Dealers are dedicated to the veneer that the casino has created—that this is a happy place where winning is more than possible. It’s a dealer’s job to welcome you, make small talk, and generally instill hope at the expense of the likely-today-certain-over-time outcome. When you are losing, they’ll chalk it up to bad luck. The problem is that people feel they can play play proper blackjack because they are able to count to 21. Obviously, that is not the case. In order to win at blackjack over the long run, you must first master a legitimate basic blackjack stra.

1. Why Does The Casino Always Win In Blackjack Winnings
2. Why Does The Casino Always Win In Blackjack Play
3. Why Does The Casino Always Win In Blackjack Real Money
4. Why Does The Casino Always Win In Blackjack Poker

Of course, the blackjack dealer doesn’t always win, but many people feel the dealer wins a disproportionate number of times in blackjack. It’s a basic rule of the casino business that the house only offers games where it has an “edge”.

The house’s edge is baked into the game.

But the edge doesn’t guarantee the dealer will always win. Over the long run the dealer should only win slightly more often than a perfect player.

So what gives?

The old adage “perception is reality” works on one level because you play the game by how you perceive it. But on another level appearances can be deceiving. And sometimes the players themselves are responsible for the deceptive appearances.

Here are 7 reasons why the blackjack dealer always seems to win.

1 – Players May Not Understand Probabilities Well Enough

If you’re not trying to count cards, then you don’t even need to worry about the probabilities. Basic blackjack strategy takes all that into consideration.

In blackjack there are only two kinds of probabilities players should think about. The first and most well-known is the division between theoretical return to player and house edge.

Contrary to some players’ thinking, the house edge doesn’t predict how often the house wins. The house edge predicts how much money the house keeps. The assumption behind the house edge is wager-neutral.

Although the house needs to win a lot in blackjack to get ahead, the differences between payout odds and probabilities of card play create the edge. In any gambling game, if there is a statistical 50-50 chance of a certain outcome, the house will pay less than 1:1 on the odds.

The only other probability players need to care about is the probability that the next card they are dealt helps them. How many people are playing at your table doesn’t matter. What matters is what’s left in the shoe when it’s your turn for a card.

2 – The Number of Hands You Play per Hour Matters

If you’re playing head to head with the dealer, you can go through as many as 200 hands in an hour. If there are four other people at the table with you then each round takes longer. You’ll play fewer hands per hour.

Just using basic strategy against the house, you’ll lose money over time. The game is designed to pay slightly less than the true probabilities allow. So the more hands you play, the more likely the house will “win” your money away from you.

You should still win a lot of hands against the dealer. The house’s strategy is a long game. The more hands you play the more likely they’ll keep some or all of your money.

3 – Bad Game Play Provides the House with a “Hidden” Edge

The casino counts on most players making mistakes or bad calls. An inexperienced player makes a bad call. An experienced player who should know better makes a mistake.

Either way, if you hit or stand when you shouldn’t you make it more likely that the house wins.

If you split when you shouldn’t you make it more likely that the house wins. If you miss an opportunity to split it’s not so bad but you could win twice or more against the house on a favorable split.

Player strategy often enhances the house’s strategy. And whereas you decide your strategy on the fly the house is playing by a very simple rule book. House strategy never changes.

I imagine a guy dancing around a fight ring, trying to show off, while the dealer waits to whack him hard in the face. Your opponent isn’t going anywhere, trying to do flashy moves, or hiding anything. He’s just waiting for you to do something stupid.

With few exceptions players sometimes make it easy for the dealer by using the wrong strategy.

4 – The House Undermines Your Advantage Play

If you count cards the way most people advise you to, you’ll raise and lower your bets in a predictable fashion. This is like jumping up on the table, waving your arms, and shouting “hey, I’m counting cards!”

That strategy may have worked well in the 1960s but today’s casinos just shuffle the cards. All your counting is wasted time and energy.

This is why card counters like to work in teams. They can be more subtle, although the casinos still look for coordinated play.

Continuous shuffling machines may have ruined card counting forever. If not, the larger shoes and option to reshuffle on a whim make card counting a less rewarding strategy for most players.

If it seems like the house is winning more than you think they should, it could be you’re counting cards badly or needlessly.

5 – Are You Tipping the Dealer?

The dealer literally wins when you leave a tip. While this is considered a courteous habit and one I myself practice, it makes it all that much harder for you to get ahead.

I limit my tips to when I leave the table. I’ve seen some players split their winnings on big bets with the dealer. Assuming that’s completely legit, it still reduces the player’s winnings.

Whether you tip the dealer or not, the house is winning if you do tip the dealer. Those tips help casino employees pay their bills. I’ve seen some people argue against tipping because it “supports the system”.

I don’t think it’s fair to push casino employees into a moral quagmire. Either tip or don’t tip, but the tip costs you money. It does affect your win-loss ratio proportionate to how often and how much you tip.

6 – Is the Dealer Feeding You Bad Advice?

I’ve played a few tables where the dealers answered player questions. Blackjack dealers don’t have to be expert players. They only follow one strategy.

If you’ve got a friendly dealer who shares advice, he or she may be well-intentioned but that doesn’t mean they know the best strategy.

I’ve never questioned the integrity of a blackjack dealer. But they may push a progressive bet option. If you want a guaranteed way to improve the house edge in blackjack, go for the progressive wager on the side.

Why Does The Casino Always Win In Blackjack Winnings

7 – Are You Using a Betting System?

Sooner or later someone sits down at the table with a betting system ready to go. Card counters raise their wagers when they believe the deck favors them but I’ve seen other betting systems.

One guy alternated his bets. He played $25 on one hand and $50 on the next. If he had played perfect strategy it shouldn’t have mattered.

When you talk betting strategies with people someone always brings up the Martingale System. The strategy is simple. Only make minimum wagers until you lose and then double your wager on the next bet to win back what you lost.

The Martingale System requires an endless supply of money, luck, or both. I’ve never met a great blackjack player who believed in a betting system. The best players I’ve sat next to had a set wager amount they always played and stuck to their games.

Conclusion

One of the most important things in gambling is to manage your expectations. The more you expect to win the greater your disappointment will be.

When people allow their expectations to get out of hand they try to make up for disappointment with risky bets. I’ve been one of those guys who got so frustrated he started making aggressive wagers.

When you stop caring about how well you’re playing you should walk away from the table. You can always go back later when you’re feeling better.

The only way the house doesn’t win is if you enjoy yourself and stay in budget. Dropping $200 at a casino is no different from buying $200 concert tickets.

If it’s all for fun and you enjoy yourself the house can’t take that away from you.

One of the popular myths surrounding blackjack in casinos is that the average player can get an edge over the casino if he just plays his hands correctly. In other words, a lot of people think that you can win at blackjack just by mastering basic strategy.

But basic strategy isn’t enough to win at blackjack in most instances.

You need an additional strategy – an advantage technique – to get an actual edge over the casino in blackjack.

This might mean counting cards, but there are other ways, too. I’ve written extensively about counting cards in blackjack in the past.

Why Does The Casino Always Win In Blackjack Play

But today I want to take a different approach.

Here’s how to win at blackjack WITHOUT counting cards.

The First Step to Winning at Blackjack Is Mastering Basic Strategy

In blackjack, you have a finite number of potential situations to deal with. The dealer can only have one of the following face-up cards: ace, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10.

And you can only have one of a handful of potential totals, starting with a total of 3 and going up to a total of 21.

And many of those situations offer obvious strategic decisions. You’d always stand with a total of 21, for example. It’s an automatic winner. You’ll also always stand with a total of 20. You have far too many ways to bust in this situation to ever make it worth your while to hit in that situation.

The same holds true for a lot of your smaller totals, too. Any hand totaling 11 or lower is impossible to bust, so you’ll always at least hit in that situation.

But for many hands, you must compare what you’re holding with the dealer’s face up card to determine the playing decision with the highest expected value. In a lot of these situations, your expected value is negative. Imagine having a hard total of 16 against a dealer’s face up 10, for example. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t in that situation.

But, in those situations, some plays have a lower negative expectation than others. Your job is to make the play that loses the least amount of money in the long run.

Luckily, basic strategy is easy to memorize and implement. When you use basic strategy for every blackjack decision, you reduce the house edge to its theoretically lowest possible number. In most casinos and under most rules, this means that the basic strategy player faces a house edge of 1% or less.

You still can’t win in the long run with a house edge of 1% or even 0.5%.

But your probability of being a winner in the short run improve dramatically.

An average blackjack player with no knowledge of basic strategy is probably giving up between 2% and 4% of their house edge.

Advantage Play Techniques and Blackjack

Why Does The Casino Always Win In Blackjack Real Money

An advantage play technique is a way of playing a casino game that gives you an edge over the casino. The most common advantage play technique is counting cards, but that’s not your only option. You can win at blackjack without counting cards, even though it’s probably the easiest way to get an edge.

How does card counting in blackjack work?

Counting cards is just a means of roughly tracking the ratio of high cards (aces and 10s) to low cards in the deck. When the deck has a higher proportion of high cards, the player is more likely to get a blackjack. That’s a 2-card hand that totals 21, and players love this hand because it pays off at 3 to 2 odds.

Bet $100 on a hand of blackjack, get dealt a natural, and you’ll get a payout of $150.

Card counters raise the size of their bets when their probability of getting a blackjack goes up based on the count.

And counting cards isn’t hard, either.

You just subtract 1 from the count every time you see a 10 or an ace.
You add 1 to the count every time you see a card worth between 2 and 6 points.

If you’re playing in a game with multiple decks, you adjust that running count to account for the extra decks of cards in play. That’s as simple as estimating how many decks are still in the shoe and dividing the running count by that number.

For example, if the running count is +8, and you estimate that there are 4 decks left in the shoe, the true count is only +2.

Why does this matter?

Because you raise your bets proportionally related to the count. You’ll bet more when the count is +8 than you would if the count was +4.

Not everyone wants to learn how to count cards, though.

You Can Win at Blackjack Without Counting Cards by Getting Lucky

The house edge in blackjack is a long-term phenomenon. In other words, your short-term results might look like anything. You’re mathematically expected to lose between 0.5% and 1% of your action at
the table in the long run.

But, in the short run, anything can happen.

So, one way to win at blackjack without counting cards is to keep your session short and walk away when you’ve won a specific amount of money. This is called having a “win goal.”

Most gamblers who use win goals set a win goal based on a percentage of their bankroll. For example, you might sit down at a $10 blackjack table with a $200 bankroll for the session. Your win goal might be 50% of that $200 – or $100. In that case, if you ever get to a point where you have $300 or more in chips, you walk away from the table and book your win.

Since blackjack is a negative expectation game, you’ll have more losing sessions than winning sessions over time.

Why Does The Casino Always Win In Blackjack Poker

But, unless something weird happens, you WILL inevitably have some winning sessions.

Another Way to Win Is to Bet Really Big and Negotiate Better Rules
Don Johnson is a living example of a blackjack player who won really big at the game without counting cards. He won over $6 million on blackjack in a single evening. Here’s how he did it:

To start with, he had mastered basic strategy. Everyone who’s ever been interviewed about him said that he played perfect cards. If you want to duplicate Johnson’s success, start with mastering basic strategy.

The next thing he did was negotiate with the casino. High rollers like Johnson, who bet $10,000 or more per hand, don’t have to play by the same rules as the average casino-goer.

It’s common for high rollers to get loss rebates. This means that the casino offers a player a discount on his losses. For example, if the casino is offering a 10% discount on your losses, and you lose $100,000, you only really lose $90,000 because of the rebate.

Some casinos also give high rollers bonus money to gamble with up front just to get them started gambling. Online casinos do this all the time, but brick and mortar casinos save this kind of treatment for their higher rollers.

Don Johnson negotiated a 20% loss rebate on his action the night he won all that money in Atlantic City.

On top of that, he negotiated specific blackjack rules that reduced the house edge to a tiny percentage. They played with a hand-shuffled, 6-deck show, and the dealer was forced to stand (rather than hit) a total of soft 17.

In total, all the rules changes wound up making this blackjack game a game with a house edge of only 0.25% — making it almost an even money game.

But on top of that, because of his loss rebate/discount, he was only risking 80 cents for every dollar he stood to win.

He had to buy in for a million dollars, but he was guaranteed a 20% discount on his first $500,000 in losses. Also, he wasn’t required to lose the entire million. He could lose the $500,000, quit, and get his $100,000 rebate – leaving him with “only” a $400,000 loss.

On the other hand, if he started winning – which he did – he could just keep playing.

And that’s how he won over $6 million without counting cards.

Other Advantage Techniques in Blackjack

Counting cards isn’t the only strategy for getting an edge at the game of blackjack. Advantage players use other techniques, some of which are well-known.

Dealer tells is one of these techniques. This describes the tendency that a dealer has to give some kind of physical clue after looking at his or her down card. The savvy blackjack player can then adjust his decisions based on the information he gleaned from the dealer tell.

Shuffle tracking is another advantage technique. The idea is that even though decks of cards get shuffled and randomized, they don’t get completely randomized.

If you can keep up with clusters of cards that are heavy with 10s and aces, you can raise the size of your bets when the dealer gets close to using those cards.

Hole carding is similar to dealer tells. It’s when a dealer accidentally reveals his actual down card when he looks at it to check for blackjack. The advantage of knowing which 2 cards the dealer has is obvious from a strategic perspective.

Other advantage play techniques exist that advantage players don’t share in public, too.

Conclusion

Counting cards is definitely the easiest way to win at blackjack, but you can without this technique. It’s harder to do, though, and I recommend learning to count cards if you’re serious about becoming a blackjack winner.