There are subtle nuances to the game of Blackjack which are wrapped up in strategies that can help you increase your chances of winning the hands you play. It is however important to remember that these strategies will help you win most of the hands you make, but are not a guarantee of winning every time. With this in mind, it is important that you always play responsibly.

Before we get into the more complex aspects of basic strategy as a beginner you will improve your chances of winning at 21 if you keep in mind the following tips:

• The very first thing you should remember when using Basic Strategy is that ALL decisions are made on the dealers up card.
• If the dealer has an up card valued at 6 or lower, "hit" until you have 12 and stop once this value is reached.
• If the dealer has an up card valued at 7 or higher, "hit" until you have a hard hand (a hard hand is one containing no Aces or where the Ace is counted as 1) of 17 or higher or a soft count (a soft hand contains an Ace which is counted as 11) of 18 or higher.
• Always split (separate cards into two pairs) Aces and 8's but never any other pairs.
• Double down (double your original bet) if your first two cards total value is 10 or 11 and the dealer has 9 or lower. You will receive one more card after doubling down.

That's easy enough to remember isn't it? Once you are comfortable playing with those strategies you may want to make use of blackjack strategy cards. This will however require brain power as you will need to memorise every aspect of these cards in order to incorporate them into your game play.

Basic Blackjack Strategy

When used correctly, strategy cards can lower the house advantage from around 8% to approximately 1%. That is quite a large difference! While there are a number of variations on cards the ones you will find most often are single and multi-deck versions and the one you choose will obviously be selected according to the game you play.

To use these cards you need to read them correctly: Your two card total is in the far left-hand column. The top row is the dealers up card and as mentioned earlier, your decisions are based on this information. From this starting point you can refer the chart to decide whether to Hit (H), Stand (S), Double (D), or Split (P).





If you can't memorise these, you can print them out and use them when you play online...just another great thing about playing at online casinos!

Card Counting

If you've seen the movie 21 you will be familiar with the concept of card counting, which is a strategy to determine whether a player has a probability advantage by monitoring the ratio of high cards (cards with values of ten or eleven) to low cards in the deck. Decks with greater numbers of high value cards offer the player an edge as they are more likely to produce blackjack which offers much higher payouts or increase the likelihood of the dealer busting.

This strategy can be learnt through a variety of systems, the most basic of which is the high-lo system where positive, negative, or null values are assigned to each card and the running count is adjusted by each card's assigned value as it is dealt.

Card counting is illegal at land based casinos and will get you thrown out or worse if you are caught and is impossible when playing online due to random number generators used on all games.

Now that you know how to play Blackjack, why not visit Europa Casino to put these strategies to the test?

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