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Make blackjack a positive game of anticipation. Whether you’re playing with a basic strategy or you’re a novice card counter at Xgtiger Casino, understanding how shoe size affects the house edge is key to moving above and beyond the basics of blackjack math.
Strategy doesn’t start when you sit down at the blackjack table. The first step to a good blackjack strategy is walking through the casino doors and finding the right blackjack table. Every blackjack table in a casino is not the same. Being a good card counter and knowing the correct strategy in blackjack is not the only skill you need to learn. You will also need to learn how to choose the right casino and the right table at that casino.
What is Card Counting?
Counting cards is simply a system for knowing how many of each card rank is in the deck relative to the total number of cards. Card counters keep track of those cards as they move in and out of the deck. Skilled card counters know when to be aggressive based on the cards still in the shoe. If a casino only uses one deck at their blackjack tables, a card counter has a good chance of placing profitable bets. If a casino uses 6 or 8 decks of cards in their blackjack shoe, the percentages don’t move as quickly and it’s harder to know what cards are left in the shoe.
The best blackjack card counters know exactly how many decks a casino uses, how many hands to make before a reshuffle, and the specific rules a casino uses that change the odds. . Card counters also take into account how many blackjack players are at each table, as this affects the number of hands the counter can see each hour.
Number of Decks in Play
When card counters first started making their way into casinos, single deck shoes were more common. Once the casino managers got the advantage that the card counters held against them, they began to make small changes to shift the odds more in the house’s favor. The fastest way to do this is to add more decks to the shoe. Nowadays, casinos offer blackjack games with up to 8 decks in a shoe. Single deck or two deck shoes tend to be very limited in terms of bets, with minimum bets as low as $10.
But you don’t have to be a card counter to figure out how the number of decks in a shoe affects blackjack strategy. A one-deck shoe is easier to build a basic blackjack strategy around. If you see two aces come out of that deck, this is important information because there are only 4 of them, to begin with. But if you see 2 aces come out of an 8-deck hand, there are still 30 more potential aces in the deck. The more decks you see in a game, the worse your edge is against the house.
With a one-deck shoe and perfect playing strategy, the house advantage in blackjack is +0.02 in the player’s favor. That means that if you follow basic blackjack strategy and make the right move every time, you should expect to win more money than you lose over time.
House Edge with Two or More Decks
Once a casino throws more decks into the shoe, the odds change dramatically. Switch from a single deck to a double deck shoe and you can expect your return to drop from 100.02% to 99.69%.
Here’s a breakdown of the compensations you can expect in different shoe sizes. Note that this percentage assumes you are playing perfect blackjack strategy.
100.02%
99.69%
99.57%
99.52%
99.48%
99.46%
99.45%
99.43%
The odds start to flatten out at some point, which explains why more casinos online don’t choose to invest in more decks for their blackjack games. The inclusion of even one extra deck has the greatest impact on the outcome of the game, as the additional four cards of each rank throw off a lot of calculations. That’s why casinos use multiple decks—to prevent card counters from breaking the law.
Conclusion
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