My blackjack tips.

 

Make sure you are familiar with the rules of basic play before you go to the tables. There should be very few situations when you have to think a lot before your decision to stick, hit, double, or split. It should be automatic. And in this regard, ignore the other players’ protestations.

 

Always eat before you play. You need fuel to win. Never play hungry.

 

After three consecutive losses move to another table.

 

Always chip up after a win.

 

Always chip down on a loss or push.

 

Never break your own rules, no matter what the bet. Probability is your friend. That is how you win.

 

Try not to play on weekends and Friday nights. The place will be full of terrible stupidly drunk amateurs, who will have little or no idea what they are doing and they will most often cause you to lose.

 

Never play tired or hung-over.

 

Never play with scared money. Especially rent. Make sure all your bills are up to date before you gamble. Otherwise, you risk getting into that downhill spiral of bad gambling addiction.

 

Leave your cards at home. Just go with cash. If you lose, you can have that sobering trip back home to your cards and then you can make a better decision to return or not.

 

Go to the tables where the players are winning, with big stacks of chips in front of them. But remember, never just boldly open a new box without asking or watching for a while. It is very irritating to winning players, and more often than not will cause the other players to be angry with you. You need good karma at the table to win.

When a winning run goes cold LEAVE the table.

 

It is a good idea to set a winning goal. Think of something you want to buy. A new surfboard. Some gold. A great night in a hotel with booze and a whore. Anything. Look at your chips and then leave. Often, the winning will be the easy part, the leaving the casino with winnings, is the hardest part. Don’t get greedy. Of course, never leave a winning run, but as soon as it turns, leave with your winnings. Go out, as soon as possible and buy something. Dispose of those winnings. Because the longer you have that idle cash, the more risk you have of going back and blowing the money. I have a friend who plays roulette and he always says, never gamble when you have money, gamble when you need money for something.

 

Try and to do something karmic before you gamble, perhaps a good deed, or a small donation to someone.

 

Never play stupidly drunk, you will lose very quickly. If you decide to drink, I recommend having a few pints of beer, perhaps with food at the casino restaurant. Then, when you are feeling a bit merry and hazy, start to hit the spirits. Get doubles, or even better straights. When you feel that if there were a brick wall stopping you from getting to the tables, you would and could walk through it - that is the time to hit the tables. You need to be aggressive, confident AND smart to win against the cold machine. Sometimes playing nervous and sober will be your worst enemy also. If you use alcohol, make sure you use it wisely, or it will always help the casino.

 

Exercise or meditate before playing. This clears the stress out of your mind. Go the gym, have a surf, or go for a run. I would do this before a particularly complex and stressful court battle, so the same thing applies to battling the casino.

 

NEVER play stoned. I was once told that “P” was good for gambling. For me, all drugs, are a no no before blackjack gambling, except strong alcohol.

 

Take a good look at the outside of the casino before you decide to play. If it looks and feels too powerful and you feel weak and tired then try to turn back and go home. There will always be tomorrow, or another day. The casino won’t go anywhere, and nor will their money.

 

Only play extra options if you know exactly how to play them. But generally, I would play them, as they often save you, or give you a very impressive payout. There’s nothing worse than not putting chips on the pairs then getting a perfect or two.

 

If something bad happens on the way to the casino, take it as bad karma and if you can, go home. For example, if all the traffic lights go red on the way. Or, if something at the table goes bad, bad karma is a winning destroyer. For instance, if someone strongly criticizes, your or another player’s card draw decisions. The best tables are when everyone is in good spirits, everyone is winning and the dealer is stressed at all the payout calculations and/or runs out of chips. Those are the times to chip up majorly. A stressed and tired dealer will often be a losing dealer.

 

Stay away from lightning cocky dealers. The casino loves them. Because they win. When the cards are coming so fast to you that you can hardly see them, move from the table as soon as you start losing.

 

Experiment with your gambling times. Many casinos bring their novice trainee dealers to the tables in the early hours of the morning. A slow dealer is always good.

 

Personally, I rarely take insurance, and usually I don’t take even money if it is offered, unless I have a huge stack on. Insurance is up to you. In Germany, the dealers tell you, you can’t lose if you take it. I could never work that out, but they seemed to be right.

 

On the other hand, I will always double down with eleven against a ten, no matter how much I have on. No guts, no glory.

 

Listen to the dealers. Whatever they say, will in my experience be right, ninety percent of the time. If I have a seven and an ace, I will often ask the dealer what they would do. If a dealer says you should quit while you are ahead, then you should quit.

 

One time in the Auckland casino I had two nines, and the dealer had a two. I would always split. The other players told me to split.

 

The dealer said, “Against a nasty two?”

 

I listened to her. I lost the bet. If I had split, I would have had a double with twenty-one, and twenty-one on the other hand.

 

In retrospect, I should have listened to the dealer, and then split. A “nasty two” was correct, from her. It meant my eighteen would not be enough, as many times a dealer’s two will reach, nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one. So, I needed more than an eighteen, and splitting nines would help me to nineteens, on probability.

 

Be careful of dealer changes. For some reason, even when they are just pulling cards out of a shuffle machine, a new dealer will more often than not change things. There is no logical explanation for this, as I mentioned in The Unexplained Phenomenon. It just happens. But the old rule applies, change is good for you when you are losing, and not good for you when you are winning.

 

Internet blackjack is tricky, unless you pay for the whole table, you cannot control the box changes, or numbers of players.

 

Although in casinos you can not only bet behind a player, you can also side bet behind a player, my experience of internet blackjack is that you cannot bet behind a player on the side bets. That can be heartbreaking if you are forced to bet behind, and then the box player gets a perfect pair, a three of a kind, or a straight flush, and you were not on it.

 

In my experience, even on twenty-five-dollar tables, the dream runs only occur with one box, and more often than not within a couple of hands players turn up to constantly change the box numbers, making it almost impossible to get a winning run of more than two or three hands.

 

One advantage of internet gambling is that you can take a timeout, which I use a lot. This is not something you can do in a casino, unless you ban yourself, which I have never done.

 

An advantage of live casino internet blackjack is that the dealers seem to actually shuffle and deal the cards manually, rather than using shuffle machines.

 

 

Good luck!