An Overview of Blackjack

Blackjack is one of the most popular games of chance for both the experience and novice player. This may be partly due to the fact that it is an easy game to learn and play as well as it being mathematically beatable. With a bit of practice and some skill you can turn the house edge to your advantage, when playing Blackjack the odds of winning is more in your favor than the spin of the roulette wheel or the tug of a one-armed bandit aka the slot machine.

First lets start with a little history lesson; I'll keep it brief (see our history section). Blackjack is believed to have originated in French casinos in the 1700s where it was called "vingt-et-un" or twenty-one in English. The game found it's way over the ocean to the U.S. in the 1800s and has had a foothold in casinos since then.

The name of the game, Blackjack was derived from a player's hand of an Ace of Spades and a Jack of Spades. This combination paid the player out extra.

The object of the game is simple to get to twenty-one.  Let's take a look at how the game is played and with what.  The rules are simple and quite easy to learn and a standard deck of 52 cards is used.  Players compete against the dealer and not one another.  The values of the cards in the deck are displayed in the table below;

Card Values:

The dealer deals each player two cards face up, the dealer gets two cards, the bottom one face down and the top card face up.  The object of the player is then to get 21 or as close as the player thinks possible before busting, this is done by the player telling the dealer to hit them.  When all the players have finished the dealer turns the bottom card up and tries to beat the players.  If the players hand is higher than the dealer then the player wins, if not the player loses the bet.  All cards that have been played in a hand are scooped up by the dealer and the cards are put in a discard tray (of course the software puts it into an e-discard tray until the next shuffle).

Let's see the game through the dealer.  Some casinos will make a dealer hit on all 16's and stand on all 17's, the exception being a "soft" 17 (A and a 6), the reason being that an Ace can either have the value of one or eleven.  Therefore the dealer can safely try to hit from a soft 17 to 21, if the dealer goes over 21 on a soft 17 the value of the Ace reverts to 1.  If the dealers two cards are an Ace and a Face card the dealer wins, this is called a natural Blackjack.  Players or Dealers with a natural Blackjack always beat combinations of cards that total 21.  Only natural Blackjack are ties or "pushes" where no money is lost.

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