When Does The Dealer Stop Hitting In Blackjack

  

When Does Dealer Stop Blackjack Go Nov 08, 2019 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. In blackjack, your task is to make a total closer to 21 without going over than the total made by the dealer. To understand the logic behind hitting your hand, we need to understand a few basic blackjack principles.

  1. When Does The Dealer Stop Hitting In Blackjack Play
  2. When Does The Dealer Stop Hitting In Blackjack Machine

Blackjack, formerly also Black Jack and Vingt-Un, is the American member of a global family of banking games known as Twenty-One, whose relatives include the British game of Pontoon and the European game, Vingt-et-Un. It is a comparing card game between one or more players and a dealer, where each player in turn competes against the dealer. Players do not compete against each other. Hit or Stand on Soft 17 This is probably the most common rule difference in blackjack games. A soft 17 is one that includes an Ace valued at 11 and can be valued at 17 or 7. 17 is the standard value that a dealer would normally be forced to stand on. The house edge is higher when the dealer has to hit on soft 17 rather than stand on that value.

By Henry Tamburin
No other hand makes blackjack players feel queasy than the dreaded 16. Players hate to hit the hand because they are afraid tobust. So many chicken out and stand no matter what the dealer shows. Others opt for the surrender option if it’s available figuring losing half a bet is better then losing it all. If your 16comes as a pair of 8’s most players are reluctant to split if the dealer shows a 9, 10, or ace because they are afraid of losing two bets instead of one. Then there is the 16 made up with anAce counted as 11 (i.e., soft 16). So what’s a player to do when he gets a 16?

First, let’s focus on a hard 16. That’s a hand that does not contain an Ace or if it does the Ace counts as one. Some examples of a hard 16 would be 10-6 or 5-7-4 or 7-8-Ace.

The correct basic playing strategy for hard 16 is to stand when the dealer shows a small card (2 through 6) and hit when the dealer shows a high card (7, 8, 9, 10, or Ace). Following thisplaying strategy will not guarantee that you will win every time but that you are more likely to lose less in the long run.. Let me explain.

Suppose you are dealt a 10-6 and the dealer shows a 7 upcard.

If you hit you win on average 30% of the time and lose 70%.

If you stand you will on average win 26% and lose 74%.

Note that you improve your chances of winning the hand by 4% if you hit rather than stand. But the dealer is still an overwhelming favorite to beat you because he will win 70% of the hands toyour 30%. But is it better to win 26% of the time by standing or 30% of the time by hitting? You should hit because it will increase your chance of winning by 4%, not much, but every percentagewill help you in the long run when you play blackjack.

So the bottom line with a hard 16 is this. Even by following the basic strategy, you will lose more hands than you win but in the long run, you will lose less than following a seat-of-the-pantsstrategy. Losing less on hands where you are the underdog is just as important as winning more when you are the favorite.

What if your 16 consists of three or more cards like 5-7-4? Normally the basic strategy ignores the composition of the hand. However, if you have a hard 16 hand consisting of three or morecards, then you should stand when the dealer has a 10 showing. The reason is that you have consumed a few of the small cards that you need if you were to draw. This tips the odds in favor ofstanding.

Some casinos allow players to surrender. This means you give up the opportunity to play out your hand and automatically lose half your bet. Even when surrender is offered, most players don’tlike “giving up” without a fight. So they rarely surrender. That’s unfortunate because surrendering a hard 16 when the dealer shows a 9, 10, or Ace will save you more money in the long run thanhitting. In fact, surrender is always the best option when your chance of winning a hand is less than 25%. Take the hand of hard 16 against a 10. If we hit our chance of winning is 23.4%. Thismeans the dealer’s chance of beating us is 76.6%. If we played a hundred hard 16’s against the dealer 10 with those probabilities, we would end up winning about $23 and losing $77 for a netloss of $54 on average. By surrendering on every hand our net loss would be $50. Get the point? You are better off losing $50 then $54 which is why surrendering a hard 16 against a 10 is thebetter play because you will save $4.

If you happen to be dealt a soft 16 (like Ace-5), you should never surrender and you should never stand. Your first option is to double but only if the dealer shows a weak 4, 5, or 6 upcard. Ifnot, then hit.

Finally, we have a pair of 8’s. The correct basic strategy play is to always split the 8’s no matter what the dealer shows. Even though you will lose money on both 8’s when you split, thecombined loss, in the long run, will be less than the amount you will lose by playing the one hand as a 16. Splitting 8’s against a dealer 10, by the way, is also a slightly better play thensurrendering.

No question that 16 is a lousy blackjack hand. Unfortunately, it’s one of the most frequent hands you are going to be dealt in blackjack. But, by following the above playing strategy you willbe optimizing your chances of winning more, and losing less, in the long run. It’s the smart way to play blackjack.

Henry Tamburin has been a respected casino gambling writer for the past 50 years. He is the author of the Ultimate Blackjack Strategy Guide and was editor of the BlackjackInsider newsletter. You can read his latest articles on blackjack, video poker, and his personal playing experiences at https://www.888casino.com/blog/writers/henry-tamburin

The entire game of blackjack is based around the two words “Hit me”. All of the strategy and logic in the game comes down to whether or not you want to get another card added on top of your first two cards. Remember, the goal of blackjack is to either make the dealer bust, hit 21 yourself, or have a higher number than the dealer ends up with.

Most of the variance in the game comes from the idea of hitting or standing when you either get another card dealt to you, at risk of busting, or stay where you are, and risk the dealer beating you. This is a complex decision making process, and it’s important to know how to approach it.

This page details all of the methods you can use to understand when to hit or stand, and at the end, you can find a chart explaining why. Let’s jump right into it with a discussion of the dealer’s up card and why that matters.

Knowing When To Hit Or Stand - The Dealer’s Up Card

Understanding the implications of the dealer’s up card is very important. Basically, you get to see one of the dealer’s cards, and that allows you to make some guesses as to what number they are at, and what their decision making process will be. The higher the dealer’s up card, the more likely the player is to want to hit, as a general rule. This is because, once again, the goal is to beat the dealer - to get the closest to 21 without going over. The card you see tells you a lot about the range of possibilities they could have. For example, if you see a 2, you know that their total is relatively low, and if you have a decent total, it could be correct to stand. That’s the basics of understanding a dealer’s up card, but there’s so much more to understand what the process is behind choosing to stand.

Stop

When To Stand In Blackjack

The basic idea of when you want to stand in blackjack is when you have a pretty good idea that your total is pretty close to 21, you don’t want to risk going over, and you want to put the onus on the dealer to beat your total. This tends to mean that you want to start seriously considering standing at around 17 total. The idea here is that, unless you can see an ace from the dealer, you’re fairly likely to have more than them at this point, given the amount of times cards that are worth more than 7 appear in the deck. If you have 19, you’re always standing, for example. You’re likely to bust if you hit, and it’s relatively hard to beat. The rules for this are fairly fluid so understand them well.

When To Hit In Blackjack

The basic idea behind when you want to hit in blackjack is twofold. First, you want to hit when you aren’t in much danger of going over or busting. Second, you want to hit when you need to beat a decent dealer total. This means that if you have a middling hand, let’s say 15, you’ll want to stand if the dealer’s face up card is fairly low, but hit if the dealer’s face up card is higher. This is because you can extrapolate the range of possible outcomes from the dealer’s face up card, and understand when you need to hit, and when you need to stand. There’s a lot of math that goes into this, but you can play by intuition as well. Remember, the goal of the game is to beat the dealer without going over - and that’s devilishly simple, but devilishly tricky as well.

When Does The Dealer Have To Hit In Blackjack

The basic rules that most dealers follow, across the board, are determined to their mathematical advantage over years of study and play. The dealer will always hit on anything below a 16 total. This is why, when you have a 17, you tend to consider staying - you have something fairly close to what they tend to stay at. This can get a little more complex when people start considering aces, which allow the concept of hard and soft 17s to enter the equation, but that’s mostly a discussion for a different page. Suffice to say, the basic rule they follow is that they will hit anything that is a 16 total or below.

When Does The Dealer Stop Hitting In Blackjack Play

When Does The Dealer Have To Stay In Blackjack

Dealers in blackjack follow strict rules - rules that are designed for them to play as optimally as possible against you. The basic idea behind most of them is to optimize their mathematical odds at victory. For this reason, almost all dealers will stand when their total is 17 or above. As before, aces throw a bit of a wrench into this equation, but there is a lot of grey area in Blackjack. The basic rule they follow is to stand on 17 because that puts the onus on you to beat a 17, which is pretty hard to do without going over.

Hit Or Stand Cheat Sheets

Here is a very basic legal blackjack hit or stand cheat sheet. Remember that the math changes depending on which type of blackjack you’re playing, so make sure you understand what’s going on in each variant you play.

When Does The Dealer Stop Hitting In Blackjack Machine

Your HandUp Card
2345678910A
<11HitHitHitHitHitHitHitHitHitHit
12HitHitStandStandStandHitHitHitHitHit
13StandStandStandStandStandHitHitHitHitHit
14StandStandStandStandStandHitHitHitHitHit
15StandStandStandStandStandHitHitHitHitHit
16StandStandStandStandStandHitHitHitHitHit
17-21StandStandStandStandStandStandStandStandStandStand