The Ultimate Guide to Online Blackjack: Tips and Tricks for Every Player

Online Blackjack Tips: What You’ll Learn

• Optimal Surrender Strategies: Learn when to surrender based on the dealer’s face-up card to minimize losses, factoring in the number of decks and specific house rules.

• Understanding Insurance Bets: Discover why taking insurance is usually not advisable and how to assess its value depending on the composition of the remaining deck.

• Evaluating Promotions: Gain insights into how casino promotions like loss rebates and golden card offers can impact your winnings and strategies for maximizing their benefits.

• Leveraging Dealer Rules: Understand the implications of house rules like the dealer hitting on a soft 17 and how they affect the overall house edge in a game.

• Navigating Bonus Terms: Learn how to effectively navigate the terms and conditions of deposit bonuses, ensuring you understand wagering requirements and their potential impact on your Blackjack strategy.

Blackjack differs from many other casino games in that the skilled player will win in the long term. Nobody has been banned from playing roulette or baccarat but many players have been excluded from playing blackjack at both “land-based” casinos and “online” casinos. This article will substantially increase your chances of being a winner.

The Basics

You will need to know basic blackjack strategy before you start. There are charts available for all types of games and the chart at the end combines many games and gives all the exceptions. In particular, when to double down and when to split will vary according to the rules of the particular game you choose to play.

It is important to use the right chart. If you follow this chart and do nothing else, you will get a return of 99.5%, which is more than any other casino game. By comparison, roulette only gives you a return of 97.3% per bet.

Splitting and Doubling

You need to be sure of the rules and have the right charts for splitting and doubling These will vary when the Hilo Count is high or low. There are charts available for all games on the Internet and you need to print out the one applicable to your game and have it by your side.

Online v Land-Based

There are significant advantages in playing online casinos as opposed to land-based casinos. You can do any calculations you need with a calculator and this would not be allowed when sitting at a casino table. More importantly, you can skip hands when the odds are against you without being asked to give up your seat.

There are many games, in particular One Blackjack and Infinite Blackjack, where there is only one seat but hundreds of players and you can choose to skip as many hands as you want. Finally, you can keep a count of cards that have gone using pencil and paper, and you would be asked to leave if you did this under the eye of a pit boss.

The Hilo Count

This is the bread and butter of most professional players, who know that you at least break even when the Hilo Count is greater than +1.  You add the number of twos, threes, fours, fives and sixes, which count as +1, and subtract the number of tens (including court cards) and aces, which count as -1.

The sevens, eights and nines are ignored. You then divide by the number of decks remaining to get a true count. This is not a perfect measure, but without computer assistance is about the best you can do. Let us see a graph of the advantage for the player:

So there is an advantage when the Hilo Count is greater than +1, but not a huge advantage. The downside of only betting when the Hilo Count is above +1 is that your behavior is transparent to the casino and they may close your account if you are betting significant amounts. The other factor is that betting with only a 1% advantage at best is unlikely to make you a mint.

If you can afford to bet £1000 a hand with a small advantage then you probably don’t need to win at Blackjack!

And if you do play for high stakes and win, you may get an email from the casino. “We have decided to limit your blackjack betting to a maximum of £5. You can play roulette  for any stakes you want. This was a commercial decision and cannot be challenged.”

777 Bets

The Crazy Sevens Bet is one of the best opportunities to win big for a small stake that one can find on the Internet. It is offered by several providers in a different guise. You bet on your first three cards and if you get three sevens, suited, you can win 2000 times your stake! And, with a maximum bet of £25, you can win a cool £50,000.

The simplest bet is offered by Pragmatic Play, called Crazy Sevens, and is offered by many of the sites recommended on here, with both Lucky Bird Casino and Crown Coins, two of the top-rated sites on Casino.org, offering the game. The payouts are as below

Top Tip 1

Play this only in a shoe game, or  you will have to beat an RTP of  94.26% which is very hard to do in the long term if there is a shuffle after every hand. All you need to do is to keep track of the sevens that have gone as a percentage of cards that have been dealt. Pencil and paper and simple math.

Let us look at the return on the bet when the percentage of sevens remaining goes up. Usually of course the percentage does not offer any advantage, but sometimes it does.

There are 32 sevens in a shoe of 416 cards and that is 7.7%. When the percentage goes over 8%, the player has a small advantage, and when it is over 10%, that advantage is very significant and a curve:

So, the cut off point for making the bet is when the percentage of sevens is above 8%. It will take you a bit of practice to work out the percentage of sevens remaining, but you can usually see at a glance if it is not high enough.

So, if eight sevens have gone  and 120 cards have been dealt, then there are 24/296 remaining, which is a little over 0.08 and worth a bet of 1. If it is 0.09, then bet 2, 0.1 you can bet 3 etc. Add 1 for each percent advantage you have.

Buster or Bust it

This is offered by several providers and narrowly the best is the one offered by Evolution. It does have a high house take h, but it can be beaten if you keep track of the small cards that have gone.

The reason these are important is that there is a high payout when the dealer busts with more than five cards, as shown by the following table again from Pub Casino:

The return to player on the first hand of the shoe is correctly stated to be 94.12% and therefore you should wait until there are a lot of small cards remaining. Count the percentage of 2s, 3s and 4s that have gone. The graph of the RTP for the number of these is as follows:

So, if more than 26% of the cards remaining are 2s, 3s or 4s, the Bust It bet has an advantage. You need to have a sharp calculating brain, however, to keep track of these.

Super Boost Blackjack

This game from Stakelogic is another opportunity for the skilled player to win big and to have an advantage. The player has to bet an additional quarter of his stake on a “Super Boost”  which only pays out on the third consecutive win. The boost is stated to go from x2 to x100, at random, but Stakelogic, who produce the game, would not disclose the distribution of the multiplier.

I played the game for a few hours on Casino Click, the top-rated casino on Casino.org as I write, and the average multiplier was 3.75 over a sample of 100 multipliers.  The typical minimum bet is £20 or $20 and one has to add a boost bet of £5 or $5 each time, so this game is more expensive to play than regular games.

The player is only paid on the main bet, but if she wins two consecutive games, then, if the player wins her third game, she gets her winnings boosted by the multiplier.

This game has some interesting changes to basic strategy because the main aim is to win the hand, not to get the highest payout.  The chart below is the change to basic strategy when you are playing Super Boost Blackjack.

I included the basic strategy chart in my earlier article in casino.org. and you should have that by your side whenever you play Blackjack online.

The Basic Strategy action is the third column, known to all experienced players. However, this changes when you are playing Super Boost Blackjack, when you want to increase your chances of winning the hand when you have no wins or one win. The game has an RTP of 99.5%.

Top Tip 2

It is interesting to compare the chance of winning the hand (as opposed to getting the highest result) using the Hilo Count. If you play basic strategy, you win about 43% of hands, and the 3:2 payout for Blackjack and the opportunity to double or split, elevates your effective wins to about 49.7%.

However, when there are more tens in the deck, you win more often, and also get Blackjack more often. The chance of a win by the number of tens is as follows:

Essentially you want to play only when the percentage of tens is above 30%. That will give you a small advantage and if you adopt the amended strategy on the previous page, you will have an advantage of about 1% based on my simulations of this game.

Staking Strategy

Gamblers usually bet too high a percentage of their bankroll. In rough terms you should bet the percentage of your bankroll that represents your advantage.  In roulette, you never have an advantage, so even £1 or $1 is too large a bet in theory!

However, in Blackjack, you often have an advantage, and you should bet your bankroll multiplied by that advantage. Say, that you decide that £500 or $500 is the most you are prepared to lose. When you have a 1% advantage you should bet £5 or $5 respectively. This only applies, however, when you are betting at even money, which you are for the main bet in Blackjack.

The side bets, however, are different as they are at longer odds, and you should generally bet the minimum bet, which is usually £1 or $1.  When you have a 10% advantage you can increase the bet to 2 units, and with a 20% advantage, you can bet 3 units. It is rare that you have that advantage with a side bet, of course.

Over betting is the most common cause of the gambler losing their bankroll, and results from the Blackjack player chasing losses.

Betting Systems

One’s mailbox gets full of emails promising huge profits from “guaranteed” betting systems. Martingale and Fibonacci are two that come to mind. These and other systems are not worth a penny and you should steer clear of them. Martingale, doubling your bet after a loss, is the more dangerous and fails because a long series of losses requires a bet above the table maximum.

The right approach is to set a bankroll, and each day record your new bankroll by adding the wins or deducting the losses. Then, when you play blackjack, you should bet 1% of your bankroll when you the count is +2 or more.

Your advantage is 1% and you are making the right bet. Increase the bet by 1 unit for each 1% extra advantage. Of course you will have to round the bet as you will not be able to stake £8.76 or $12.13.

Professional Pointers

Henry Tamburin, the legendary blackjack pro and gambling author, gives the most important factors the aspiring punter should look out for:

• The first and most important is to only play a game that offers at least 3-2 for Blackjack: Casinos can be a bit greedy and will offer 6-5 or, perish the thought, even money. They don’t emblazon their front page with this, of course, and you have to find it in the game rules. AVOID SUCH GAMES. They are at least 2% in favour of the house. The converse is that very occasionally the casino offers 2-1 Blackjack. You should play while the promotion is on and stay at the table as long as possible!

• Single Deck Games offer the best odds for the player: Microgaming offers an excellent game on many sites with five seats. It shuffles after each hand but the RTP (the return to player) is still 99.8%. The full strategy for the player was explained in an earlier article on casino.org , Everything You Need to Know about Single Deck Blackjack. The advantage of this game is also that you can take as long as you like to make your decisions. You should also play the game that allows you to occupy five different seats, and to bet more in the fifth seat, which sees more cards. This makes the game worth about 0.1% to the player, with a staking strategy of 1, 1, 1, 1 and 5 in the end seat!

• Games that allow “double after split” are slightly better for the player: The actions are not affected much, you would split 2s and 3s more often, but the house advantage is cut by 0.1%. Again you should ensure that you have the right strategy chart for the game in question.

• Being allowed to re-split aces is rare, but again is in the player’s favor by nearly 0.1%: It is also rare that you can hit after splitting aces, but if you can, this reduces the house edge by about the same amount.

• Surrender is an option that is sometimes offered: It is usually late surrender, after the dealer has checked that she does not have Blackjack. This is worth about 0.1% to the player.  Early Surrender, where you can get half your bet back BEFORE the dealer checks for Blackjack, is rarely seen but worth about 0.6% to the player. You should usually surrender on 16 against a nine, ten or ace, and 15 against a ten. This varies depending on the number of decks and whether dealer hits soft 17. Again make sure you have the right charts.

• If the dealer hits soft 17, this is bad for the player and good for the house: The reasons are complicated and sometimes the dealer busts when she would have won. But be assured that overall this is a bad rule for the player

The Insurance Bet

The insurance bet is offered only when the dealer has an ace face up.  The house offers 2-1 odds that the dealer has Blackjack and this should rarely be accepted. However, if the percentage of tens in the remainder of the deck is greater than one third it offers value.

Casino Promotions

Now and again a casino will offer you bonuses like 10% back on your losses over a particular period. This is obviously in the player’s favor, but does not offer as much as you might think.

Say that you play 100 hands at $10. Your average result will be -0.5% which is to be $5 down, but you are unlikely to be exactly that. You would still expect to be an average of $2.75 down after the refund of 10% of your loss.

Of course, if you are playing when the count is >+1, you would expect to be positive over 100 hands, around 1%, but is still worth having as it reduces your losses when you do lose.

Golden Cards

Sometimes there is a promotion with special cards being randomly inserted into the shoe and if you get one of these it is worth $5, $10 or even more. These are well worth looking out for and you should play every hand while the promotion is on as the special card offsets the house edge even when the deck is unfavourable.

Other promotions give you bonuses for deposits but you must always check the terms and conditions. Many of these do not allow you to play Blackjack to meet the wagering requirements, or, if they do, Blackjack bets only contribute 10% towards your staking and you have to play for months to meet the required “play through”.

Basic Strategy Chart. Assumes Single Deck and First Hand Only