Blackjack Side Bets

14 March 2020

By John Marchel

Across the country with a little over 900 casinos with blackjack tables you will find over 40 different side-bets available to the player at the table. With loads of players leaning and practicing “Basic Strategy” and others moving to different table games like Let-It-Ride, and 3-Card Poker, casinos began to introduce side bets to help keep players at the blackjack table. It has helped to add more excitement to the game and maintain a profit to the casinos bottom line, but it has also brought a high price to the player.

The real problem with side-bets is they all have high house odds against the player. Playing basic strategy at blackjack can reduce the house odds to well below one percent. However, some of the side-bets start at 2.5 percent and go as high as 30 percent against the player. Remember, taking Insurance is also a side-bet in blackjack. Basic Strategy allows you to reduce the house edge to 0.5 percent, but then you take Insurance and that drives the edge way up on that bet.

In the end, its best to avoid side-bets when playing blackjack. The odds are pretty high against the player. You’ll find that you will lose more chips than you will win, no matter which side-bet you make.


BET YOU DIDN'T KNOW

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• Gamblers who were unable to pay their gambling loses in ancient Egypt were sent to quarries to work off their debts.

• There is a gambling table located in the Delta Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada called the “Suicide Table.” It got its name after three owners of the saloon, during the 1800s, committed suicide after heavy loses at that table.

• Want to know where the closest bingo hall is? Just go to your computer and type in “bingo hall directory.” You’ll find all the hall’s in the US, listed by states and towns.

• A report in early April 2007 revealed the 22 casinos on the Macau strip in China generated more than $7 billion in revenues in 2006, this compares to Las Vegas’s $6.6 billion, a deficit of $400 million. This data showed that Macau has now become the number one gambling capital of the world.

• Long before Las Vegas became the gambling Capital, Saratoga Springs, New York, located at the foothills of the Adirondacks, was called the “Monte Carlo of America” in the late 1800s. It was America’s first and finest gaming and entertainment resort in the country. Some of the foremost names of the century were patrons including Mark Twain, Civil War Generals Sherman and Sheridan, several Presidents, and early industrialists such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, “Diamond Jim Brady”, and “Bet-A-Million” Gates.

• The common reference “Poker according to Hoyle” is curious because the English writer and lawyer, Edmund Hoyle (1672-1769), never heard of poker: he died sixty years before the game was originated.

• If you need to relax after a day of hard gambling, Las Vegas has over 36 hotels that offer spas.

• May 5, 1931 Clark County issued Oscar E. Klawitter, a license to run roulette, craps, and a blackjack table. This established the Pair-O-Dice as the first casino club to open on Highway 91, the future Las Vegas Strip thoroughfare.