Blackjack is different from this in two very important ways. First, it's one of the few casino games in which the player uses his judgment to make decisions after his bet has been placed. These decisions will either increase' or decrease his chance of winning the bet. For example, if you always stand when you have 2-4-Ace against a dealer's 4 up, you'll win only 46% of those hands, but if you hit you'll win 53% of them. Hence, for you blackjack may be the best game in the house, or the worst one depending upon how well or how poorly you make your decisions.

It's true that some of the newer games like Caribbean stud or Let it Ride also offer the player the opportunity to make strategic playing decisions. But these games are modern day inventions, developed according to a much more limited set of mathematical probabilities. The house has you right where they want you when you're playing "perfect" strategy in Caribbean stud or Let it Ride -- at a 2'/2 to 3 percent disadvantage!
On the other hand, the game of blackjack is more than a century old. When its rules were first structured, putting the house at an advantage was much more complicated than just paying 35-to-1 on a 37-to-1 shot.

The game's developers had no computers to determine what the exact percentages would be in many of the more extreme nuances that can arise. But that was okay because the player too, would be limited by his own reasoning powers. That being the case, the available design tools of their day were sufficient to provide the house with a comfortable edge over any human of that era. And so it went for several decades. Then came the age of computers.

Now we have to examine what our chances are of win¬ning or losing multiple hands consecutively. To do that, we'll work with a chart I created that clearly depicts the probabilities. The figures on the chart were gen¬erated by taking the number two to the sixteenth power (2") to simulate wins versus losses over thousands of hands of play, not taking into consideration ties, or as they are some¬times called, pushes. The results were rounded and evened up for our basic analysis. If you look at Figure 6-1, you'll see two ways of interpreting the results regardless of the deck configurations.