Transcript
Hey guys. I wanted to go into some mistakes to avoid at the Blackjack table. There are a few. It’s not as daunting as you may think it is. It’s not really a whole lot of things that you need to avoid, but I just wanted to touch up on the basic ones. Here we’ve got a wide set of circumstances where a lot of people will do the wrong thing. In the case here, it’s a player here with a 15. One of the big mistakes that players will get a little too passive with their hands. 14s, 15s, 16s. Even when the dealer is, it doesn’t matter what the dealer’s showing, they’re just afraid that they’re going to bust, so they’re not even going to bother. And that’s not really a good way that you’d want to play, because, generally, with the dealer showing a card like, say, this 9, he’s going to make a hand more often than he’s not going to make a hand, so by just deciding, I’m not going to hit my 15, in the long run, you’re going to end up costing yourself a lot of money.
In the case here, he hit, but he ends up over 21. But at least he gave himself a shot against the 9, as opposed to just being a sitting duck with a 15. A lot of times another thing players will do, too, is they’ll be a little too aggressive with their hand. Where a player will have a soft 14, versus a 9, and he’ll do something like he’ll just want to double down on it. He just wants to get more money out. Which, that never works out very well, because any hand where you can’t make at least a 20, it’s generally not a hand you’re going to want to double down on. True, he can make a 6 or a 7 with the 3, but if he misses, which, most of the time, he will; like, now, he’s got a 12. He’s stuck with a 12, nothing you can do about it, and he’s got 400 out, versus a 9.
Another thing that people want to do, and this falls under the category of aggressive, is do moves like splitting 10s. Where, everybody at the table probably winces as you do it, you split these 10s, now you’re looking for two 10s or better. Now you’ve got a 15, and then you elect to hit the 15. He lucks out with a 20, but then this hand here, he’s got 18. He’s behind. So if the dealer ends up making a hand, then he will more than likely just push, as opposed to if he would have won straight out with a 20.
Another thing that falls under aggressive plays would be splitting too often. So a lot of times people will want to split a pair of 7s because they want to get more money out, just for whatever reason. So now, you’ve got one hand that was okay, the 14, but now instead, now you’ve got a hand where you turned your marginal hand, now you’ve got two of them that you’re stuck with. So, if he decides he wants to hit the 16, now he busts, now he’s got a 17 that he’s stuck with. What’s going to happen now, he’s hoping he had a 19, he did, and he’s got a 14, dealer draws to a 20. So now he just lost two bets by splitting his 7s. And he loses his bet, and then you’ve got the guy who decided to split his 10s, he loses one of them, he pushes one. He could have just stayed and whatever would have happened with the cards would have happened with the cards. But instead, now he loses money, and the guy who was aggressive with his soft 14, he ended up with this hard 12, he ends up losing as well. So, these are a lot of mistakes that a lot of players make that I like to try to help you guys avoid, because mistakes like that cost you money, and then it swings the odds even further in the house’s favor.
