A lot of other games on cards such as poker do not have a fundamental strategy. There is, for example, no basic strategy for poker. Poker players use their hands according to whether or not he thinks the opponent has a strong hand or may be playing bluff, and whether they themselves are holding an impressive hand or might be tempted to try a Bluff.
There is no basic method for playing any card game so long that your opponent has the ability to make decisions about what to do with his hands. There was no blackjack strategy in many years. Blackjack was not a casino game that required the dealer to be obliged to display only one card and play the game according to house rules. Instead, it was more of a poker-style game where both dealers' cards were concealed. The dealer was able to play however he wanted, and players could try to fool the dealer using their own strategy.
The American casinos made important changes in the rules for Twenty-One to show the dealer's cards, and to require that the dealer follow the hit/stand system. The game was transformed from being a poker-style game which relied more on the psychological factors to one that was entirely mathematical.
Why Basic Strategy is Effective ... The "Odds"
We'll assume that the dealers of today play fair games to meet our needs. No sleight-of-hand, no chicanery. We won't forget the First Rule of Professional Gamblers we will temporarily ignore it in order to understand the logic behind each game and reveal the fundamental strategy that eliminates all of the house's mathematical edge. The reality is that the majority of the games played in casinos these days are fair and fair, and if you bump into an unbalanced game the level, you're not going to even try to beat it.
In the game of honest dealing computer scientists have examined every hand that you could have against every possible dealer upcard to determine the most effective fundamental strategy to play . The fact that the base strategy was almost perfect had shocked the mathematicians who were the first to make use of computers to analyze computer data. This was due to four GIs working desk jobs in the 1950s and lots of time. Although apps did not have computers, they had been using mechanical add machines in order to calculate all possible outcomes. This may have been the best price Uncle Sam ever received from his four GIs' salaries!
We also know that decent hints of the correct basic strategy had been figured out by various professional gamblers in the Nevada decades before computers appeared into the picture. These guys figured out the method by playing hands to themselves on their kitchen tables. Some decisions required thousands, tens or thousands or even hundreds of thousands of hands. Like most professional gamblers, they didn't publish their strategies. Blackjack was their main source of income and they had spent hundreds of hours researching the subject. What would they say to anyone else what they'd learned?
One thing is for certain that casinos did not know the correct strategy to play the game. It was the same for those who had read the best books on the matter. A number of Hoyle's old guides advised that players always keep the totals at 15 and 16, regardless of what the dealer's top card was, to split tens and never to split nines, as well as to keep a to a soft 17. The "smart" players of the day, i.e. players who had read one of the gambling books by some of these respected authorities, typically made all kinds of plays that we know as extremely costly.
Many people don't get the logic of basic strategy. Let me provide an example. Blackjack strategy instructs me to hit when my hand totals 14 when the dealer shows me a 10 upcard. This is the mathematically right way to play. Sometimes, you'll hit the 14 and then draw an 8 9, 10, or 10 to bust. You will then see that the dealer switched over his hole card which is a 6. This will show that, to stand on your 14 the dealer must be at 16. go to this site would have busted with that 10. The dealer lost a hand making the mathematically correct decision.
There are some players who argue that there isn't a single strategy that is perfect all the time. Blackjack according to them is a guessing game.
Knowing the basic strategy demands to consider yourself a professional gambler. That means that you have to understand the concept of "the Blackjack odds".
Let me discuss the fundamental logic behind the strategy by using an example which illustrates how the math of probability and statistics works. Let's imagine I have a jar that contains 100 marbles. The majority of the marbles are white while the other fifty of them are black. In a blindfold, reach out and grab one marble. However, before you do this, place a bet of $1 on the marble you select will be either black or white. If you find the color you picked, you win $ 1 If you don't then you'll lose $1.
Are you guessing?
Absolutely. How do you know what color marble you're planning to choose in advance? If you win, it's just luck. If you lose it's bad luck.
What if you knew that 90 percent of the marbles listed in this list are black, and 10% are white? Would you rather bet black or white prior to you draw? A smart person would pick black. It's possible, of course, to pull out white marbles, but it is much more unlikely to find a white marble than one of black. It's a guessing game and you could still lose $1 in the event that a white marble gets taken out. But if you're betting on black, the chances are in your favor the black marble.
A professional gambler makes his living by always thinking about "the odds", and only betting when odds are in his favor. This wager would have the gambler bet on black, as the odds of winning are 9 to 1. You'll have 9:1 chances of losing if choose white.
If you go back to that total of 14 you had when the dealer dealt a 10 upcard, you may lose if you take a chance, but the odds are against you if you take a stand.
If you take your decisions using your intuition you might win some hands however you'll lose more hands over time. There's only one correct choice for any given game and that decision is based strictly on the math. Whether or not you should hit or stand, or double down or split a pair, depends on what the laws of probability show your expectation to be in each of these possibilities.
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