Trying to choose what game you want to play when you’ve found the best online casino for you can be a tricky endeavour. Slots is always a good choice, with fantastic visual effects, engaging bonuses and a blend of solid RTP with a chance for a massive jackpot if you get lucky! But sometimes you want an experience that’s a little more tactical, a bit more strategic and if that’s what you’re after then you should probably settle in at the Blackjack table.
Blackjack is a favourite for a lot of advantage players as it’s possible, through careful strategy and a few key techniques, to give yourself a big leg up in play. One of these techniques, pioneered by a famous mathematician called Edward Thorp, is card counting. Card counting involves keeping an eye on the cards as they’re being dealt and keeping track in your head, not of the cards’ exact values (that would be extraordinarily complicated) but of the value of cards being played.
The standard way of attributing value in most systems, such as Hi-Lo, is to attribute a positive score to cards ranked 2-6 and a positive one to cards ranked 10-A. Whenever a hand is played, you take a look at what every player is dealt (including the dealer) and work out what the score is – if there are more high value cards then the count is negative and if there are more low value cards then the count is positive. What this means is that, after that first hand, you have a reasonable idea if there are more high value or low value cards left to be played and, since high value cards make it more likely you’ll be dealt a good hand, it helps to know when to bet big! For a visual breakdown of how this works, see below!
