Following on from my post about where to play blackjack, here’s a basic strategy tester and strategy table built in Tableau. The idea is that if you play perfect strategy, you minimize the house advantage and your losses. By playing “with your gut”, you’re giving the house a massive advantage, especially if you’re not doubling down.
Played properly, the house advantage will typically be somewhere around 0.5% depending on the rules at the table. In other words, for 20 bets of $10, you can expect to lose only $1. Of course that’s unlikely, and you only approach the house advantage after hundreds or thousands of rounds of cards. In the short run, you’ll be up or down with much bigger swings.
The idea behind basic strategy is simple; you know what cards you have, and the up card of the dealer. That allows you to make a decision based on that information. Here’s the strategy table for a typical ruleset:
And here’s the workbook for testing your basic strategy:
Given what cards you have, you can predict the return. The blue squares show the positive return and the red an expected loss. A negative 45% means that by using basic strategy, on average you will lose 45c per dollar bet. This is data from Wizards of Odds.
Blah blah, standard disclaimer. You can’t sue me if I screwed up.
