Blackjack Basic Strategy

Basic strategy is actually a blackjack-specific term that refers to a strategy that was developed back in 1956 by four mathematicians, Roger Baldwin, Wilbert E. Cantey, Herbert Maisel, and James P.Basil Nestor is the author of the new Playboy Complete Guide to Casino Gambling. This wonderful book teaches players how to avoid sucker bets and win more when playing gambling games.  He is also the author of The Smarter Bet Guide series for video poker, slots, craps, and many other books about gambling.  Basil's website is www.smarterbet.com  McDermott. These four men were the first people to thoroughly analyze blackjack, and they subsequently published their results as “The Optimum Strategy in Blackjack” in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Since then, the strategy has been refined and tested over countless trillions of hands played in real casinos and computer simulations. All professional blackjack players use basic strategy, and it’s the starting point of every optimal game.

The next few of paragraphs may seem unusually complicated. But don’t worry, this is only an example.

Let’s say you have a hard 13 and the dealer’s upcard is 6. What should you do?

If you were a math wizard, you might instantly calculate that 62 percent of the cards in a deck have a rank of 6 through 10. So there’s a 62 percent chance the dealer has a stiff hand, and it’s very likely the hand is 15 or 16 because 38 percent of the cards in a deck have a rank of 9 or 10.

Then you’d do additional calculations in your head and conclude that the dealer has an overall 42 percent chance of busting when she’s showing a 6. Meanwhile your chance of busting with a hit on hard 13 is about 38 percent. You’d add the possibility of hitting and getting an ace through 3, and realize the overall chance of busting or remaining stiff would be about 62 percent. Finally, you’d compare those two figures with a few others I haven’t mentioned and come to the conclusion that a hit would do more harm than good. So you’d stand and the dealer would bust four times out of ten.

Brilliant!

But frankly, even a math wizard might have problems doing the above calculations on the fly. So this particular combination and all the rest have been pre-calculated and organized into basic strategy. The only thing you need to remember is to stand on hard 13 against a 6.

Basic strategy is easy to use. Just find your card combination on the left side of the chart and the dealer’s upcard at the top. Follow the column down until it intersects with the row for your card combination. That’s how you should play the hand. If some of the strategy choices seem odd, then you’ll find the Dealer’s Bust Probabilities chart below helpful. It shows the probable outcome of a dealer’s hand based on the upcard.

sp=split, NC=stand, h=hit, db=double

This is basic strategy for splitting pairs in a multiple-deck game.

NC=stand, h=hit, db=double (hit if a double is not possible), dbN=double (stand if a double is not possible)

This is basic strategy for soft hands in a multiple-deck game.

 NC=stand, h=hit, db=double (hit if a double is not possible), sr=surrender (hit if surrender is not allowed),

This is basic strategy for a multiple-deck game, dealer stands on soft 17, late surrender, doubling after splits and doubling on any two cards is allowed. These game conditions also apply to the charts above.

At first glance, basic strategy may seem complicated, but it’s actually quite simple. Nearly half of the hands should always be played the same way, regardless of what the dealer is showing. The rest, with a few exceptions, should be played one of two ways. This is determined by the dealer’s upcard.

The strategy in these particular charts is optimized for multiple-deck games (four or more decks) when the dealer stands on soft 17, and the rules allow late surrender, doubling after splits, and doubling on any two cards.

Games with one or two decks, restricted doubling, or soft-17 hits by the dealer have slightly different strategies. We’ll cover those in a later section.