5 Ways How to Improve Your Blackjack Winning Odds
There are very few online casino games where skills might tilt your odds in your favour and actually get you a great advantage. Blackjack is one of these games, known for its low house edge. With some good skills and a basic strategy, you could easily enjoy a 0.5% house edge, though most experts agree that regular players will stay around the 2% mark.
To improve your odds and keep the house edge as low as possible, try using the following five tips.
1. Don’t try to count cards if you’re not skillful enough
After the infamous story of MIT students who won massive amounts of money at Las Vegas casinos thanks to card counting, many beginners want to replicate that success by trying their own skills with card counting. But as you can imagine, these tries end up going nothing like in the case of those MIT students.
Overall, card counting is a highly controversial strategy and many casinos aren’t too keen on players utilizing it. Plus, at online casinos, card counting is much tougher.
Yet, some beginners still want to try counting cards since it gives them a certain feeling of empowerment and control. It rarely actually helps you or gives you any benefits whatsoever. If anything, it distracts you from the game and stops you from making rational decisions since you’ve been blinded by your „counting“.
2. Have a bet limit and a budget
Budgets and limits aren’t exactly words you’d like to hear when thinking about gambling. After all, you’d just like to have fun and forget about personal finances. But forgetting about these trivial points will get you in big trouble.
Before you even think about opening up an online blackjack table, figure out your bankroll and appropriate bet sizes. Your blackjack budget should be the kind of amount that doesn’t jeopardize your general finances. Once you’ve established a budget, you should never deposit more money to your casino account, even if you run out.
After getting your budget figured out, you should keep your bets to around 1% of your overall bankroll, so you wouldn’t run out too quickly. A 1% bet means you’d get to play at least 100 rounds, giving you plenty of playtime.
3. Use a betting strategy
Every efficient blackjack player has a certain strategy in place, guaranteeing them steady wins and a low house edge. In fact, blackjack is one of the few card games where you can use a particular strategy and become quite successful (though, of course, nothing is guaranteed).
There are plenty of highly detailed blackjack strategies available, giving you enough support when making decisions. If you’re not experienced enough to craft your own blackjack strategy yet, feel free to scroll around the internet and use some of the pre-made strategies.
4. Don’t use insurance
Insurance is especially lucrative for novice players – it makes you feel safer in case you should lose some money. But it’s a slippery slope with a big catch: insurance bets come with a house edge that’s over 7%!
Just pure logic tells you that the odds of the dealer hitting a natural blackjack is low. By taking the insurance bets, you’ll just end up wasting your money for nothing.
5. Don’t use side bets
Talking about insurance, you shouldn’t actually make any side bets at all. Blackjack experts call these „sucker bets“ where the house edge can even reach up to 20%. Side bets have been created by online casinos just to rake in more money and novice players are the best targets for it.
Similar to insurance bets, side bets seem lucrative and beneficial but in reality, the odds for these situations to happen are extremely low. You’re better off using a legitimate betting strategy and rational bet sizes, instead of chasing for side bets that seem too good to be true – because that’s exactly the case.