Everything I can find lists the odds for an individual hand at between 44 and 48%, ignoring a push.
I think people are counting different things here. You can look at how many hands you win or at your Expected Value. You don’t win that many hands–if I remember it’s maybe a third or so–but “winning a hand” isn’t how you really make money in blackjack. The money is in the splits, double downs, and blackjacks.
Those plays are what raises the EV up to maybe as much as 49.5% or so on a table with favorable conditions and using basic strategy.
ETA: or sorta what Peter Morris said.
As I stated, I’m no expert, but I have at least brought cites to the table, which people challenging me have not. I’m more than happy to be proven wrong, hell, I expect to be proven wrong, but on this site, we typically back up our challenges.
In my link, the explicit wording of the question is:
- Ignoring ties, the percentage of hands that you can expect to win when you play blackjack is about…
The answer given is then 48%. I’m perfectly fine with someone demonstrating that it’s 33%, me being a novice and all, but I’m asking for someone to actually give some evidence and not simply say “No, you’re wrong.”
When I last visited the Luxor in Las Vegas (about 10 years ago), they offered you a small card at the Blackjack table which had all the ‘best’ plays on it (according to the probabilities.)
Yep, the casinos that don’t give them away have them for sale in the gift shops as well. New players are always surprised that the casinos are fine with you using them openly at the table (as long as you’re not holding up the game by studying it on every deal).
Sorry, but your own cite says you’re wrong. Not that 1/3 is right either.
If you read the full explanation, it begins with “when you ignore the 9 percent of the hands that tie”, i.e. you can expect to win ~43% or so of all hands, when you include pushes.
That also said, it depends on players playing something resembling a decent basic strategy. Somebody who always hits on 17 or something like that, i.e. many casual/drunken players, are going to win an even smaller percentage of the time. How much smaller will depend on how far they deviate from basic strategy.
The two true classics on blackjack:
Playing Blackjack as a Business by Lawrence Revere
I suggest looking for a ‘collector edition’ which has color charts instead of the mono-color charts of recent reprints. The book is somewhat dated but is still the best introduction to understanding blackjack available. It is a very readable book and will teach you to understand the how and why of BJ.
If you want to go more in depth and intend to actually learn to play well the place to start is:
Professional Blackjack by Stanford Wong
Of course there are many other books available, some very good, some actually horrible, but these two are the classics. I used to use the Revere book as a text to teach casino executives the basics of blackjack (No, they don’t all really know very much about the actual working of the game).
Here’s a mathematical analysis. The author, the Wizard of Odds, is considered an expert in the field of probability maths as applied to gambling.
The chance is
Win 42.43%
Push 8.48%
Lose 49.09%
The big factor in why you play differently vs. different dealer cards is the probability of the dealer busting. If you somehow knew that the dealer was absolutely definitely going to bust, your strategy would be simple: Just make sure you don’t bust yourself (i.e., don’t hit on anything 12 or higher). Of course, you never absolutely know that the dealer is going to bust, but some dealer cards (like a 6) make it more likely than others, and so when the dealer is showing one of those cards, you want to play more conservatively than you would otherwise. And likewise, when the dealer is showing something that makes it unlikely that they’ll bust, like an ace, you need to play more aggressively, since being higher than the dealer is the only way you’re likely to win.
I quoted my own cite earlier and stated “ignoring a push.”
Ah screw it. I’ll just use “the Wizard of Odds” analysis and get my own answer. As noted by Peter Morris (thanks for getting an actual answer instead of just stating “a third”, as this is what I was looking for):
Using that, I can see that of the hands where someone is victorious, i.e. there is a winner or a loser or any money changes hand, you can expect to win 46.4% of them and the house 53.6% of them.
That’s the answer I was looking for and is almost exactly the same as what I posted when I earlier said:
Between 44 and 48%, ignoring a push.
Which is obviously much higher than @nightshadea’s memory of a discussion about an interview.
I wonder if it was actually that around 11 to 17 percent of the time, your average player should come out ahead during a session, not a hand. That seems more reasonable to me.
Possibly, but that would require nailing down a specific amount of time per session. I’d really like to see where the numbers came from.
It’s nightshadea. I can give you a very good idea where the figures came from…
[Moderating]
This is clearly a personal attack. Personal attacks are not allowed on this board outside of the BBQ Pit. This is an official Warning.
The length of session will determine this. The longer you play, the likelier you are to lose.
Yeah. Specifically, The effect of removal from the deck of a 10 or Ace is larger in single deck. So if you are dealt a 10, it raises the odds of the next card being an Ace, and if you are dealt an Ace, the odds are greater that you’ll draw a ten. And since players get paid extra on a blackjack and dealers don’t, the player has a slightly higher advantage.
But this can easily be negated by simple rules changes, such as having the dealer hit on a soft 17. So ultimately, the best game is one with the best combination of fewer decks and the best rules.
The soft-17 rule is very important. If a dealer can hit a soft-17, the house advantage goes up by .2%. That’s roughly the same advantage as the house gets by going to 2 decks instead of one.
The difference is subtle, but blackjack is a game of very small advantages. A typical blackjack game has a house advantage of only somewhere around .2-.7% And even the best card counters can only get maybe a .5% advantage on the house. One playing error per hour can wipe out your advantage.
The best blackjack game for non-counters is a single deck with the dealer standing on a soft 17, unlimited splits, and a surrender option. Such games are breakeven or even have a tiny player advantage with perfect play - but they are nearly impossible to find. More typical is a 4-6 deck game with a house advantage of around .4-.7% depending on rule specifics.
Lansky had a vested interest in downplaying the ability to beat blackjack. Everything he said was wrong, other than blackjack being the best game in the house. But depending on when he said it, card counting might not have been a thing yet, so he could have been right that the only way to win then was to cheat.
Winning in Vegas is certainly possible in the short term. Gambling is statistical, and in games like blackjack or baccarat where the house edge is very small, it’s common for people to come out ahead over a session or a weekend holiday.
Your best chance to win in Vegas is to find the game with the lowest house advantage and play as few rounds as you can. The more you play, the less your chance of winning. So your best chance to win would be to put your whole bankroll on one bet at Blackjack or Baccarat - you’d have almost a 50/50 chance of doubling your money. The more you play, the less likely you are to come out a winner. But of course if you are there for fun as well, play slowly, stay away from fast games with poor house odds, take lots of breaks, and cross your fingers.
I agree with those choices. I would add ‘Beat the Dealer’ by Edwin Thorpe for historical interest, as it’s really the book that kicked off the card counting thing. Also, for those who want a more technical grounding in this stuff, “The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic” by Richard Epstein is a classic and applies to all games.
Everything in a casino is subtle. If I can talk about slot machines because that’s where my expertise lies rather than black jack…
The club where I worked got in a new bank of dollar slots, Red White & Blue 7s, the most popular game IGT had at the time. The reels had single, double, and triple bars and of course a red, a white, and a blue 7 on each reel. The big payouts involved the 7s, the biggest was showing a red, white, and blue 7 in that order, then down thru all red, all white and all blue 7s and finally, mixed-color sevens in any order.
The bars were involved with the lesser payouts ranging from all triple bars down to three mixed bars. There were 64 stops on each reel with blank stops in between the symbols and a blank on any reel would mean no payout. The Wizard of Odds site has an analysis of the game, stating the overall return is 86.58%
The thing is, the site shows “the” lookup table with each stop listed. In reality a club could order the machine with one of a number of tables ranging anywhere from 82 to 98% and probably could get a custom table if they wanted to pay more. The 86.58% table was the most popular, quite common in quarter machines.
When we got the machines in a big sign went above them proclaiming
New dollar slots
98% return!
After about six months we changed the table in the machines to 90% return and took down the sign. The payout glass remained the same so the difference had to be in the reel stops. Curious, I looked up the documentation. I mean, a drop of 8% has to be a really big change in the tables, right?
Wrong. Reel 2 was identical in both tables. Reel 1 had one more blank than a bar – I forget whether it was single, double, or triple – and reel 3 had two more blanks than bars. This difference is not something any player will notice in even a whole evening’s play on the machine. Nobody is going to say, “Hmmm. That third reel is showing a blank more often tonight than when I was here last,” yet at 180 pulls per hour, one every 20 seconds, the player is losing $14.40 more per hour than he was before the change. Most players pull faster than that.