Blackjack Strategy Articles

Blackjack Tips

This section of the site presents articles and tips about how to play blackjack. We eventually hope to include at least a hundred or more strategy articles for blackjack players of all experience levels, and when we do, we'll have the articles organized by category.

Traits of Winning Blackjack Players
5 characteristics of winners at blackjack. Develop these traits in yourself and you can beat blackjack too.

Winning Blackjack Tips
Five tips to to help a beginner become a better blackjack player.

Blackjack Probability and Odds
An analysis of some of the probability situations that come up in a blackjack game.

Blackjack Basic Strategy
A discussion of what blackjack basic strategy is and why you should memorize it.

Dealer Tells
Most people think of tells as something to use in a poker game to get an advantage. We examine how dealer tells can improve your odds at blackjack too.

Card Counting in Blackjack
An introduction to how to count cards in a blackjack game, and why card counting works.

Shuffle Tracking
Another introduction to an advanced blackjack strategy concept.

Blackjack (along with video poker) is one of two casino games that we know for a fact can be beaten through the proper application of math and strategy. There are lots of strategies for winning blackjack play, most of which have been determined using computer analysis of the math of the game. Almost all other casino games are rigged so that the casino has an unbeatable long-term advantage, and this includes roulette, keno, slots, baccarat, casino war, and almost any other casino game you can mention. The only way to win at one of those games (long-term) is to get lucky once, quit, and never play that game again. Otherwise, the longer you play, the more the house advantage at those games will eat away at your bankroll.

Basic strategy was the result of three years worth of hard work behind several calculators in 1953. Roger Baldwin, Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel, and James McDermott developed a basic strategy that was first published in the 1956 issue of The Journal of the American Statistical Association. Later Professor Edward O. Thorp published a book titled Beat the Dealer, which explained why blackjack is beatable: the deck of cards has a memory, and each card played has an effect on the probabilities and odds of certain outcomes later in the game. By tracking when the deck is rich in cards favorable to the player. a card counter can raise his bets accordingly, and increase his overall expectation against the house.