Tonight is the opening night of the much anticipated (at least by me) of the blackjack movie 21.

In case you do not know what 21 is about it is about a group of students from MIT lead by a Professor who form a card counting team and travel to Las Vegas on weekends. The MIT 6 as they have become known as use team work and card counting skills to win millions of dollars from Vegas Casinos. Eventually greed starts to take over and cracks begin to form in the team resulting in team members being caught and all of them being banned for life from most casinos.

I don’t feel too bad giving away the plot and ending as the movie is based on a real team of students from MIT. The MIT 6 exploits are (in)famous and there has been numerous books written about/by them.

The is certainly a must see, the trailers look excellent and Kevin Spacey as Prof. Rosa is a great choice! I’ll do a review once I see the movie (hopefully this weekend).

Basic Strategy, from the name you might expect a strategy that is simple, easy to use and provides very little benefit to your game play. At least those were the thoughts that came to mind when I first read about Basic Strategy for Blackjack. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Now I suppose compared to other strategies like card counting, Basic Strategy is pretty easy and simple to use. However for someone trying to learn them, they can be quite complicated.
First I have to worry about how many decks are being used, does the dealer hit or stand on soft 17’s, is early surrender available (to list only a few options).
Once I know these I have to pick the appropriate Basic strategy to use as each variant of Blackjack has it’s own Basic Strategy.

To make things easier for myself and for other I have decided that I will cover Basic Strategy in detail. I will post a Basic Strategy chart for each variant and explain which each chart means. This way I and my readers will be able to quickly find the appropriate chart for their chosen blackjack variant.

The best thing about Basic Strategy is that you can take a basic strategy chart with you to the casino blackjack table and use it as a reference for when you suffer a memory lapse One piece of advice that I have been told and it sounds like a good piece of advice so I will pass it along. Do not rely on your basic strategy chart at a table, if you slow down play at the table not only will be hurting the dealer (they have to deal a certain number of hands per hour) you will be asked to stop using the chart or leave the table. Remember to treat it as a “reference” chart and not a step by step guide.

Well I need to find a Blackjack strategy or something to help me play. I started playing on Saturday and quickly lost my bankroll. Loss after loss after loss.

I think I made every bad decision that could have been made while playing Blackjack. I held when I should have hit, and hit when I should have held. It seems that the only time I won was when I was dealt a Blackjack.

I had planned on playing Blackjack all weekend but my first game was such a horrid experience that I spent the reset of the weekend looking up blackjack strategies that could help me improve my game. I found two strategies that seem like they might hold the answer to my poor Blackjack skills. These blackjack strategies are Basic Blackjack Strategy and Card Counting. Everything I read said that I should start with Basic Strategy as some card counting strategies rely on Basic Strategy.

I’ll be writing about Basic Strategy shortly and how it affects my play.

Well I just finished my first game of Blackjack and man was it a lot of fun!
I think I did pretty well. I played with $1 wagers and went on a streak right from the start until I was up about $20 and then I bounced around for a while until I left being up $3. I was able to play for about 45 mins. I never went higher than $20 in winnings and spent most of my time bouncing around $15 until I slowly started to loose. I figured I would walk away from my first game with some winnings.

I won’t bore you with a play by play of the game but I think I did pretty well considering. I’ve figured out a few things as I was playing. It seems like a safe bet to assume that the dealers hole card is a ten. More often than not I stood on a 17, or 18 with the dealer showing a 8 or 9 assuming that they would need to hit and then bust. This rarely happened. In most cases the hole card was a 10 and they won the hand. When I started assuming that the dealer’s hole card was a 10 I didn’t lose as often. Sure I busted more but I think I won more of these hands than I did before.

Don’t take insurance. Insurance is a huge waste of money that I only won a few times. Clearly the casino knows it is a looser for the player or they wouldn’t offer it.

I’m going to be playing some more Blackjack this weekend and we’ll see what happens.

Welcome to my Blackjack Blog. I know there are a large number of Blackjack related blogs to read. Blogs that offer strategies, others that offer tips and some that give hand by hand details of their latest game or tournament. I hope to offer something a little different. You see I’ve never actually played Blackjack other than at a friends house to kill some time.

I’ve always been interested in Blackjack but I’ve never taken the time to learn about the game other than the basic rules and I’ve never taken the plunge and actually played Blackjack at a casino whether it be a land based casino or an Online casino. Since I live in an area where there are no local casino’s I’ll be playing mostly online Blackjack. I’m hoping to get to Vegas soon and I am really interested in playing some Blackjack in Vegas.

Since I know very little about Blackjack I’ll be recording my thoughts and experiences as I play and learn about this game. Of course I’ve heard stories about the MIT team that went to Vegas and won millions of dollars by counting cards. Now I’m no math genius and I don’t think I could keep track of that many cards to win anything. There is no way I could tell you how many Aces, Kings and Queens had been played after about 15 cards so I think I will avoid card counting.

So It’s off to my online casino of choice (which is GoldenCasino.com) for my first real game of Blackjack.

Wish me Luck
-Bob