Blackjack
Blackjack is one if not the most popular casino game whether played
online or in a land based casino. The odds are the best of any other
game and the rules and strategies are extremely easy to learn.
In blackjack, the cards are valued as follows:
An Ace can count as either 1 or 11, as demonstrated below.
The cards from 2 through 9 are valued as indicated.
The 10, Jack, Queen, and King are all valued at 10.
The suits of the cards do not have any meaning in the game.
The worth of a hand is just the sum of the point counts of each card
in the hand. For example, a hand including (5,7,9) has the value of
21. The Ace can be counted as either 1 or 11. You need not specify which
value the Ace has. It's unspoken to always have the value that makes
the best hand. An example will illustrate: Presume that you have the
beginning hand (Ace, 6). This hand can be either 7 or 17. If you stop
there, it will be 17. Let's suppose that you draw another card to the
hand and now have (Ace, 6, 3). Your total hand is now 20, counting the
Ace as 11. Let's backtrack and suppose that you had instead drawn a
third card which was an 8. The hand is now (Ace, 6, 8) which totals
15. Notice that now the Ace must be counted as only 1 to avoid going
over 21.
A hand that contains an Ace is called a "soft" total if the
Ace can be counted as either 1 or 11 without the total going over 21.
For example (Ace, 6) is a soft 17. The description stems from the fact
that the player can always draw another card to a soft total with no
danger of "busting" by going over 21. The hand (Ace,6,10)
on the other hand is a "hard" 17, since now the Ace must be
counted as only 1, again because counting it as 11 would make the hand
go over 21. |
