Blackjack is a popular American casino game, now greatly played throughout the world. It is a banking game in which the aim of the player is to achieve a hand whose points total nearer to 21 than the banker’s hand, but without exceeding 21. In Nevada casinos for example, the game is generally known 21 rather than Blackjack, and the holding of an ace with a 10-point card is called a “natural”. Players should bear in mind that blackjack rules vary from casino to casino, and check for local variations before playing.
Blackjack is played with an international 52-card deck without jokers. A common practice is mixing several decks together which are called a shoe. That’s both in order to speed up the game (with more cards in play you don’t have to reshuffle after every single hand) and to make card counting more difficult – card counting is a technique used to gain an advantage over the casino by keeping track of the proportions of different value cards remaining in play. Casinos online offer great options and many bonuses you can use on a daily basis while preparing the strategies for playing blackjack.
The number of decks differs from one online casino to another, but there can be anything from two to eight decks in the shoe. The re-shuffling frequency also differs from casino to casino, and depends on the number of decks used. Frequent re-shuffling is another way to diminish the value of card counting.
To play blackjack you need chips to bet with, and you typically buy your chips directly from the dealer. When there is a break in the action, you simply put cash on the table and the dealer will change it for an equal value of playing chips.
Each player at the blackjack table has a circle or box to place bets in. There will always be a minimum bet and a maximum bet for the table. The maximum bet is normally ten to twenty times the minimum bet, meaning that a table with a $5 minimum would have a $50 to $100 maximum. Each player decides how much to bet on a hand before the deal. For die-hard fans, there is an option of gambling on your mobile phone so you never miss the fun of online betting.
At the start of a blackjack game, the players and the dealer receive two cards each. The players’ cards are normally dealt face up, while the dealer has one face down (called the hole card) and one face up. The best possible blackjack hand is an opening deal of an ace with any ten-point card. This is called a “blackjack”, or a natural 21, and the player holding this automatically wins unless the dealer also has a blackjack. If a player and the dealer each have a blackjack, the result is a push for that player. If the dealer has a blackjack, all players not holding a blackjack lose.
Although many players may play in a single round of blackjack, it’s fundamentally a two-player game. In blackjack, players don’t play against each other and they don’t co-operate. The only competition is the dealer. The aim of the game is to accumulate a higher point total than the dealer, but without going over 21. You compute your score by adding the values of your individual cards. The cards 2 through 10 have their face value, J, Q, and K are worth 10 points each, and the Ace is worth either 1 or 11 points (player’s choice).