Playing the Hand

Even the most occasional Player wants to avoid egregious mistakes. He is looking forward to some fun, and losing heavily is not. He would like some guidance on how best to make all those choices available and, of course, what the odds are when he does make the best choices. Every Player has information that is actually quite pertinent to his choices: he knows the identity of the cards in his hand and he knows the value of Dealer’s upcard. Even this small amount of data is enough to provide a straightforward but powerful strategy for playing each hand, one that reduces the house advantage to much less than that of any other game in the casino. That recipe for play is usually called “Basic Strategy.” Basic Strategy is defined as the class of play guidelines with the best odds, given only the values of Dealer’s upcard and Player’s hand; the values of his individual cards here serve only to distinguish hard hands from soft and to identify pairs for possible splitting. Basic Strategy also assumes that each split hand, after the second card is dealt to it, is played with the same guidelines as for unsplit hands. Optimal Basic Strategy is that Basic Strategy with the best odds for the specific number of decks in the shoe, here labeled D. Discussed later are small improvements in play from use of the individual values of Player’s first two cards, as well as that of the second card dealt to a split hand. Chapter 3 lays out the further improvements in optimal play enabled by information on cards dealt in previous rounds.