the scientific gambler is a real milestone. It changes the way in which casinos in Indiana operate. Whether it will apply to other US states will depend on the way their gambling is regulated but, reading through the ruling, it looks as though it should apply in quite a few other states. It would be great if this could also apply to online backjack but the sad truth is the software does not mimic the real world. Unlike the shoe and its shuffled cards, the software uses a random number generator to decide which card comes out next. That means there's no way to use the past cards dealt as a way of predicting future cards. The act of dealing one card is a uniquely random event, not influenced in any way by what has gone before. So scientifically-minded players will be heading to Indiana over the next few months and looking to make a killing. Those of us playing online blackjack will be relying on the optimum strategy and luck to build our winnings.

Which is better, playing in a casino or playing online?

There's one game that will forever be associated with casinos - it's not called the "king of casino games" for nothing. The reason? Perhaps it's the simplicity. Someone spins the wheel, releases the ball, "Where will it fall? No-one knows!" There's the noise as the ball is thrown against the direction of spin. It rolls around the wood framing the the wheel, slowly losing momentum, edging down toward the whirling blades of the slots. Then, with a clatter, the ball is caught by the wheel. It bounces, suddenly caught up and thrown in the opposite direction. There's a hypnotic quality about how the ball moves. Everyone watching feels they can reach out with their minds and will it to land in their numbered slot.

As the wheel slows, the ball bounces up and down a few times, then finally gives in to a combination of friction and gravity, and is caught in one of the slots. It is a wonderful moment of theater, followed by the "instant" gratification of the win for those with the luck. For some, this is the perfect game of chance to play. In the real world atmosphere of a casino, the crowd always gathers round the wheels first among all the games. It has a compelling fascination. Strip away the real world and play online, the experience on your computer can never really be the same. There are good graphics and the sound effects are reasonable. All you are left with is the game itself.

Is it strong enough on its own? Almost certainly. Little changes about the game. The rules are the same, the odds and betting are identical. So should you play it? Well, so long as you know the rules and the odds, it remains a good game. The only difference is the loss of atmosphere when you play online. So you are sacrificing all the travel, inconvenience and expense by staying home and switching on your PC. You can play when you want, for as long as you want from the comfort of your own home. Think how much you might spend on a real world trip in gas, drinks at bar prices (assuming no comps), and so on. That's why you stay home. You will find bonuses and spot prizes to replace the comps. You have more money to play through as a result.

One gentle reminder - there's a myth to dispel. Many try to sell the idea of a strategy to win. In reality, the house has an edge no matter how you play roulette. Never be deceived if you have a hot streak. You might get ahead in the short term but the house will always win in the end. There are no professional players who make a living out of playing this game. You can do many things to keep your losses small, but roulette should really be for fun and excitement. If your luck is in, you can have the satisfaction of beating the house. But always be disciplined. If you have a good win, quit while you are ahead. Make your fun go a long way by coming back another time.

Max Rubin

Max is the author of Comp City, first published in 1994, with an expanded second edition published in 2002. In this groundbreaking book, Max exposed techniques even non-counting players could use to get an advantage over the casinos by exploiting weaknesses in the casinos' comp systems. Max's inside information came from his years of experience in the industry as a dealer, pit boss, and casino manager. Max still does consulting work for the Barona Casino in California.

The initial manuscript for Comp City included advanced comp-hustling techniques that could be used by professional card counters, but the editors at Huntington Press decided to delete this section from the book in order to appeal to the wider market of recreational players. These excluded portions were published in Blackjack Forum in June 1994, and can be found now in the BlackjackForumOnline.com Library.

In the mid-1990s, he started hosting the Blackjack Ball, a secret annual event for professional players, where he serves as Game Master as many of the top pros compete for the Blackjack Cup and the title of World's Best Blackjack Player.

Now, as a host of the Game Show Network's World Series of Blackjack, Max Rubin has become one of the most visible public advocates of professional players.

Lawrence Revere

Lawrence Revere was both an author and a serious player. He died in 1977. His only book, Playing Blackjack as a Business, initially published in 1969, is still in print. If you look at the "true count" methods being employed pre-Revere, you will see why Revere was inducted into the hall of fame. The earlier methods were cumbersome and mentally fatiguing to use. In the second edition of Beat the Dealer, in which Thorp first proposed the Hi-Lo Count, he mentioned a simplified method of using the count, though he failed to develop it as a full system. Revere had a leap of brilliance that led him to come to the conclusion that the simplified method of obtaining a "true count" that Thorp had mentioned could be fully developed and employed with the most powerful of point count systems. Revere's method was so simple compared to the alternatives, it has been employed by virtually every serious balanced point count system developer since, including Stanford Wong, Ken Uston, Lance Humble, Bryce Carlson, Arnold Snyder, and others. As a serious player, Revere's knowledge of blackjack included such esoteric techniques as shuffle tracking and hole card play.

Gambling in the US

The legislature in Delaware has just approved a new law expanding the gambling opportunities in that state. It was almost immediately signed into law by the Democratic Governor who is looking at a major hole in the state budgets and needs additional revenue to help fill it. The new law is intended to allow table games, i.e. blackjack, craps and the "King of Casino Games", to be played at the casinos sited on the state's three horse racetracks.

As soon as the revenue splits are agreed with the casino operators - the legislature has allowed 75 days for the consultation - the final approval will be given by the legislature. The games should be in play at the racetracks early 2010. The law also helps prop up the horse racing industry which has been feeling the pinch in the current recession. The move is controversial in Maryland because their attempts to collect revenue through exploiting betting on slots will be marginalized. But tax payers in Delaware are giving their full approval. They accept this source of state revenue even though it is, in effect, a tax on gambling which, research shows, tends to have a prejudicial effect on lower income families.

As a state, this is elevating Delaware to one of the leaders in the gaming industry. As it stands, the state is one of the four, i.e. Delaware, Montana, Nevada and Oregon, exempted from federal laws prohibiting sports betting. At a federal level, Barney Frank recently introduced a new Bill which would keep sports betting illegal online in all but the four exempted states. This means Americans can only legally bet on professional sport in one of the four states or by getting on a cruise ship that sails out into international waters off the US coast. Quite why something should be lawful in four states and a few miles offshore, but not at home when someone switches on their computer, is a mystery no-one has been willing to explain. The law is as the law is. Interestingly, New Jersey is challenging the state exemptions on the ground it is unconstitutional to allow sportsbooks in some states and not all states. If this challenge is successful, federal law will change to open the US to betting or force all gamblers out to sea or back into underground betting which, more often than not, is run by organized crime. By comparison, Australia permits all betting where there is an element of skill, and more strictly regulates games which are purely based on luck. The Australians think it takes skill to handicap football games.

So, as it stand, Delaware is set to create gambling honeypots where people can come to the racetrack to bet on the horses, use the sportsbooks and play roulette, craps or blackjack. There are no residence requirements. As with Las Vegas, people can come from anywhere in the US. This despite the mounting evidence that gambling is highly addictive and can seriously damage the health (and wealth) of the families it touches. But, as it stands, Delaware is pushing ahead enthusiastically to enhance its facilities with online roulette and draw all gamblers.

Tommy Hyland

Tommy started playing blackjack professionally in 1978 while still in college. That was also the year he started his first informal "team." He's never looked back. For more than twenty-five years, he has been running the longest-lasting and most successful blackjack team in the history of the game. He and his teammates have played in casinos all over the U.S., Canada, and the world. He has used big player techniques, concealed computers (when they were legal), and had one of the most successful "ace location" teams ever. He has personally been barred, back-roomed, hand-cuffed, arrested, and even threatened with murder at gun-point by a casino owner he had beaten at the tables. Every year, the Hyland team players take millions of dollars out of the casinos. And even though Tommy has had his name and photo published in the notorious Griffin books more times than any other player in history, he continues to play and beat the games wherever legal blackjack games are offered. He has also fought for players' rights by battling the casinos in the courts.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Tommy is polite, soft-spoken, and always a gentleman. He is as loved by players as he is feared by the casinos. In an interview conducted by Richard Munchkin in 2001, Tommy said, "If someone told me I could make $10 million a year working for a casino, I wouldn't even consider it. It wouldn't take me five minutes to turn it down ... I don't like casinos. I don't like how they ruin people's lives. I don't think the employment they provide is a worthwhile thing for those people. They're taking people that could be contributing to society and making them do a job that has no redeeming social value."

Is rakeback for me?

The general answer is probably yes. Every player pays some rake no matter which version of poker is played and no matter how the game is played. But the choice is individual. The majority of people in the online poker rooms only play the game for fun. They are just looking to get the maximum enjoyment out of their gambling dollars. Most will not know about the rake and have no immediate interest in claiming some of it back. These players tend to be steady losers. Be grateful to them for supplying your winnings. If you only play for a few hours a week to clear the bonus, there is a short-term argument for saying the rake is irrelevant to you. But circumstances can change. What would you do if the bonuses were to dry up? Equally, if you find you are winning more often and start thinking about playing with a more professional approach, not having an agreement about the rake could leave you with a problem. Then look at your playing style. If you like to get involved in the action, you will tend to see more pots and this will increase the rake paid. If you are a tight player preferring to pick the hand to play, you will be involved in fewer pots and pay a smaller rake. The number of pots also increases if you play short-handed. In a full ring, it is less necessary to defend blinds and so there are fewer pots. Players pay the maximum rake on low to medium sized pots. No limit players pay less, often because the poker rooms operate a "no flop, no drop" policy, i.e. no rake is charged when a player with a good hand raises pre-flop and the others fold. This limits the number of big pots per hour as against limit games where playing the odds usually results in a draw.

Even though claiming back some of the rake is usually favorable, move with care. Always read the terms and conditions of the rooms where you play before you act. Often, these schemes are not offered directly, but made available through affiliate sites to attract new players to the online casinos. Most poker rooms have rules preventing you from having more than one account. If you are caught with multiple accounts, your winnings may disappear. You could also be banned. Similarly, just as you check out the poker rooms before signing up, you should also check out the reputation of the affiliate before signing up. If the affiliate crashes and you lose your accounts, many dollars may have disappeared. With proper research, you can get good deals when you sign for new casinos and poker rooms. Check out the rules before you try to add this to your existing rooms.

Because rakeback is effectively free money, it's usually a good idea to get signed up. Even if you only make a few dollars out of it every month, you might want to turn professional next month. For now, look for the highest rakeback percentages from reputable affiliates and open new accounts within the service terms of the best poker rooms.

What is a Rake Race?

The rake is that drip, drip of fees deducted from every pot you play (and, sometimes, from the entry fees you pay for tournaments or other "special events"). All the regular players who get into the action in the small to medium sized pots have already signed up for a rebate. To add extra excitement to those players, some sites run races - usually over a calendar month - awarding points for the rake paid and the number of raked hands played. To let everyone see how well (or badly) they are doing, there's a real-time leaderboard with the top one hundred (or more) being paid out at the end of the playing period. How many get paid depends on each competition and you should take time to read all the terms and conditions before you sign up. Some of the top players may be grinding through fifteen or sixteen hours of play per day - i.e. only stopping to sleep (and for other necessary functions). They will tend to sign up for the races where the prize money is high. If you are a more casual player, look for low volume competitions in smaller poker rooms. Obviously, this means the prize money is also significantly lower, but you can usually find the right competition for you when you balance out the potential for some race winnings alongside the additional loyalty and VIP bonuses and privileges you will earn if your volume of play increases. Always look at the bigger picture when choosing the race - the sites through which you signed up for a rake rebate will usually have a newsletter service to keep you up-to-date on the latest races being offered.

If you are serious about trying to win, what should you do? The first step is a warning. Always make sure you keep a limit on any losses. There is no point in continuing to play for the sake of winning a race only to find you are bankrupt at the end of the month. Similarly, always stay healthy. Get enough sleep and eat regular meals. Where the race is to find those who play more hands than anyone else, you have to play on multiple tables. If the winning line is solely the amount raked, you may have to play multiple tables - it depends on the value of the pots you play for and the rake percentages and caps. If the rake you pay only rarely exceeds the cap, you will have to play multiple tables.

To give yourself the best chances of winning a rakeback race, play on multiple tables, always trying to find loose tables where people play more marginal hands. This also gives you the best chance of winning the game because you will see more flops and can play the odds better to take the pots away from the weaker players. However, this makes remembering every player's style more challenging so, when playing multiple tables, using a heads-up display of stats and hand results gives you essential information. So, with these strategies in place, watch the leaderboard and avoid burning out. Even if you do not win the race, you will still get several hundred (or thousand) dollars of rakeback to add to your winnings.

A few tips for a casino player

Distractions

When you're walking upon the casino's floor to start your gambling session, holding your perspective is significant. All the miscellaneous things in casino kind of hypnotize a lot of gamblers. Casinos want it. So, you have to stay cool and keep an unclouded mind.

Walk around for five or ten minutes before you sit down to play. Survey in mind your purposes for this session while you perceive the gamblers and the games.

Selecting a table

This is a makeshift decision for gamblers in general. They are choosing the first table they approach, that has a free seat and offers a minimal bet suitable for them. But the decision in selecting the table is an essential element in your chances of becoming a winner in this session.

A good sign is if a players' majority bets more than the minimum bet. Most players enlarge their bet when they continue to win.

This activity of winning might be produced by a non-random shift. It begets cycles of winning for both sides - the dealer and the players.

Tables you should avoid

Same as you are brought to tables where "the lights of Christmas Tree are blazing", you should pay attention to avoid the evident losing table at which players are showing few chips, making single-chip bets, and filter a sullen attitude.

Basic Strategy

So, now you're in the game. Now you've got to make a settlement on each of blackjack hands: split pairs, hit, double down, stand, or take insurance if the dealer demonstrates an ace.

These settlements are making online blackjack one of the most popular and thrilling table games in online casinos. They also give the players a certain control over what comes out of heir hands.

There exists a mathematically accurate way of making each of these settlements. Its name is Basic Strategy.

With this strategy you can become a serious player. It's actually a card counter's strategy. You'll have to pay attention to the cards on the table and their low and high quantity.

So, in general, before starting to play in casino, don't get distracted by such things as lights or beautiful women. Pay attention to everything, especially to your game session.

Raise your income with Basic Strategy Plus

While you might gain in during one particular day, in the long you will probably grind yourself down if you play long and often enough.

An enhanced basic strategy - also called Basic Strategy Plus - is essential for you to accelerate from being an average player to being a serious recreational player who has better chanced to win over the long periods.

To lower the small edge against you with Basic Strategy moreover, and at times turn it into a precise edge in your liking, you only must be attentive to the cards on the table and evolve some proportion sense of high cards versus low cards residual in the card batch. This is just what a card counter is doing.

Anyway, you aren't obliged spending all the hours it takes to befit an expert card counter. By "counting the table" you might get a main sense of the high against low cards proportion. It simply means that in any given hand, you look at the unprotected cards for each hand on the table, the dealer's hand included. Then quickly count of all the high cards and all the low cards. The number of both is equal.

If the number of low cards is much larger than high cards, for example in blackjack, there are chances that the batch is a little ampler in high cards. That is propitious for the player. On the contrary, if the quantity of low cards is in advantage, which means the deck is now richer in low cards. That is unfortunate for the player.

Armed with the gained information, you are able to adjust your play consequently and thus play a little more like an expert.

There are some shave calls with Basic Strategy that might be perfected later with Basic Strategy Plus, same as other resolutions that may be done now more sagaciously.

The first steps to a basic strategy

The game is one of the simplest ever invented. The rules are few and there's no physical effort involved in playing it. You just sit, look at a few cards and make your bets. That's probably why it's become one of the most popular casino games of all time. Of course everyone knows the House has an edge. That's how it pays all the expenses for running the casino. Remember it makes no difference whether this is a casino in the real world or online. You still need people and a base. So common sense tells you that no-one beats the House unless they invest some effort. Put another way: if everyone could beat the House without breaking sweat, the casino would go out of business in a day. This produces the headline: no pain, no gain. You have to put in some study time to master the basic strategy.

So what is this strategy? Over the years, some serious math types did all the work for you. They calculated the best way to play all the card combinations and wrote them down in simple charts. If you were going to play in a real casino, you would have to learn all these rules. That saves you having to pause before every decision to check the charts. Not only would the other players around the table be less than impressed, the casino would probably suggest you leave. But playing online changes all that. You can consult the charts as often as you like before deciding which card to play. It may be slow but, if you get the strategy right for every hand, you just shifted the odds in your favor.

So what are these charts? The first gives you the rules on when to split a pair. The strategy changes depending on the value of the cards dealt to you and the value of the card you can see the Dealer holding. So it starts with the rule that you split a pair of aces no matter what the Dealer holds, and goes down to the choices when you hold a pair of 2s. The other two charts deal with hard hands and soft hands. A hard hand is when neither card is an ace and the strategy changes significantly depending on the card held by the Dealer and the table rules on when the Dealer must stand or draw. A soft hand contains an ace and is easier to play because you can always draw one more card without busting - this takes some of the pressure off the play. I started off by saying blackjack is an easy game but, like all games, you can play for fun or you can take it seriously and play to win. In this case, you are more likely to win if you learn the charts and can play the strategy without thinking. To really take on the House edge, you also have to become a card counter but that's a whole new story because it does not work in a virtual casino. For now, focus on the basic strategy and start your winning blackjack career.

What is the rake?

There are many things that make poker the best game to play - more skill, more fun - but the key advantage is that you are up against the other players around the table and, over time, the best players will win as the luck evens out and the skill takes over. Unlike blackjack and the other table games, there's no house edge to give the casino operator a guaranteed percentage. You take your winnings out of the pockets of those you beat. From the point of view of the casino, this is bad news. Here it is with its capital tied up in bricks and mortar and its outgoings burdened with a staff of dealers, and it has no edge to help cover its costs. So, it charges the players for the right to sit down and play the game. This fee is called the "rake" because the dealer physically rakes in chips at the end of each hand to cover the fee. The amount varies. Sometimes, in the more exclusive rooms, it can be as high as 10% per hand, but it's usually capped and falls to very small percentages when big bets are made.

The fact that you play online does not change the economics of the casino's operation. There may only be one small building and very few staff, but it costs money to install and maintain the software. Servers have to be paid for to host the games. So the casino must still cover its costs when offering a poker room. The advantage is that the costs of virtual operation are significantly less than the real world costs and so the rake percentage is usually lower and capped. On a $50 pot, the rake might be 5% but on a $500 pot it might be 0.5%. So high stakes or no-limit players might pay only a small rake. Whereas small pot players could pay quite high fees except that most online casinos cap the amount per hand at no more than a sum between $3 and $5. Nevertheless, the amount of the rake paid over a month might be substantial for regular players.

If you play online, the rakeback system has been introduced to allow the casinos to compete against each other for players. The idea is simple. Every month, your account is credited with a percentage of the total rake you have paid. That reduces the casino's margin but encourages regular players to stay loyal and to play for longer periods of time - remember online players go through more hands per hour than real world players. The refund makes a big difference and often represents the chance for the regular players to turn from losing to winning. If you only play for small pots, you are playing against the others around the table and the house fees. With the rakeback offering as much as a 40% refund, this can quickly mount up, e.g. if you played 1,000 pots at a capped fee of $3, you will recover $1,200 at the end of the month. This is "free money" for you to play with at the start of the next month and a very good reason for signing up for this facility.

The basic strategy and doubling down

There's a sad fact about playing in a casino, whether real or virtual. The operators have worked out how to play the games on offer and set the odds to favor themselves. After all, if the majority did not lose, there would be no money to pay out all the money you win. Needless to say, the casinos have invested time and money into working out every possible variation on the rules and the ways to play under them. So, if you are going to take on the House edge, you have to become as big an expert on the rules as the operators. So let's start with one of the more interesting rules which decides when you are allowed to double down. This applies when you have received your two cards. If you decide you are going to draw only one more card, the casino rules can allow you to double your initial bet. The different possibilities are to double:

on any card combination;
only when the two cards total 9, 10 or 11; or
after splitting.

Why should you double your bet? The answer is deceptively simple. You double the bet when you think you are going to beat the Dealer. That really does make sense. But because you are suddenly investing more money in playing the game and have more to lose, you need to get on board with the math. You need to know the frequency with which the Dealer is likely to go bust based on the card you can see. If the Dealer's card suggests a bust is probable, i.e. the Dealer's hand is weak, you double the bet when you have a strong hand. You are maximizing the chance of making a good profit on the hand. If you build the doubling rule into your basic strategy, you reduce the House edge. If you refuse to play the doubling rule, the House edge actually increases. This is not to claim you will win every hand when you double down. If you are on a losing streak, you could lose every doubled bet for the session. But, in the long term, you will win more than you lose if you double. If you hesitate to double the bet, it suggests you are outside your comfort zone and already playing for higher stakes than you can afford.

At the blackjack table, the Dealer is weakest when showing a card in the range 2 through 6. With a 2, the bust percentage is 35%. It rises to a 42% chance of busting with a 5 or 6. Your hand is strongest if the two card total is less than 11. Do not be thrown off the basic strategy by the casinos that allow you to add less than the original bet. Blackjack is a game for winners. Never give up the chance to double and take the maximum win against the Dealer. Adding a few dollars to the original bet but not doubling is half-hearted and cowardly.

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