In an 8 deck game, if you are dealt an Ace there are 415 more cards in the shoe and 128 of them are worth 10, so you have a 128/415 chance of being dealt blackjack – that’s 30.84%. In a single deck game, if you are dealt an Ace there are 51 more cards in the shoe and 16 of them are worth 10, so you have a 16/51 chance of being dealt blackjack – that’s 31.37%.

The more likely you are to get it the lower the house edge, because it pays out at 3:2 (in most games) instead of 1:1. The number of decks affect the house edge because of your chances of getting blackjack. Six or eight deck games are most common, but any number can be used and some single deck games still exist. Number of Decks Usedīlackjack was originally played with just the one deck, but players soon got wise as to how to take advantage of this using systems like card counting, so casinos started using more decks.

There are a great many blackjack games with different rules and payouts, all of which have an impact on the house edge. It’s not just a player’s skill that can affect the edge either. This is why the house edge isn’t set in stone. This disastrous house edge would be completely down to you, because you were making the bad decisions – even if you had stood on every single hand you would have won some of them, right? The casino would keep every penny of every pound wagered. To explain this using a slightly ridiculous example if you played 50 hands and hit until you bust on every single one of them you would obviously lose every single hand, and the house edge would therefore be 100%. Unlike games like roulette which are based purely on chance, the players themselves have a huge impact on the house edge of blackjack because they have decisions to make. Knowing the pitfalls of the game is one way to give yourself the best chances of winning and avoid handing the casino any extra advantage, and there are even ways to bring the edge down further if you are a very smart player. The edge comes mainly from the player busting and from the fact that the player has to make decisions on their hand while only knowing what one of the dealer’s cards is. The house edge in blackjack is one of its main attractions as it is so low, just 0.5%, although a number of things can affect this. It’s how they guarantee to make money in the long run and is a theoretical number based on a very large sample of hands played. Every casino game has a house edge, and this is the advantage that the house has over the player because of the way the game has been designed.

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