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Real Blackjack Strategy17 December 2023
Is there a reason those hands would be omitted? ANSWER: Among the basics of basic strategy are "never split 5s" and "never split 10s." Splitting those pairs weakens your starting hands and reduces your chances of winning. A 10 is a much stronger building block than 5, and 20 is one of blackjack's strongest hands, a much more desirable position than building from 10. The Wizard of Odds has a footnote on its chart that if there is no row for splitting, then you should look up your hand as a hard total. For 10, 10, play it as 20 and always stand, For 5,5, the play it as hard 10 and double down if the dealer has 2 through 9 face up or just hit if the dealer shows 10 or Ace. Let's check out some numbers, using a common six-deck game in which the dealer hits soft 17. It's tempting to split 10s against a weak such as 6, where the dealer busts 42 percent of the time. But the average profit when standing on 20 is 67.7 cents per dollar wagered. If you split, the average profit decreases to 50.1 cents per dollar OF YOUR ORIGINAL WAGER. If you bet $10 and stand on 20, you'll lose some and push some, but your average result is a profit of $6.77. If you split, then you have $20 at risk instead of $10, and your average profit drops to $5.01. With 5-5 vs. 6, doubling down is best, but even if you found yourself in a game where doubling is not allowed, hitting is more profitable than splitting. Average profits per dollar of your original wager are 58.8 cents if you double, 29.4 cents if you hit and a mere 10.4 cents if you split. I'll leave it at two examples, but in every case splitting 10s or 5s weakens your average results, so some basic strategy charts leave those plays to a footnote instead of full rows on a grid. QUESTION: My daughter is in her 20s and doesn't play much in casinos, but will go keep me company once in a while. When she does, she plays a little on penny video slots. That's mostly what I play too. One day, I played three-reel slots for a bit, and she just laughed. "So what do they do?" I told her the reels spin and you win or you lose. She said, "And people would just settle for that?" I told her when I was younger, all slots were like that. It got me to wondering. When exactly did video slots come in? ANSWER: The first video slot, Fortune Coin, was distributed in 1976. It mimicked three-reel slots of the day in gameplay, but the reels were on a screen. In the more modern sense video slots with more reels and paylines and incorporating bonus events were launched in the mid-1990s. Success came a little earlier in Pacific Rim nations, and by 1996 several companies were distributing video slots in the U.S. The first big hit video slot was WMS Gaming's Reel 'Em In in 1997. Slots with three mechanical reels retained the majority of floor space through the first few years of the 2000s. This article is provided by the Frank Scoblete Network. Melissa A. Kaplan is the network's managing editor. If you would like to use this article on your website, please contact Casino City Press, the exclusive web syndication outlet for the Frank Scoblete Network. To contact Frank, please e-mail him at fscobe@optonline.net. Recent Articles
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